Charles Taylor: The Malaise of Modernity

The first time I can remember talking to Charles Taylor was in the mid-1980's, when I interviewed him in his office at McGill about a Canadian philosopher of an earlier generation, George Grant.  Like many another celebrated Canadian intellectual - Grant comes immediately to mind, as do Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan - Charles Taylor always made time for the CBC.   A few years later, after the publication of his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, a book whose scope is just as broad as its title suggests, I proposed to my Ideas colleagues that Taylor be asked to do our annual Massey Lectures.  They agreed; he agreed, and the result was The Malaise of Modernity, a pithy and accessible condensation of Sources of the Self in which Taylor sought, characteristically, a middle way between what he called modernity's "boosters" and its "knockers."   The five lectures were given in 1991, and I still remember my incredulity and skepticism when Taylor told me he would like to deliver them more or less extemporaneously, followed by my amazement when he proceeded to do just that.  He had already prepared a text for publication, but when he gave the lectures he stood in the studio and spoke freely, referring only occasionally to his notes. The result was coherent, orderly and quite remarkably similar to the text - a performance which remains a model of intellectual virtuosity for me to this day. 

At the time I produced Taylor's Massey Lectures, I was already a keen student of the work of Ivan Illich, and I remember being disappointed on finding, when I introduced Illich's name, that Taylor was not sympathetic to Illich's ideas.  This changed dramatically in 2,000 when I broadcast a series on Ideas called "The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church and Society."  (It's available elsewhere on this site, as is the Grant series I mentioned.)  Taylor called after the broadcasts to say that he had listened and had found a remarkable convergence between what Illich had said and the direction his own thinking was taking, as he prepared his A Secular Age, published in 2007.  (A harbinger, Modern Social Imaginaries, appeared in 2003.)  His comments gave me crucial encouragement in a project in which I felt myself to be somewhat out on a limb as a result of the unusual and, I thought, somewhat explosive character of the claims Illich was making.  When I published the interviews with Illich that had gone into the Ideas series as The Rivers North of Future in 2004, Taylor contributed a preface to the book.  My vivid interest in him notwithstanding, Illich was by then a largely forgotten figure, at least in academia, and Taylor's generous endorsation, in my opinion, gave the book a much wider audience than it would otherwise have had.

After his contribution to The Rivers North of the Future, we kept in touch, and, in 2010, in the wake of the wide notice and extensive commentary occasioned by A Secular Age, I felt it was time to attempt a full-scale intellectual profile of Charles Taylor for Ideas.  He agreed, and, for several days, he and his wife Aube received me hospitably at their hilltop home in Harrington, Quebec, where we conducted twice daily interviews, punctuated by delicious lunches and a glass of wine on the patio at the end of the day.  The five programmes that follow played on Ideas in early 2011 - their title cribbed from his Massey Lectures twenty years later.

History Beneath the Skin

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It's a common idea that history and nature belong to separate realms.  In history things change,  cultures evolve, civilizations rise and fall; but, in nature, except on the vast time scales of evolutionary theory, things stay the same.  A pine tree is a pine tree, and an intestine is an intestine whether it's in ancient China or contemporary Toronto. The body is thought to belong to this (relatively) unchanging realm, now uncovered by modern scientific technique.   What appears under modern microscopes and shows up in CAT scans is taken for what is and what has been throughout recorded time.  People in the past may have had strange ideas about humours, miasmas and other phantoms, but now we know how things really are. 

German historian Barbara Duden challenges this story.   As a young historian, she discovered the writings of a German physician of the 18th Century,  practicing in the town of Eisenach, who recorded, in seven volumes called Diseases of Women, what the women of Eisenach told him about their ailments.  Duden listened carefully to these accounts, and, instead of translating them into contemporary terms,  tried to understand what these women were saying on their own terms.  This led her to "historicize" the body in two senses: first she took the experience of 18th century women seriously, rather than treating their accounts as mystifications arising from a defective understanding, and second she questioned the status of the body which contemporary persons come to believe they have as a result of having internalized the images and statistical constructs supplied to them by modern bio-medicine. 

I met Barbara Duden in 1988 State College, Pennsylvania where she was part of a circle of friends around Ivan Illich who were attempting what they called "an archaeology of modern certainties."  (The body, as defined, diagnosed and manipulated by bio-medical science, is such a certainty - perhaps the first among such certainties.)  By the time Duden and I met, she had already published her book on Dr. Storch and his patients in Germany as Geschicte Unter Der Haut (History Beneath the Skin.)  It appeared in English, from Harvard in 1991 as The Woman Beneath the Skin and was followed two years later by Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. 

Barbara Duden and I became and have remained dear friends.  My book The Rivers North of the Future is dedicated to her.  On one of her first visits to Toronto, we sat down in the Ideas studio to talk about her work, and the two programmes that follow were broadcast in 1991.  (But not without incident.  On the way home one day, in the week before the broadcast was scheduled, I set down a shoulder bag, containing the sole edited copies of the two programmes, on the counter of the World's Biggest Book Store on Edward St.  When I put the tapes up on my editing machine the next morning I found, to my amazement and horror, that the contents were completely scrambled and quite unintelligible, presumably as a result of them having come too close to some sort of de-magnetizer which, unbeknownst to me, had been on that bookstore counter.  I returned to the uncut interviews of which I had kept a copy, and, in several, largely sleepless days, I was able to re-edit the tapes in time for the scheduled broadcast.)  As a title, I used a literal translation of the name of her first book, preferring it to Harvard's English version which I found less vivid and less accurate....

Beyond Institutions

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With this post, I will complete my tribute to Nils Christie, who died on May 27th of this year in Oslo.  He is featured in the final broadcast of this six part series, first broadcast in 1994.  My starting point in this work was a claim made by American community organizer John McKnight in a profile I had done of him the year before, and also available on this site, called Community and Its Counterfeits.  In this series John McKnight claimed that society is composed of two distinct domains: an institutional domain, governed by legal, contractual and administrative norms - in a word,  bureaucracy - and a community domain, where citizens associate for their own purposes, and people matter for themselves.  These domains are distinct and incommensurable, but they are often confused.  This series explored various attempts to address situations normally treated institutionally within community.  It was recognized by the Canadian Association for Community Living with a plaque that hung proudly by the door of my office for many years afterwards.

The first three programmes of the series are taken up with an account of the work done by my friend David Schwartz when he was the director of the state of Pennsylvania's Developmental Disabilities Planning Council and related in a book he had then just published called Crossing the River: Creating a Conceptual Revolution in Community and Disability.  Two of his associates in the work of creating community alternatives to institutionalization, Sharon Gretz and Nancy Lee, are also featured.  The fourth programme begins with sociologist Peter Berger discussing a book he co-authored with Richard Neuhaus called To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy - a work that pleaded for a reinvigoration of civil society as a buffer between individuals and monopolistic mega-institutions.  It continues with Jerry Miller telling the remarkable story of how he dismantled the juvenile corrections system in Massachusetts after he was made the state's Commissioner of Youth in 1969, a story he also tells in his book Last One Over the Wall.  In the fifth programme Miller goes on to talk about his work with the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, an organization he found to deal with the ills of the American criminal justice system as a whole.  The series concludes, as I mentioned, with Nils Christie talking about his long association with Vidåsen, a Camphill community in Norway for people whom Nils liked to call "extraordinary" in preference to some more pejorative name.  Nils wrote about Vidåsen in a book called Beyond Loneliness and Institutions which also gave its name to the series.