The Commodification of Religion

There has been considerable amount of research on how commodification and the Internet are transforming the religious lives of young people. For young Muslims, Internet use is an important means of building a consensus about, for example, whether the use of henna for cosmetic purposes is com­patible with Muslim tradition or whether dating and premarital intimacies are compatible with the life of a “good Muslim.” Whereas the religious sys­tem of communication in an age of revelation was hierarchical, unitary, and authoritative, the system of communicative acts in a new media environment are typically horizontal rather than vertical, diverse and fragmented rather than unitary, devolved rather than centralized. Furthermore, the authority of any message is constantly negotiable and negotiated. The growth of these diverse centers of interpretation in a global communication system has pro­duced considerable instability in the formal system of religious belief and practice. In Islam, for example, there has been an inflation of sources of authority, since through some local and specific consensus, almost any local teacher or mullah can issue a fatwa to guide a local community. Because new media provide multiple channels of access and encourage discursive interaction on blogs, they bring about a democratization of knowledge and religious lifestyles. Although there is clearly a digital divide, more and more people have access to these religious sites of communication. There is a democratization of Islam in the sense that many young Muslims bypass their traditional ulama and imams in order to learn about Islam from pam­phlets and sources, but this is equally true of other religious traditions.

There is in very general terms an important growth of religion online. In developing an account of the commodification and democratization of religion, let me return to the matter of ineffability, concentrating on the issue of communication and modern Islam. How is the Internet shaping the daily lives and religious practices of young generations? One obvious answer is that it makes the actual collective practice of religion—such as going to church or to the mosque—no longer necessary, and the result is that reli­gion online becomes online religion. The Internet has therefore only served to reinforce the problem of authority. Within the Muslim diaspora, where young Muslims face new problems relating to personal conduct, the new Internet intellectuals create personal websites, providing religious or ethi­cal rulings on various questions relating to religious conduct. These e-mail fatwas are not recognized by traditional shari’a courts as admissible evidence and cannot be readily enforced, but they clearly have an influence within the diaspora. They become authoritative, as users compare these rulings against other sites and e-fatwas. The debate on the Internet between multiple Mus­lim audiences constitutes an informal shari’a in which a communal consen­sus can emerge around controversial issues related to appropriate practice in new environments.

In summary, the Internet is an important technology for creating an imagined community for individuals and groups that are separated from their homelands and exist as minorities in alien secular cultures that are often hostile to Islam. These Internet sites also serve to reinforce the indi­vidualism that many observers have associated with neo-fundamentalism because, in the case of Islam, the global virtual ummah, or community of believers, is the perfect site for individuals to express themselves while still claiming to be members of a community on whose behalf they are speak­ing. We can conclude therefore that these forms of religious communica­tion are characterized by a principle of subsidiarity by which authority rests in the local and specific act of communication rather than in a principle of hierocracy.

These media contribute to a growing subjective individualism that is very different from the rugged ascetic and disciplined individualism of early Protestantism. This emerging religious subjectivity can be interpreted as a facet of the “expressive revolution” that had its roots in the student revolts of the 1960s. In the new individualism, people invent their own religious ideas and borrow religious practices from diverse traditions. The result has been a social revolution flowing from both consumerism and individual­ism, and as a result, “Capitalism’s success eroded class rivalries and replaced the activist and utopian mass politics of the inter-war era with a more bloodless politics of consumption and management. Goods not gods were what people wanted.” Consumerism helped to break down the old division between religion and the world, contributing to the contraction of the span of transcendence.

Religious lifestyles get modeled on consumer lifestyles in which people can try out religions rather like the way they try out a new fashion in hand­bags or shoes. In a consumer society, people want “goods not gods,” and to a large extent their desires can be satisfied by consumer credit. A new indus­try has emerged, concerned with spiritual advice on how to cope with the modern world while remaining pious and pure. Pious lifestyles are marketed by religious entrepreneurs who need to brand their products in the spiritual marketplace.

The consequence of these developments is a growing division between traditional “religion” and modern “spirituality.” Globalization has brought the spread of personal spirituality, and these spiritualities typi­cally provide guidance in the everyday world as well as subjective, tai­lor-made meaning. Such religious phenomena are often combined with personal therapeutic, healing services or the promise of personal enhance­ment through meditation. While fundamentalist norms of personal dis­cipline appeal to social groups that are upwardly socially mobile, such as the lower middle class and the newly educated, spirituality is more closely associated with middle-class singles who have been thoroughly influenced by Western consumer values. David Martin’s study of Pentecostalism also suggests that new therapies and lifestyles can be sustained through mem­bership in Pentecostal groups in which religion and material aspiration no longer conflict.

The new religions are closely associated also with themes of therapy, peace, and self-help. Of course the idea that religion, especially in the West, has become privatized is hardly new. However, these new forms of sub­jectivity and privatized living are no longer confined to Protestantism or the American middle classes; they now have a global audience. These reli­gious developments are therefore no longer simply local cults but burgeoning global popular religions carried by the Internet, movies, rock music, popular TV shows, and pulp fiction. I have described these new forms as pick-’n’-mix religions because their adherents borrow freely from a great range of religious beliefs and practices without any noticeable regard for coherence. It is also a new experimental context in which the iconic can also be the iconoclastic, as represented in Madonna’s experimentation with both Cath­olic and Hasidic personae.

These phenomena have been regarded as aspects of “new religious move­ments” that are, as we have seen, manifestations of the new spiritual mar­ketplaces. Such forms of religion tend to be highly individualistic, they are unorthodox in the sense that they follow no official creed, they are charac­terized by their syncretism, and they have little or no connection with insti­tutions such as churches, mosques, or temples. They are post-institutional, and in this sense they can legitimately be called “postmodern” religions. If global fundamentalism involves the modernization of social groups who are new arrivals to global megacities, the global post-institutional religions are typical of postmodernization.

Finally, spirituality is a mobile religiosity that mobile people can trans­port globally to new sites where they can mix and match their religious or self-help needs without too much constraint from hierarchical authorities. It is a religious orientation that permits rapid and easy transitions between dif­ferent identities, in which modern conversions tend to be more like a change in consumer brands than a searching of the soul. If the new religious life­styles give rise to emotions, these are packaged in ways that can be easily consumed. Brand loyalty on the part of consumers in low-intensity religions is also minimalistic.

Conclusion: New Gods of Communication

In modern societies, the principal characteristics of religion are its individu­alism in association with the decline in the authority of traditional institu­tions (specifically, the church, the liturgy, and the priesthood) and a grow­ing awareness that religious symbols are social constructs. Robert Bellah’s predictions about modernity have been strikingly confirmed in the growth of popular, de-institutionalized, commercialized and largely post-Christian religions. In fact, similar processes are at work in all the major religions. In a differentiated global religious market, the various segments of the religious market compete with one another for followers and resources. Bourdieu’s ideas about the struggle for symbolic capital in the field of religion provide a valid sociological perspective on the volatility of this religious field. The new religions are genuinely consumerist, but while fundamentalist move­ments appear to challenge consumer (Western) values, they are themselves typically selling a lifestyle based on special diets, alternative education, health regimes, dress codes, pilgrimage destinations, and marriage services. The contemporary religious market is consequently highly diversified into a range of competing groups, charismatic movements, Pentecostal churches, traditional religions, spirituality, and the like, but these are all, to varying degrees, influenced by consumerism. The audiences for religious services are also differentiated by class, gender, education, region, and so forth.

The triumph of popular, democratizing, global consumer culture is now having a deep impact on the traditional, hierarchical, literate religions of the past. Perhaps the most important development in modern religion is the changing status of women; one can safely predict that women will become increasingly important in religious leadership, and not simply in liberal Episcopalian churches but in the world religions more generally. Gender is a crucial feature of the new consumerist religiosity in which women increas­ingly dominate the new spiritualities; women will be and to some extent already are the important “taste leaders” in the emergent global spiritual marketplace.

Globalization theory has focused scientific attention on modern funda­mentalism, which is seen as a critique of traditional and popular religiosity. However, the real effect of globalization has been the growth of heterodox, commercial, hybrid, syncretistic religions over orthodox, authoritative, and institutional versions of the spiritual life. The ideological effects and social consequences of these religions cannot be easily or effectively controlled by religious authorities, and they often have a greater impact than official mes­sages, at least among the young. In Weber’s terms, it is the triumph of mass over virtuoso religiosity.

Pentecostalism has prepared the lower middle classes for participation in the emerging consumer economy of Latin America, and in a similar fash­ion, reformist Islam in Southeast Asia provides newly urbanized people, and especially educated women, with values and practices that are relevant to life in more complex, multicultural urban and largely secular societies, in coun­tries where international corporations have provided employment opportu­nities for young people willing or able to leave their villages for work in the megacities.

The habitus of the modern adherent of deinstitutionalized religion is basically compatible with the lifestyles of a commercial world in which the driving force of the economy is domestic consumption. Megachurches have embraced the sales strategies of late capitalism in order to get their message out to the public. On these grounds, one can claim that modern religions are compromised because the tension between the world and the religion is lost. We may define these developments as a form of social secularization. One can imagine that social historians will object to this argument, claim­ing that commercialized religion was not unknown in the Middle Ages, when pilgrimage and relics were basic elements of the economy of European societies. However, with contemporary social differentiation, the market no longer dances to the tune of the dominant religious institutions. Further­more, these secular developments are global rather than simply local. The result is a sociological paradox or set of paradoxes. Religion has erupted into the public domain, being associated with a number of radical or revolution­ary movements from Iran to Brazil and from Poland to Colombia, but at the same time, religion has been coming to terms with a variety of changes that are the consequence of commodification. More precisely, the secular­ization of religion has occurred through a double movement—democratiza­tion and commercialization. The sense of mystery and awe surrounding the ineffable character of the sacred has been eroded by the liberal ethos of democracy, in which egalitarian, immediate, and intimate relations are valued more than hierarchical, distant, and formal relationships. Religion as an agent of social change has been further compromised by the loss of any significant contrast between the sacred and the world. Religion has special­ized in providing personal services and has therefore been competing with various secular agencies that also offer welfare, healing, comfort, and mean­ing. In this competition, religious groups have by and large taken over the methods and values of a range of institutions operating within what we can, for want of a more sophisticated term, call “the leisure industries.”

I will return to this latter, and perhaps over-caffeinated, comparative claim. But first I want to address the kind of materialism that fuels Bender’s patient and exacting study of contemporary spirituality.

In The New Metaphysicals, Bender homes in on a storied orbit of an American Metaphysical tradition, at once thick with the debris of precedent and inhabited by those who skillfully avoid contact. Bender addresses the “practices of experience” manifest in and around Cambridge, MA—the practice of past experiences and present ones, of future encounters, and of experiences desired, feared, and deflected. A virtual world of experience, divorced from much of what came before it, yet inflected by Puritan intellect, liberal reform (from Unitarianism and pragmatism to neo-pagan enclaves), as well as, in some cases, evangelical affect. Experiences, historically speaking, that are decidedly neither seamless nor self-contained (pace Emerson’s circa-1836 injunction to establish an original relationship with the universe).

As a matter of professional instinct, historians may be inclined to frame contemporary spirituality against a background of, say, emergent institutions of Unitarianism and Universalism, evangelical approaches to the question of mediation, therapeutic institutions, or perhaps the circles emanating outward from the figure of William James. It is equally necessary, however, to account for the synchronic affects of history in the moment—the backstory of spirituality as it becomes anonymous, diffuse, and utterly present precisely because it is unacknowledged.

“Experience,” writes Bender, “does not just happen.” Looking askance at some cherished traditions revolving around the history of liberal experimentation, Bender interrogates a subject who can doubt, distill, debate, and triumph.

Take, for example, the following image of what might be called secular religious consciousness: “I eavesdropped on two older women clad in track suits who were standing in Mondazzi Book Emporium’s occult section. One had a copy of The Idiot’s Guide to Communicating with Spirits in her hand, and said to her friend, ‘You see, look here, I knew I was right!’ The other read over her shoulder, nodding without much enthusiasm as she browsed the tarot decks.” One senses here both self-deprecation on Bender’s part and a subtle questioning of Geertzian thick description. The requisite winks and nods conform to a looking-over-the-shoulder ethnographic sensitivity. Yet for Bender, the significance of the scene does not reveal the “real” reason why two people would consider, largely independent of one another, the fashion of the tracksuit circa 2002, not to mention the practice of spirit communication. For rather than the promise of descriptive closure, scenes such as this accumulate and make evident the thickness of the atmosphere in which both observed and observer find themselves.

There is a representative quality to this scene, something having to do with an American imagination. As with everyone else these days, the belief-practices of Cambridge metaphysicians are mediated by market-driven circulations. Such mediation is, of course, acknowledged in the bookstore (you do not pick up an Idiot’s Guide because you think you are an idiot, but because you have gauged your current limitations). Such acknowledgment, then, serves to confirm that whatever terms the market may introduce into the process of self-knowledge, true self-knowledge, has nothing, essentially, to do with the market. But they are wearing track suits, for God’s sake!

Cutting to the chase, there is a methodological wager in Bender’s book that is reminiscent of a radicalism shared by Marx (or at least Wendy Brown’s reading of Marx)—an analytic admission that historical forces may not only exist but may also, at some admittedly vague level, possess an agency of their own.

An implication of Bender’s argument, and the one most pressing for me as an historian, is the decoupling of experience and agency. Although most would claim that free will is only a working ideal (a benefit of the doubt, a social construction), there is a way that this ideal begins to go without saying because it continually arrives without saying—what might be called an involuntary voluntarism. In other words, there is a particular kind of epistemics going on here, processes by which various doxa secure their own replication.

“Even in the age of the Internet,” writes Bender, “many spiritual teachers and healers spend time ‘flyering’ every month, walking from the Harvest Coop to the second-hand bookstore up the street, across to a café, to several branches of the public library, and hitting the homeopathic apothecary, the adult education center, and a number of others as well.”

The seeming banality of walking from place to place and posting signs at eye-level, perhaps endlessly—“a number of others as well”—is betrayed by the primitive potency of the technic. Public discourse, at ground level, is perhaps accomplished by something not unlike a stapler. The rhythms of perforated corkboard. Fine steel snapping into place. Over and over again.

Bender’s object of inquiry is a clan in the Durkheimian sense—the representations of time, space, and technology becoming atmospheric. Consequently, Bender’s scenes of inquiry range across book clubs, group therapies, Starbucks, Whole Foods, TJ Maxx, Annie Call’s The Power of Repose (1851), Harvard Square, Swedenborgian Churches, the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, dining room tables, William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience, Friends Meeting Houses, Congregational Churches, rooms of Reiki, Zen, and acupuncture, the Theosophical Society, the Mystical Arts and Talent Show, yoga studios, the Boston Whole Health Expo hosted at the Park Plaza Hotel, and journeys to the Middle East on the astral plane. And although one could focus on the epistemic processes at work in any one of these social fields, Bender’s is a panorama of lives lived within them all. Together, her vignettes reveal how a particular discursive framing of piety congeals, almost imperceptibly, by resonating between multiple sites.

It is with this in mind that I read Bender’s claim that spirituality “is not its own field, but this does not mean that it is not organized except through the market, nor does it mean that it is ‘emergent’ into a field of its own.” Entanglements across and all the way down. A narrative of contagion that one cannot help but sense between the lines of Bender’s prose. A virus that seeks to secure the vitality of its hosts—to become a carrier of language, consciousness, and institutions. What Durkheim called the contagion of the sacred and what I have called secularism in other venues: atmospheric; an emergence that is not singular; a discourse that exhibits signs of organizational compatibility, moving systematicity, and feedback.

As scene follows scene in The New Metaphysicals, something is revealed: a mode of thinking and being that is not born solely of capitalism, nor that is unique to the economic sphere. It has emerged across a range of practices—work and consumption, to be sure, but also moral considerations and those of something called religion, political alignments and attitudes, struggles with familial relations and intimacy, modes of civic engagement, and imaginings of disengagement. Perhaps even the mood one inhabits when sitting at Starbucks, sun shining fiercely through the window.

*  *  *

In The New Metaphysicals, there is, once more, a representative quality to contemporary spirituality. Representative of what, exactly, is an open question.

So, although it may seem outrageous, I am struck by the degree to which the belief-practices of Cambridge metaphysicals resonate with Taylor’s subtle deflections of history, capitalism, and their attendant opacities. For Taylor’s epistemics of hope—his particular commitment to making the world a better, more just, and more humane place—posits something like an astral plane, a polis not unlike the space in which telepathy is a matter of intention and direction.

On the astral plane, explained Doug, “there is no room for error, you don’t have to be very careful about what it is you’re articulating because communication is absolutely perfect. It’s your intention—it’s your sort of perfect thought form that is being communicated, not the words. So you can have someone who speaks French as their natural language and someone who speaks Russian, and they’ll have a perfectly beautiful conversation and understand each other entirely well. Because it’s not the language that they’re communicating, they’re actually kind of expressing telepathically the essence of what they intended to say.” Overlapping consensus cannot help but emerge on the astral plane. And although this dream of the cosmopolis is impossible to translate into ordinary language, Doug affirms non-mediation as an assumption worth holding onto and working with in his daily life. This assumption is the sine qua non of Doug’s reasoning, without which there is little reason to think at all.

The expectations of immediacy can also be a source of awkward tension, as when Wes asks Bender for permission to “read” her energy. “I was surprised at how put off I was by Wes’s claims that he had found a way into my energetic interior, or rather, that our energetic interiors were so readily available to touch and sense.” And although Wes seems innocent enough as he and Bender sit around a kitchen table, there is emitted a kind of blithe aggression, not unlike the best intentions of an American empire.

So, to pick up a thread from the current discussion about The New Metaphysicals, “Market,” Economy,” and other secular distinctions are not the substantial equivalents of karma, energy, or soul clusters.  These former concepts are perhaps even more auratic, more magical in their capacity to organize the social spaces in which humans eat, work, dream, and think.

For Economy, the State, the Market, God, etc., are those words—spare and capitalized—that gesture toward a complexity that cannot not be summarized. Such words, despite their analytical limitations, do real work in the world. They are limit terms, efforts to encompass something that cannot be contained. Such words serve to convince the user that the complexity is not overwhelming.

Thus, what strikes me about Bender’s metaphysicals is not their inconsistency, their illogic, nor their bad faith, but their reasoning skills. For it is precisely their rationality that allows them, on one hand, to acknowledge that forces beyond their control pervade the universe, and, on the other hand, to immunize themselves from those forces (which is to say, from the more radical implications of the entanglements they acknowledge at the outset).

There is an honest grappling with enchantment among Bender’s dabblers. They may be ridiculous. They may be misguided. They may be inappropriately and overly enthusiastic when it comes to coming to terms with the vibrancy of the material world. But they are on to something even when they do not necessarily follow through on their critical insights. They grapple with thorny epistemic issues. They seek perspective upon institutionalized injustice and wrestle with their own alienation. They adhere to the myth of liberalism even as they question aspects of it.

Many of Bender’s metaphysicals, in other words, do consider enchantment as a possibility, but only before domesticating it. Rather than theorize or practice a dissolution of the self, they inevitably protect themselves from the more radical implications of enchantment, keeping them at a distance.

“I am tired of the chronic uncertainty,” says Marcy, an aspiring yoga teacher with an “incredibly stiff neck.” Uncertainty is “making me sick—affecting me physically.” Marcy still considers returning to “advertising in corporate America” or taking a job at Starbucks, where she could at least get health insurance. Marcy’s friends are empathetic. They are soothing. They offer suggestions that would allow Marcy to continue her metaphysical practice uninterrupted—writing more, working out an exchange with a chiropractor, and other ways of addressing the blockage of her “fifth chakra.”

Marcy’s friends are nothing but helpful. They share her despair over an uncertainty that is chronic. Their suggestions, however, frame uncertainty as an aberration, something that can be overcome if only one’s present situation could be seen with clarity. What corrupts such epistemic capacities are the contingencies of the corporate world (not to mention a model of insurance that allows bets to be hedged against a death that is both certain and opaque). For in Marcy’s case, as in so many others, the problem of uncertainty depends upon normalizing the state of present transparency. Consequently, auras are there to be read; past lives ready to be known; futures to be insured.

And it is upon this kind of reasoning that Bender’s book provides genealogical reflection. For in TNM, there is a hallucinatory quality to lives lived and imagined in the metaphysical grain. But those hallucinations are not simply their problem. The hallucinations, on the contrary, have as much to do with other spaces of submission.

Taylor’s sense of the material world is not unrelated to his not always implicit commitment to (or perhaps nostalgia for) the ideals of a self that flourishes, unfolds, and, at the end of the day, can be sufficiently liberated from history so as to be able to take the measure of itself—in concert, of course, with others, as they liberate themselves sufficiently from those very same forces.

In “The Sacred, the Secular, and the Profane: Charles Taylor and Karl Marx,” Brown takes Taylor’s reading of Marx to the genealogical mat. Taylor, argues Brown, practices a kind of materialist analysis that replaces a focus on the processes by which historical conditions are generated with explanations of what psychologically animates human action. Consequently, in Taylor’s story the focus on motives and aims leave little room for forces that do, in fact, exist, yet are “beyond our control, and even our cognition.”

So, as I sit here, in my comfortable chair, latte in hand, a Chocolate Mini Sparkle Doughnut by my side, I wonder whether such forces are simply too much to bear. I look to the copy on my cup for guidance: “Everything we do, you do. Buy our coffee and good things happen.”

Brown homes in on what I see as a significant detail of A Secular Age—the presentation of human intentions without sufficient attribution to the vibrancy of the environmental forces that conditioned them. To be sure, there are tragic limitations at the heart of Taylor’s story. But, as Brown argues, Taylor gives lip but little service to what Brown, via Marx, calls “historical forces conditioning and contouring secularism that do not take shape primarily as ideas or explicit human aims.”

Capitalism, to take but the most pertinent example, does not exist in essence yet possesses an agency of its own. “The movement of capital,” writes Brown, “violates both the creation of man (species being) and human capacity and creativity (making what we will of ourselves)—it violates holiness and humanism at once. Capital’s profaning power blasphemes human divinity and inverts the proper order of things, reducing us to its effects.” Capitalism is religious (and not simply like religion) precisely because of this unlocatable agency. Transgression follows in its wake, the only mark of its existence, portending a general state of enchantment. Capitalism disrupts all manner of binaries, profaning both human being and potential, transforming the best of Enlightened intentions into all manner of benevolent stasis and bloodless alienation.

Taylor, of course, is not alone in his failure to follow through on the more radical implications of Marx’s argument. Marx didn’t either, positing a heroic, ultimately expressive consciousness as the inheritance of a redeemed humanity that would make its way across a threshold of false consciousness, beyond capitalism.

But whither redemption when it has become all but impossible to come to terms—any terms whatsoever, mind you—with “forces” that are “humanly generated but not apprehended as such and not humanly controlled”? This is not any garden-variety illusion, but rather a particular kind of hallucination that is endemic to the secular age. This hallucination, moreover, is bound up with capitalism but cannot be reduced to mere economics. For it thrives in any space that entertains the outrageous perspective that opacity and enchantment can, with epistemic diligence (and a politics that promotes such diligence), be overcome.

Indeed, it would take someone like Walter Benjamin, stoned observer of modernity’s ambiguous core, witness to both the beauty and violence of capitalistic structures, to begin to take seriously the ontology of self-organizing economic and political systems. And it is this genealogical move that Taylor’s narrative refuses. In rendering enchantment as a pre-existing but unnecessary condition (and transparency as a kind of ideal), Taylor misses something definitive about the secular age whose story he is telling.

Summarizing (by way of a Benjaminian lineage of critique that addresses the phantasmic elements of modernity) what might be called the genealogical insight of Marx, Brown writes that humans are “extraordinary creatures, capable of endowing our mental and physical productions with autonomy, generativity, even sovereignty.” Once such sovereignty is entertained, the line of questioning posed by Taylor calls for a different kind of explanatory response. It requires a more meticulous, yet vaguer, documentation. It demands a history of modernity that does not simply jettison naïve theories of secularization (as Taylor’s admirably does), but that also gestures toward the norms of enchantment and opacity. Regrettably, such states are often assumed to be exceptional, existing only to prove other rules. This point, I think, is at the heart of Jane Bennett’s subtle critique of Akeel Bilgrami’s discussion of enchantment vis-à-vis Taylor’s use of it in A Secular Age.

Brown’s story of the secular age would begin with a different premise. The questions would be genealogical rather than analytic: How is the “secular subject to be grasped and articulated,” asks Brown, given that each one of our decisions may be our own even though the range of available choices has nothing, whatsoever, to do with us?  “How is its history to be traced, what are the most relevant conditions of its emergence, and what kind of consciousness is secular religious consciousness?”

Such questions inevitably turn the narrative logic of A Secular Age against itself, for they necessarily call attention to what is embedded deep within the structures of Taylor’s argument—namely, the communicative promise of liberalism, its imagined harmony of differences, and of course, a tolerant embrace of “alternative” notions and lifestyles.

In opening her essay with a discussion of the Obama campaign and the resurgence of a “spiritual left” in 2008, Brown positions Taylor’s work as partaking in a similar project of hope—of affirming “belief in belief.”  And who amongst us was not just a little hopeful when envivsioning an Obama administration? But what, exactly, was that hope about? Perhaps the same as that which gives A Secular Age its sense of welcome gravitas.

We have here, in two sites, the presence of a vague yet generative epistemics that serves, not to legitimate this or that doctrine, but to secure the kind of self who could assent to a doctrine if he or she only chose to do so.

For at the end of the day, Taylor’s story of the nova effect of choice vis-à-vis the concept of religion is premised upon a self that has the potential to fulfill such promises and fuel such harmonic processes in and through its inherent sovereignty and its capacity for immediate access to itself and the world around.

Brown broaches a question that confirms the deeply romantic genre in which Taylor tells his tale. The question is not whether Taylor’s is a great work. Nor, really, is the question about whether Taylor is right or wrong. It is, rather, a question of narrative effects. For, as the image on the cover conveys, an iron bridge of Whitmanic expanse is displacing the more dystopic iron cage.

The question—for me, at least—is to what extent the fragments of Taylor’s argument constitute a strategy of defense, shored against the ruins of history and society itself? A strategy of immunization? Of disenchantment in its classic Weberian formulation? A fixing of the distinction between subject and nature? A desire to immobilize nature, chance, and secrecy? A product, in other words, of the secular age it promises to describe?

*  *  *

Brown’s essay points to how, within Taylor’s narrative, enchantment and opacity exist for the purpose of being transcended—spectral forces ultimately succumbing to diligence and intention.

Another text, from Marx’s scene of writing, also speaks to this kind of relationship between reason and enchantment: On Hallucinations: A History and Explanation of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism (1845), by A. Brière de Boismont, M.D. This founding text in the history of psychology was translated into English in 1860, when it, like numerous other scientific exposes of occult phenomena, was nevertheless embraced by burgeoning metaphysical movements on both sides of the Atlantic. (But that is another story.)

What concerns me here is de Boismont’s claim that hallucinations may “coexist with the due exercise of the reason.” Images, ghosts, specters (ethereal powers not unlike Marx’s commodities) were “creations of the mind.” And because they were “the result of things that have passed,” they were “visible to the external senses.” Yet despite their empirical veracity, hallucinations were ultimately harmless. For even when they were “looked upon as the effects of a supernatural power,” hallucinations did not pose a vital threat. De Boismont’s translated voice was emphatic, drawing on Honoré Aubanel’s Essai sur les Hallucinations (1839): hallucinations could “exist in man without the intellect being distorted.”

Hallucinations, in other words, did not necessarily constitute mental distortion. Such imbalance, on the contrary, was the effect of an overbearing reason. When reason was excessively present, the “mind” became an “obedient slave.” Consciousness lost perspective upon its own shaky ground. Reason forgot that it, too, was born of feverish dreams, that it, too, was historically conditioned—born of physical sensations, ideological vectors, and lingering emotional streams.

More reason would not necessarily solve the problem (and could, perhaps, even exacerbate it). De Boismont’s concern, then, was how one lived with hallucinations, how one disciplined oneself in light of them. Reason was to be continually sharpened through willed distortion.

The ideal, according to de Boismont, was someone like Newton who could produce hallucinations “at his pleasure.” Newton, it was said, learnt such discipline when he spent “some time” looking at “an image of the sun in a looking-glass” and then “direct[ed] his eyes towards the dark part of the room, to see a specter of the sun reproduced bit by bit until it shone with all the vividness and all the colors of the real object.” Newton’s was a project of auto-enchantment whose discipline was a matter of separating oneself from the hallucinations one had generated for oneself—like becoming an addict in order to kick the habit. An act of both self-deception and honest truth-seeking.

So what happens when reason is recognized as, in part, hallucinatory? What happens when you stop fooling yourself that spectral forces do not exist because they should not exist, that false consciousness is only a possibility precisely because it is false—at the end of the day, a state that is anathema to the better part of human nature? What happens, in other words, when enchantment is considered the norm? When claims of disenchantment are considered forms of wishful, perhaps even animistic, thinking?

So what, exactly, is the payoff of Brown’s critique of Taylor, besides getting a sense of Marx’s scene of writing, the topic of reasonable hallucinations, and the subtleties of false consciousness? What might we learn about the secular age if we were to resist the sense of intentionality that Taylor harbors? And, finally, why has it been relatively difficult to maintain a sense of refusal when assessing whatever it is we are talking about when we talk about the secular age?