I hugely enjoyed Talal Asad’s Formations Of The Secular, which Eoin O’Mahony has been pressing into my hands since I first met him. It is a worthy ally to Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those books that I suspect I must carefully re-read because even taking close notes, I reckon I got about 30% of what was on offer.
It is probably bad form to use as a quote, something that he quotes but I’ll do it anyway. Footnote 65 on page 47 lets us into a brilliant conversation Asad begins. When I talk with people about secularism, the Christian usually thinks it is about politically laying the ground for mass persecutions to follow and the non-Christian usually thinks it is about fostering reasonable conversation and secure freedom in the face of faith-based irrationalism. Cutting through this shite, Asad asks us (as one of many perplexing and illuminating questions) instead to consider whether pain has a meaning or not. Secularism won the day not when it drove prayer out of schools but when it stripped our owies of certain kinds of metaphysical explanations. Thus:
Their pain became totally secular since pain as well as illness were seen as nature’s punishment for omissions in one’s regimen, while mental illness was perceived as a sign of conflict between the demands of each individual character and the constraints of the social order; this interpretation called for a fundamental social reorganization when its standards (chastity in particular) went against nature. This explains why, as a leitmotiv, the physician of the Enlightenment maintained that in order to be a good moralist, one must first be a good physician, thus reversing the traditional relationship between medicine and morality.
– Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 107.
Your Correspondent, Is off home to think of a lie
I’ll now have to go and read the book again because you described it as a series of conversations. Damn your eyes, Hargaden.