Last year, as part of the Forming a Christian Mind project, I was invited by a group of Cambridge University students to help them tackle a couple of pressing questions. First, what does it mean to live the “good life”? Second, in the West today, would Christians answer that question altogether differently than their secular neighbors would? On those questions, few books are as illuminating as Charles Taylor’s sprawling and brilliant Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Why turn to a labyrinthine book on modern identity formation to answer those questions? Because Taylor argues we can only make sense the “good life” when we first grasp how our identities take shape. I determine whether my life is “good” based on the things that ground my identity. Sources of the Self opens with a provocative claim. In the modern West, despite all our focus on the complexities of our inner lives, we nonetheless imagine our core identities in stark, uncomplicated terms. We perceive and present ourselves—and others—one-dimensionally. In asking “Who are we?” we reduce everything to a single label, imagining it plays a load-bearing role in constructing our identities. For some, that label is a nationality; for others, it’s a profession, a gender identity, a sexual orientation, a social class, or a social role. We see this reductionism clearly on social media: If you join a platform like X, the first thing you must do is choose what to present to the world about who you are in your bio (and in no more than 160 characters). However, one of the driving ideas in Sources of the Self is that our identities are far more complex than our reductionistic tendencies suggest. Human identity is anything but tidy. To make this point, Taylor connects dots across vast expanses of time—from Homer to Plato, Augustine to Calvin, Descartes to Herder to Kant, and finally to us. By doing so, he creates a sketch of modern, Western identity. If you were to give that generic Western person an X bio, it would say something like this: #UniversalJustice #DoingGoodInTheWorld #Equality #Freedom #WantsToAvoidSuffering. That cluster of values is generically Western in the sense that they aren’t shared by all cultures across all time. Ancient Spartans embraced suffering as character forming and saw pain as a useful tool. Confucian culture affirms hierarchy—rather than equality—as natural and necessary. In its pre-Christian past, Norse culture saw dying well as more important than living morally. Pagan Roman culture imagined an enslaved class as necessary to enable the flourishing of its free citizens. By contrast, modern Western identity intuits those cultures’ values as foreign and undesirable. However, in Taylor’s argument, it doesn’t do so uniformly. Rather, the ways we prop up our own intuitions on justice, equality, beneficence, freedom, and suffering vary wildly from person to person. This, in his terms, is because we don’t share homogeneous “moral frameworks.” In what sense, then, might two people formed in Western culture—one a Christian, the other secular—go about answering the question “What is the ‘good life’?” Sources of the Self answers that with a thought-provoking insight: In the cases of both people, Taylor claims, the concept of a “good life” is shaped by the notions of justification and sanctification. I want to focus on how those concepts give Christians a unique lens with which to view modern identity formation. Justification and sanctification are, of course, deeply Christian terms. And yet, Taylor argues, they also shape the lives of our secular neighbors. How so? LEARN HOW JUSTIFICATION & SANCTIFICATION INFORM MODERN IDENTITY |
