A few quick paragraphs in today’s NYT by David Brooks on Charles Taylor’s massive tome of 2007 on the secular age. Not surprisingly, Brooks manages to keep to his usual dualism and turn spirituality, whatever that is, into a marketable brand that might continue to deliver “fullness.” Taylor’s major question, according to Brooks: why would the default ideological position be belief in god(s) in the Middle Ages, but suspension of that belief in modern times? First off: one would have to make sure this question has a broader sphere of application than Europe and affines. Second: the two main notions in the phrase “Belief in God” have their own distinct meaning and evolution. Regarding the first: how do we know what the capacity to believe mean? Regarding the second: what is believed in, especially the putative reality pointed at by the word “god” or any other object, may have been vastly different at different periods of our history. The god of the middle ages was shaped by these beliefs as often as not, as the objects of modern beliefs are too. Perhaps a large number of people found it as easy in the Middle Ages as in our times not to bother too deeply about the “belief” part in God, even while singing or mumbling credo in unum deum. They were as adept at figuring their “belief” and “disbelief” in all kinds of ways when dealing with neighbors, patrons or lieges, princes and king, bishops and pope, as we are now when dealing with the transcendental ends and equilibrium-to-come of modern transportation, health, insurance, work, religious and media systems.

It strains belief to think there are now more unbelieving, confirmation-seeking Thomases. The point of the old Thomas story is that they have been around for a long time, and the nature of belief has always been at stake. Brooks at one point says of our own society: “Individuals don’t live embedded in tight social orders; they live in buffered worlds of private choices.” Nice regurgitation of the modern consumer’s catechism! Of course we live embedded in tight social orders. A good example is Brooks’ employer, the NYT: talk about embedding, including in wars “of choice” recently encouraged by this paper. Do we really choose our masters?

Taylor: “The yearning for eternity is not the trivial and childish thing it is painted as.” Brooks’ reading: We are now able to pursue fullness. And ancient or medieval period people were not? This is simply a paean to the present as being the only possible period one could live in. Duh. Brooks again: “People in search of fullness are able to harvest the intellectual, cultural and spiritual gains of the past 500 years.” The editorialist here is doing what is expected of him: treat matters heretofore left to another realm beyond calculation as harvestable, capitalizable, as gains that can usefully lead to some feeling of satiety. Exactly what people have problems with: looking for fullness and thinking that using a 100 ft yacht, drinking from a huge coke bottle, or skimming an 800-page tome on the richness of spiritual horizons get us that much closer to it.