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The Communal Dimensions of the Moral Self

So far in our discussion on the qualities of our choices and agency, we have discovered some new language: qualitative discriminations, moral horizon, the hypergood. We are, in fact, in the process of unlearning nihilism. There is a lot to grapple with in the morality-identity-spirituality zone (spiritual geography). Charles Taylor does not make it simple or easy for us; morality is complex and it is very important to our wellbeing. We know that total, unqualified freedom is an actual impossibility. Paradox: If freedom alone is our first or only priority, we will not achieve it; we will have tyranny. Total freedom can become the enemy of freedom. It is appropriate limits that actually pave the way to freedom, in a city as well as in personal relationships. Moral claims are made by someone within an a priori web of obligations and it is grounded in some objective value. There is something intrinsically personal about the nature of obligation, and thus we can assume that perhaps the source of our intuited obligation is also personal. More of that in later posts.

In this light, it is time to talk about the important communal dimension of the moral self. In this post, I continue with the project of moral mapping, moral recovery, amidst the posture of critical moral realism. We want to face the full reality of our total moral makeup, within our moral universe. Charles Taylor, in his approach to cultural renewal, extends the concept of one’s moral map to include key terms of community, communality, and communion. How is one’s moral identity formation interwoven with the constitution of the good life within social spaces like family, village, guild, or profession? A strong qualification in Taylor’s notion of the freedom of the moral self is the communal (inter-subjective) aspect of self-constitution and self-discovery. We are active participants in shaping our desires, in pursuing wisdom, but the right community also assists immensely. The experience of moving from one community to another is very instructive. The good is not just a free-floating ideal that we champion, but truly something embedded in human story and the web of a human community. Life is hard, suffering is real, and it hurts. Suffering can also bring good into our lives. But the good offers us a currency for human flourishing, wholeness, shaping our desires, or developing a fruitful life. Taylor is pointing in the direction of the interface between the individual agent and the community. Above all, we must make peace with our humanity.

Our Current Cultural Problem In the West, at this time of major cultural transition, we are losing our moral skillset, says Matthew Crawford in his book, The World Beyond Your Head. Moral relativism has demoted morality to a kindergarten level of seriousness and that makes us much more vulnerable as a society and as individuals. We are morally autistic. We have lost much of our history, memory and heritage, much of our traditional sources of meaning-making (existential homelessness). We have lost the ability to work with others in developing moral values that matter and give structure and meaning to our lives (triangulation). Thus, we do not really understand ourselves well as whole persons: what is noble or despicable human behaviour or attitude. This creates new levels of anxiety and makes growing up much harder and more threatening. Instead of the ancient moral goods and virtues, we are left as victims of the values of the transactional marketplace: efficiency, productivity, usefulness or cash-out value, the bottom line, ability to meet deadlines. Our identity is being reduced to performance and that makes us quite vulnerable to our supervisors, who keep raising the bar and adding projects to our desk. It is leading to an epidemic in anxiety, depression, and eventually burnout, because in this competitive environment, enough is never enough. Too many people are talking about a mid-career crash. It is also leading to serious addiction to high performance drugs and pain killers (even opioids). We have become victims of our own high achievement goals, needing to be super heroic just to feel okay about ourselves. This is not freedom, but slavery–commodification and depersonalization of the self.

William Cavanaugh also has some urgent concerns and insights on our consumer society in his new book, The Uses of Idolatry. There is a real sense in which consumerism drains us of our very humanity. The things we consume take on a life of their own and our whole identity is shaped by them. This becomes our secular religion, filled with magical objects and rituals. We invest commodities with divinity. Branding and marketing invest products with meaning and spiritual imagination. Brands are the current opiate of the masses.

Consumer culture is in many ways the opposite of materialism; it is instead a form of excarnation, an attempt to transcend the material by making the material goods vehicles for the highest human aspirations…. In its attempt to create its own self-image, the self is constantly investing divinity in things (W. T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry, 299, 304)

Addictions to Radical Individualism/Personal Isolation

• Self-help or Happiness Industry.
• Self-invention Culture of Expressive Individualism.
• Consumer-identity Culture: I am What I Purchase.
• New Age Transcendentalism or Gnosticism (including drugs like LSD). 
• Therapeutic Culture: My feelings about myself are priority one.

In Taylor’s view, the self is partly constituted by a language, one that necessarily exists and is maintained within a language community, among other living, speaking individuals. He opens this up in a big way in his book, The Language Animal.

There is a sense in which one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation to those conversation partners who are essential to my achieving self-definition; in another in relation to those who are now crucial to my continuing grasp of language of self-understanding … a self exists only within …‘webs of interlocution’. (C. Taylor, 1989, 36) 

These webs of interlocution prove significant; the communal Other is critical to one’s moral self-constitution. In Taylor’s view, there is a necessary, ongoing conversation with significant others which is critical to one’s moral identity development. There is a current myth that says that one can define oneself in terms of a relationship with self alone (Foucault), and explicitly in relation to no communal web, that true creativity and originality demands that one should work out their own unique identity, that is, to become an original (C. Taylor, 1989, 39). Taylor uses the term expressive individualism to describe this phenomenon. But as he demonstrates, this is not possible at a practical level. It is rather an artificial and unhealthy abstraction of what it means to be a full and healthy human being. Thus, against the backdrop of Taylor’s convictions, the contemporary quest for freedom as mere autonomy can lead in an unhealthy direction, towards a harmful isolation of self with its consequent high anxiety. Late modernity is leading people in the direction of radical isolation and self-grounding. It raises a key question of what is important to moral constitution and what feeds healthy agency and robust subjectivity. 

Taylor’s communal self contrasts starkly with today’s Western radically individualistic self. He contests this abstract posture:

 I define who I am by defining where I speak from, in the family tree, in social space, in the geography of social statuses and functions, in my intimate relations to the ones I love, and also crucially in the space of moral and spiritual orientation within which my most important defining relations are lived out. (C. Taylor, 1989, 35) 

Taylor notes that even from one’s earliest years, one’s language for the moral must be tested on others. Matthew Crawford agrees strongly with this viewpoint. Gradually, through this sort of relational-moral-conversation, the individual gains confidence in what life means and in who they are as a moral being and a good person. The community offers natural, healthy validation. The other person must be granted her intrinsic integrity, voice, and presence as well. One is moved, even transformed, by the lives, the wisdom and the deeper understanding of other people on the same journey and by moral mentors who take an interest in a younger person’s wellbeing and life trajectory. Taking his picture of the social dimensions of self a step further, Taylor argues for the socially embedded nature of the moral self. One relates to the good, not only as an individual self, but within a communal context, where the community also relates to and incarnates some good or goods. Thereby, we see the dynamics of an emergent moral culture, to which we can both contribute and benefit.

In terms of the social embeddedness of the morally recovering individual, community does not necessarily entail a dull uniformity, or cultic conformity, nor mere conventionalism. Rather, he suggests a dynamic, growing economy of being-with-others. Community emerges even while there is friendly disagreement at some level. But it must be stated that one cannot have community without some sort of normativity, some common commitment to the good. Otherwise, there is too much internal conflict and not enough social glue. The community must incarnate such a good within its matrices, because there is in reality no actual value-neutral, inter-subjective state of affairs. It is essential to trust and mutual respect, to basic human flourishing. There is a notable link between Foucault’s avoidance of community and his avoidance of normativity in general. The interpretation of self in terms of its relation to the good, to the moral horizon and to the hypergood can only proceed via recognition of an individual’s interdependence (not co-dependence) with other selves. Taylor presses the point more firmly: “The drive to original vision will be hampered, will ultimately be lost in inner confusion, unless it can be placed in some way in relation to the language and vision of others” (C. Taylor, 1989, 37). This is what he means by a thick identity.

Application in the Virtuous Community What kind of people form a virtuous community? How do we locate ourselves with respect to the good? What do wisdom, courage and hope, benevolence and love have to do with scholarship or everyday life? What do moderation, self-restraint and frugality, patience and gratitude have to do with academic excellence, business acumen, or scientific brilliance? Can we truly flourish if we live, work and love virtuously? Our moral vision shapes our goals and actions day to day. Many will know of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue which decried the cultural loss of this ancient language of virtue. In its place, late moderns have substituted the Nietzschean/Weberian language of an individual’s posited values, a self-invented morality which tends towards solipsism.

A moral virtue is an excellence of character, developed by conscious choices over time and thus for which we can and should be praised; virtue disposes one to act in such a reasonable way to avoid extremes, to act in short as a sage would act. It is hard to develop on one’s own, but rather requires community virtue to support the individual in virtue or character growth. We need others to learn how to practice virtue. Virtues are heuristic, they teach us about new dimensions of life as we embrace them and embody them. Professor Steven Bouma-Prediger (For the Beauty of the Earth, 140) a UBC visiting scholar articulates the language of virtue this way:

A virtue is a state of praiseworthy character—with the attendant desires, attitudes and emotions. Formed by choices over time, a virtue disposes us to act in certain excellent ways. Knowing which way is the truly excellent way involves avoiding the extremes of vice by looking to people of virtue as role models. As certain virtues shape our character they influence how we see the world. And the entire process of forming virtues is shaped by a particular narrative and community covenant. The settled disposition to act well, which makes us who we are, is nurtured by the stories we imbibe and the communities of which we are a part. https://ubcgcu.org/2014/11/23/recovering-the-virtues/

See you in the next post as I continue to pull on the thread of meaning with Charles Taylor.

Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, PhD University of Wales, Meta-Educator with Postgraduate Students and Faculty, University of British Columbia, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer.

Bruggemann, Walter. The Psalms and the Life of Faith. Fortress, 1995.

Carkner, Gordon E. Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture: Grounding Our Identity in Christ. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishing, 2024.

Carkner, Gordon E. The Great Escape from Nihilism: Recovering Our Passion in late Modernity. InFocus Publishing, 2016.

Cavanaugh, William T. Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2015.

Gregory, Brad. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Taylor, Charles. The Language Animal. Harvard University Press, 2016

See for further discussion: Incarnation Book Release https://ubcgcu.org/coming-soon/ + Thomas Merton’s thoughts on moral identity https://ubcgcu.org/2020/02/05/sources-of-identity/ + Our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl4NgIg_ht8IZCRIhho4nxA

P.S. The Idea of Secular Who indeed are we moderns? Where are our roots? What can we salvage from the past to offer us wisdom for today? What do we have to say to each other? How can we live and work together in a fruitful way amidst intense plurality and difference? In his 2007 Templeton Prize tome, A Secular Age, top Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor offers a deep reflection on the history and current state of modernity in the West. He documents a major change in the social imaginary, the way things make sense to us, a change that spans 500 years. This change is a shift in ethos, involving people’s basic sensibilities, their assumptions and perceptions about the way things really are. Taylor notes that human flourishing has become the main focus of life in a period of unbelief in the transcendent or divine. We have moved from a transcendent to an immanent worldview over the past five centuries, from a world picture where God was the ultimate good for the majority of citizens, to one where human flourishing in itself is the ultimate good and prime goal of human existence.

Taylor is post-Durkheimian in his view of our secular age; religion has not been replaced by science. He claims that we are in pursuit of more, rather than less, spirituality today. This reveals what he coins as the “Nova Effect” of multiple spiritual journeys in this pursuit of human flourishing, where the individual’s search is the main focus. Think the movie Eat, Pray, Love. Western modernities are the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understanding, rooted in new consciousness and blends of consciousness, a new sense of self. Self, identity is a many splendored thing in late modernity.

He articulates in much detail here, and in his 1989 Sources of the Self, three contemporary Western spiritualities: exclusive/scientific humanism, Christian humanism and neo-Nietzschean anti-humanism. These three hypergoods (cultural drivers) vie for our attention, each with a radically different message to deliver. Taylor feels that this is where the greatest increase in understanding of our modern identity is available for our study and reflection, critique and dialogue. This insight is deeply profound and needs to be taken very seriously.

Amidst this documentation of our modern spiritual journeys, Taylor willingly raises the provocative question for our reflection: Does the best life involve our seeking or acknowledging or serving a good which is beyond (independent/transcendent of) mere human flourishing? Is human flourishing in itself the best prime directive, the one that leads to the best results for human experience? He adjures us to look beyond naïve to reflective, self-critical positions.

In this pursuit, he suggests the need for a recovery of the thickness of language; he wonders whether we have flattened or depreciated our language within the ethos of exclusive humanism and Analytical Philosophy. Have we given science and descriptive language too much purchase on our identity and our ability to know things? More on this issue of the flatness of language in a later post. It is the first time in history, notes Taylor, that a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely-available option (one where human flourishing remained the ultimate goal, and where there was an eclipse of all goals beyond this). We ought to be aware of this fact.

He mirrors this dimension of Modernity to us, and puts it under critical scrutiny. Many of our current most famous spiritual journeys (even though they start within the immanent frame), do not end in immanence, atheism or secularity, but end in belief in God with robust results for human insight (e.g. T.S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G.K. Chesterton, Theresa of Lisieux, as well as many contemporary leading intellectuals like Tom Holland or Larry Siedentop). This journey entails a transcendent turn towards agape love, a love which God has for us and in which we moderns can participate and engage through his power, one which can transform and mobilize us beyond mere human perfection, pushing out the edges of human possibility, and ironically human flourishing. See also on this theme my 2016 book The Great Escape from Nihilism.

Historian Brad Gregory from Notre Dame University captures the crux of our discussion when he writes about this cultural sea change: i.e., the subjectivizing of morality in the West. I suggest reading the whole of chapter 4.

A transformation from substantive morality of the good to a formal morality of rights constitutes the central change in Western ethics over the past half millennium, in terms of theory, practice, laws, and institutions…. [It entails] a formal ethics of rights rather than a substantive ethics of the good [managed by the state]: combining liberty with equality. It recognizes individuals to hold their respective conceptions of the good, whatever they might be, and to lead the lives as they please, however they might wish, within the laws that it stipulates and enforces, in a manner consistent with the same recognition for everyone else…. The highest political goods the maximization of individual choice, and the greatest social virtue is the toleration of others’ choices and actions. (B. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 184)