Beauty At Work

Barriers to Cosmic Connection with Dr. Galen Watts (Part 7 of Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age)

Brandon Vaidyanathan

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What are the barriers to pursuing our spiritual yearnings in a disenchanted age? 

Dr. Galen Watts addresses this question in this final presentation from our international symposium held at McGill University in November 2024.

Galen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on cultural and institutional change in liberal democracies, with particular attention to religion, morality, work, and politics. He is the author of The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022), which explores the shift from "religion" to "spirituality" and its social and political implications in the West. Currently, his work investigates the cultural dimensions of the "diploma divide," analyzing how symbolic boundaries and cultural practices shape distinctions between urban university-educated professionals and rural nonuniversity-educated workers in Canada and the U.S. Galen has published extensively in leading academic journals, including American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Civic Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, and The Sociological Review. He also writes for public audiences, bridging academic insights with broader cultural conversations.

In his talk, Galen addresses the following themes:

  1. Why cosmic connection may be harder to achieve today
  2. The impact of cultural and institutional change on spiritual yearning
  3. The decline of the humanities and the loss of deep formative experiences
  4. The "secular sacred canopy" and its barriers to transcendence
  5. The paradox of ethical progress alongside increasing spiritual disorientation
  6. Can modernity be reconciled with cosmic connection?

To learn more about Dr. Watts, you can find him at:

Website: https://www.galenwatts.com/

Linked: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/galen-watts-a8877a212

Book: The Spiritual Turn Buy here

This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)



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Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work — the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

Hello, everyone. This is the seventh and final episode from our International Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age. Our speaker is Dr. Galen Watts, who's an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on cultural and institutional change in liberal democracies. His research focuses on cultural and institutional change in liberal democracies since the 1960s, with a focus on religion, morality, work and politics. His most recent book is The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity. Let's get started.

Dr. Galen: I just want to begin with a heartfelt thanks to you, Brandon, for organizing this and of course for inviting me, and just to say that I'm extremely honored to be here presenting in front of an intellectual hero and fellow Canadian. Charles, your work has meant so, so much to me, so I'm very grateful for this opportunity.

All right. So my remarks are going to focus on, broadly speaking, what I think of are some of the key barriers to cosmic connection. They're going to be sort of sociological and philosophical, something between that two. They come out of, as with many others, my reading of Cosmic Connections. There's a sense in which I really felt a kind of deep optimism in Cosmic Connections. On some level, I think part of this is just Charles' incredible rhetorical and kind of written style. It has this sort of deep optimism at its core. But there's something a bit more substantive about that. We can think about it in this way. That, on one hand, Charles accepts a certain version of the disenchantment thesis. We, in the wake of, say, the 18th century or so, we are increasingly buffered punctual cells. We live in an imminent frame where naturalism is increasingly hegemonic. We live in institutions which are increasingly rationalized, bureaucracies, the market and, also, as Hartmut Rosa would say, accelerated. Time just seems to be moving faster and faster. All of these seem to be reasons to despair.

But Charles tells us that we are — this is probably an inapt term. We are wired for cosmic connection, right? That on some deep, deep, philosophical anthropological level, we are cosmic-seeking creatures. And so the optimism, you could say, is that despite the disenchantment of the modern world, cosmic connection will break through. Where there's a will, there's a way, to sort of summarize. I want to believe that really, but I want to also think realistically about what the challenges are in the face of cosmic connection being actually achieved. And so I want to think about what those kind of barriers are. How great are they? Can they be overcome? What would it require for us to overcome them, not just personally but societally? What would we need to do? What kind of actions would we need to take? And to put it maybe somewhat provocatively, what would we need to sacrifice to achieve that? Again, not just personally, but collectively. And this will lead into my final remarks or not really remarks but questions that I'd love to hear from Charles on. What is the kind of good that cosmic connection is? Is it one good among others, or is it the kind of ultimate good from which all other goods derive? That, I think, is a very important question for us to figure out, because it will also help us to answer the other questions. What are we willing to do to realize this good?

Okay. So I'm making a distinction, which is ideal, typical between two different kinds of barriers to cosmic connection in, let's say, the 21st century. I'm thinking, of course, specifically in the kind of North Atlantic world. The first kind of barriers are what I'll call "characterological." And here, I'm thinking of characterological in David Riesman's sense, the idea that every social order encourages and even normalizes a particular social character. I think it's safe to say that the world that shaped Charles Taylor is not the world we live in today. I think that's an important fact to kind of come to grips with. So I want to start with a kind of shameful confession, which is that when I read the poetry that Taylor wonderfully includes in Cosmic Connections, I feel lost. I don't really know. I don't know what's going on. I am profoundly dependent on him as a reader to help me understand and orient myself in space. Now, I say this because I think on some level, this is not unique to people of my generation. That many of us are living not just in the wake of classical secularization, the decline of, say, Orthodox religious belief, but also in the wake of what Simon During, I think, helpfully calls 'second secularization,' which is roughly speaking, increasing decline of faith in the humanities. That is to say, of the canon, of the idea that art in the broadest sense has deep, objective truths there for us. And I think that we see this. We can see evidence for this in the declining involvement of humanities, you know, programs, the way that increasingly the marketization of the humanities.

So what this suggests to me is that, when I was reading Cosmic Connections, it became clear to me just how much Taylor Charles, as a reader, has these incredible capacities. These are not just knowledge. It's not just knowledge. It's also a certain set of dispositions, a set of competencies, that I do not have and I don't think many of my generation have, right? That we lack cultural frames of reference, we lack deep, formative experiences that would allow us to appreciate and receive the kind of insights that, say, romantic poetry contains. Now, I'd be curious to know what Charles thinks of that. He might say in response that poetry is just his love. It's not everybody's love. Maybe that's not the only way that we can see cosmic connection. But I want to suggest that my point has much broader implications. That in the kind of scientific, technological culture that I have grown up, and certainly my kids will grow up in increasingly, are they going to have the kinds of capacities, competencies, dispositions that allow them to achieve cosmic connection, of the kind that Taylor speaks?

So the way that I've come to think about this is that, there's a kind of crisis that I think the Romantics are concerned with. I call this a crisis of articulation. Right? That there is this attempt to try and recover this sense of cosmic connection. And so you have to devise a language—in this case, romantic poetry—to recover that experience, to communicate it, to articulate it. That's the task of the Romantic poet or artist, whatever the medium. But I would say that, at the same time, there's a crisis not just of articulation but a crisis of reception. That is to say, it's all well and good if you have virtuoso readers like Taylor. But if nobody understands what they're saying, it's no good. There's two parties in any kind of dialog. You have a communicator and a receiver. I worry about on the side of reception, whether we are creating a world for — we were talking about this earlier. What happens to a person who is on social media for eight hours a day, who becomes habituated to check their phone every five minutes? So how does this numb one a person? How does this change them on a deep level? And what are the ways in which this makes them incapable of receiving the kinds of insights that, say, the Romantic poets were trying to get us to experience? So that's the characterological set of barriers, broadly speaking.

The other are what I'll call, for lack of a better term, "institutional barriers." And here, I'm thinking kind of along two lines. The first is, the way that our institutions as a kind of overarching system make it very difficult actually to think seriously and take seriously the notion of cosmic connection. So here, a colleague of mine and myself have been working for the past year on devising a kind of sociological account of this. We've taken the notion of the imminent frame very seriously, trying to sort of put some kind of sociological meat on the bones of that. We've come to think that — following actually the work of Peter Berger, famously known for his concept of the "sacred canopy," that in pre-modern society, there's a kind of sacred canopy, an overarching cosmic, you could say, order that envelops everyone in the society. We have argued, or we're arguing, that there's a kind of secular, sacred canopy. We think that this has at least three dimensions. That there's an epistemological dimension, where empiricism is the dominant mode by which one can achieve truth or knowledge. We think there's an ontological dimension, where naturalism or perhaps materialism is presumed, where natural reality or the natural world exhausts reality. That's the presumption. Then there's actually also — Charles' work has been incredibly influential in helping us think about this. There's a moral dimension. That the secular, sacred canopy sacralizes in a kind of Durkheimian sense the values of autonomy and authenticity, what Robert Bellah would have called "expressive individualism." We think that this sort of trifecta, which forms what we call the secular, sacred canopy, is a lot more hostile, we'll say, to genuine cosmic connection than the optimism that one sometimes reads in Charles' work, right? In A Secular Age, Charles talks at length about the way that the eminent frame can be spun open, or it can be shut closed. And I wonder increasingly, how much space is there really to spin it open? I don't deny I've written a book on the existence of spiritual desires and yearnings. But I nevertheless wonder, if we're really interested in fostering genuine cosmic connection, how significant the barriers are given the nature of our institutional complex.

The second line along this is thinking about the way that this secular, sacred canopy fosters a deep anti-institutionalism, which makes of course reforming our institutions exceedingly difficult. And here, I'm drawing from the work of people like Berger and Bellah who were notably sociologists. And so interested of course in the moral vocabularies that we as modern people invoke and use, but also in the way that these are grounded and have to be grounded in traditions and institutions. And of course, on one hand, Taylor has spent many, many years trying to both defend, say, the ethic of authenticity against kind of crass or corrupt iterations of this, the way that consumer culture takes the ethic of authenticity in all kinds of shallow, superficial directions. But I increasingly wonder whether Bellah and Berger's suspicions of authenticity, and of course romanticism at least in its popular mode, was at least more merited than maybe I've been willing to recognize. That if it's the case that Romanticism, as it's popularized today, actually fuels this intense anti-institutionalism and anti-traditionalism, can, in fact, we overcome the kinds of challenges that we need to?

So this is going to lead me into my last, my final, remarks about the kind of good that cosmic connection is. And you brought this up in your earlier remarks, Charles. One of the things that struck me most, and I'm not sure if I'm understanding this right. But it's that, at the very same time, you talk about the ethical growth from the Axial Age, particularly our ethical growth, the rising moral expectations of citizens increasingly in the West but increasingly around the world, they really kind of rise up in the wake of the 18th century. And yet, at the same time, it strikes me that that is roughly when we trace the beginning of disenchantment. So, on some level, we have these two parallel processes which are difficult for me to sort of come to grips with. Because on one hand, I want to think that if you're going to have disenchantment, you're going to have ethical regression. But we've seen the opposite. On some level, historically speaking, we've seen ethical progress and further and further disenchantment. That makes me think, well, how do I make sense of that parallel process? And I particularly started thinking about this. In the last chapter of Cosmic Connections, Charles talks, I think, quite laudably about young people today and the way that they embody this ethical progress. And I see that too in my students. You have this Greta Thunberg, right? You see this intense commitment, profoundly, morally admirable commitments. And yet, I would say broadly speaking, I see this as combined with a sort of deep spiritual lack. So you have this strange situation, it seems to me, among young people. Again, I'm generalizing in a very, very crass way. But a combination of intense moral commitment and profound spiritual disorientation. Those speak to those two processes, disenchantment and ethical growth. And so then I wonder, do these two process work together? Are they actually quite independent of one another? What is their relationship?

The other question I have is, if we could have ethical growth without cosmic connection, without enchantment of a certain kind, then what should we be willing to do to recover it? How far should we be willing to go to ensure that not just a few of us in this room have cosmic connection in the woods but that most of us have this? I take Charles to believe, I believe this too, that cosmic connection is a core constituent of a flourishing, full life. I believe that. But if that's true, then do we need to sacrifice key features of the modern world, of modernity, for it, for us to have this, this good? What are we willing to do? I see right now, obviously, Trump's election is sort of provoking this. But there have been these alternatives. You can see, say, just as an example, on the left, certain forms of environmentalism which see modernity as fundamentally the problem. We need to get rid of these things, and it's quite a radical move. But you see, of course, the rise of post-liberalism on the right, which is an equally kind of anti-modern bent to it. Both of these camps, despite their differences, agree that the modern world cannot be saved. And I sense in reading Taylor Charles that you, on some level, think that we can reconcile these things. We can have the best of the modern world, while at the same time maintaining and fostering more cosmic connection. And I want to believe that. I don't know. And so I just leave that as a provocation for us to think about.

(outro)

Brandon: Alright, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.