A history professor of my acquaintance, in my first semester of grad school, offered some scholarly advice that I've found helpful ever since. The class was reading some early 20th century German historian whose history of the western world ended with Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We should learn not to trust, this professor told the class, any historical account where the author of said account makes himself the pinnacle of history, the point toward which everything has been leading up, or the point after which no improving change can occur. Though this appears as an obvious enough point, it shifts and distorts in historical-philosophical work in ways not always apparent. This is how C.V. Wedgwood can appear to honestly believe that the principal task of the Thirty Years War was to prevent the rise of Nazism: we tend to overweigh our particular moment.
In one of my notebooks from the last year, I have a list of common rhetorical devices that make me suspect the veracity of a speaker's (or writer's) claims. Two of them are notably historical: making any claim about a period of over 100 years in length, and claiming that the world has irrevocably changed within the author's own lifetime. My own attempts to do careful historical work have indicated to me how difficult it is to do the first--can't keep those pesky human variables constant for long enough--and the second is the failure of imagining a golden age just outside one's own lifetime, or in one's childhood, which usually consists entirely of anecdata, and functions on the assumption that children have perfect memories of the way things were.
Which brings us to Taylor, who, it seems to me, violates all three of these. He's written a history in which his own blend of liberal Catholicism is the only way to reconcile oneself to modernity. He hints at the end of Sources of the Self that perhaps any form of Christianity could do the trick, but by the end of A Secular Age all of his examples are, like him, Catholic. Indeed, he appears at moments in that text to think the only thing that can re-enchant the world is what is sometimes referred to as a sacramental view of reality. I can assure you this provokes a
The problem of the scope of his historical account I mentioned previously. About it I can only say what Czeslaw Milosz said about Pablo Neruda: when he speaks of the things he knows well, I find him moving and convincing. When he speaks of what I know well, I cease to believe him.
The one problem that leaped out at me when I read A Secular Age was that its points of historical inflection are poorly chosen. There's the Reformation and the Enlightenment and... 1968? I'm aware of the culture warrior reasons for thinking that The 1960s Changed Everything; I'm aware of the liberal Catholic reasons for thinking so. What I'm not aware of is anyone who was born after, say, 1980 who thinks that The 1960s Changed Everything. I'm sure it was a big deal when it happened, but if your consciousness dawns sometime in the 1980s, you are probably aware that the 70s were more like the 50s (and vice versa) than is usually suspected. And while I don't deny that it was in some important respects an inflection point, to put it on par with the Reformation or Enlightenment seems, at best, premature. (And this is to say nothing of the valid criticisms in the linked article that Taylor pays little attention to how religious belief works in the lives of ordinary citizens, and that he fails to even consider the world outside of western Europe and America)
Finally, I will say that though I believe all the above reasons are valid, I do have a taste in academic work that will naturally find books along this line suspect. Caveat lector.
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