Keynote Lecture with Charles Taylor

Hi I am privileged to introduce people I didn't know I was supposed to do this, so I was wandering to Joe's coffee shop and enjoying a conversation about decepts and arbitrage and things like this. And then I discovered when I walk in I am supposed to introduce one of my favorite people in the world, Charles Taylor. I must say that this this particular event has been a long project. The Center for Transcultural Studies in Chicago which Dilip Gaonkar is now the Director and I think of which Charles is President and many people in this audience have been members of have been trying to work on opening up the discourse between societies for many, many years. I can remember the first time that we had a serious inferences in 1989 after Craig and I had been marching in the spring of 89' in China through Tieanmen and then Craig got Calhoun got stranded there and had the fortunate opportunity to as only Craig could do, to take advantage of the situation and write a book about it. You know, and a wonderful book it was. We had the opportunity that year 89' is a pretty important year if people remember it right, I mean all the nuances of 89' and besides Tieanmen and Russia and Eastern Europe, it was also the 89' Indian elections that brought the BJP BJP into power. And we had an interesting group of people there. We had people from China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe and we were reading, of all things, two books that we had the opportunity to have mainly a manuscript form at that time, Jurgen Habermas's Public Sphere book, which Tom McCarthy had given us a an edited translation form. And then we had Charles's Sources of the Self which I had privilege of teaching in the fall of 88', in China. And the most interesting thing is here you get a bunch of Chinese and Indians and Russians as we stay together in a room, I have never done anything like this before. And they all arrived because of a Rockefeller Post Talk Program that we had. And then we got some money from other foundations and what we have done is we had a program on Asian democracy and we wanted to include Russia. How can we include Russia? So what we did was, we got Rockefeller to agree that Russia was an Asian country. That was my first grade negotiation. But the next grade negotiation was to get Russians to come as members of an Asian you know. Now I got several people from the Europe was the was the US Canada Institute, it was called back then. The US Canada institute which was also a training ground for spies, I mean we knew that. And then these things are mixed I mean all these things in Russia at that time were mixed. And I remember one of the followers deciding that he really could be characterized and categorized as an Asian because his wife was Siberian you know. And he always wondered that she looked a little bit Asian you know, so you know, he rationalized showing at this but we would sit in these meetings. And this was the beginning of the conversation that ends up in this book, on secularity. We would be sitting in these meetings and the Chinese will be looking at the Indians and marveling at their ability to speak English you know, and they they wouldn't say a word in front of the Indians. The Russians would look at everybody and just just wonder what was going on because they had never been in groups like this. Then the Chinese would go off and they start talking about the Indians you know, in Chinese and saying you know, which one of us can actually represent the Chinese properly so we won't lose face in front of these people who speak so quickly and so well about everything - you know. But the interesting discussions then on Habermas and Charles began. And I must say it was from that point that lot of the connections with the New School actually began to be wired in because not only if Asia and others were involved in some of these conversations but also we had the opportunity to look at other works of people at the New School, [0:04:57] ____ book came out I guess in a year or two later. And all these things were discussed and it - you began to realize there was something emerging you know, at that moment. It was a new kind of intersection of discourses and you could begin to see China and India beginning to move, I mean you didn't see much of a conversation; we never did have much of a conversation between China and India. And that's one of the things that we have kind of reinstituted here. But I must say that one of the most exciting during that during that period was reading Sources of the Self. And the reason that Sources of the Self had such a great influence of lots of people was, actually its rhetorical style. I mean, lot of people didn't understand, from China and India, what Charles was talking about in terms of the actual content. They didn't have the intellectual history and all that. For lot of them it was almost like a cram course in Western Intellectual History and you have to realize that some of the books that we view as great advancers served very different purposes, okay, when they travel abroad. But the one thing that people always said to me, it was the first book that they read that they felt addressed them as equals, all right. And I think you know, that's pretty much a message of all other travels work and from then on of course we move to, you know, multiple modernities, alternative modernities and now, we could call like you know, may be its not titled quiet correctly the secular age and we know may be its secular ages or whatever we want to call. But this dialogue has been going on for many, many years and it has been going on in many, many different countries. And I am so happy to have so many of our friends and colleagues here. And also I want to now introduce of course the person who I had always considered, literally the most democratic man that I know, along with the founder of the Center, which some of you know, Barney Weissbourd the two most Democratic people I have ever met and its because they were always open to a conversation. So up to Charles Taylor. Well I have to say how touched I am and how glad I am to be here, be talking to you because this is the I mean the two, I don't know about Mellon Foundation, but the two other organizations which are sponsoring this whole event, that is the New School and the Center for Transcultural Studies I have done all the thinking I have done when I was 20 years, somehow moving in and out of these spaces, talking to these people and so I don't even know any more which ideas exactly are mine or which ideas belong to other members of network and I don't think you could ever draw the line may be we can't draw these kind of lines. So on a certain way this is returning to home, but its also continuing a long conversation may be moving in ahead, may be not, which has been going on for a long time and I hope people who part in either of these organizations wont find it sometimes opaque because we might be referring to things that had been valid back and forth. But let me try to give a talk today on, well it could be called master narratives of secularization or it could just be called master narratives because I like to talk a little bit about the place of master narratives in our understanding of things. But, then in particular talk about the master narratives of secularization which I wanted to, I mean the main ones that were going around, I wanted to challenge in the book that I have just finished writing and its going to come out fairly soon. It's driveling out in bits and pieces and bits and berries and so on. I wanted to challenge it and I don't know quite what I replaced it with, that's another thing that I am still work in progress but I want to try it to mark out the places where I I challenge it. Now the master narrative of or the form of the master narratives of secularization which were dominant I think in Europe and America after the Second World War and until fairly recently when the recent events of the last 10, 15 years began to shake them very considerably. But the one that was the family that was dominant before that was the role of the simple causal theory. And it started off with some idea of modernity or modernization which was you can, I wont try to define because I will fail in the first five minutes of my talk if I try to define it, but I think we all know there is a range of developments, urbanization, development of market economy, development in science and technology, social mobility and so on and so on. All these factors that people think of as factors of modernity, well at one hand let's put them all of them together in a package. And then on the other hand we have something that was called secularization and really this meant many a things but there were two main things which it meant. It meant on one hand that somehow the separation of religion or churches from states or public life were easing in the sense were separation of religion from public life in various forms going on over centuries, so it meant one big institutional thing. And it meant also in other, when we were talking about other facets of it, the retreat of religion, that is the decline of faith or the decline of practice, very often deeper decline of practice and the decline of faith, right. So it meant these two things and very often we will put them all together thinking that we were just facets of the same development, all right. So these two globes here and I only have one hand, so I cant I am rhetorically, totally inhibited here, but on one hand we have sort of the modernization and on the other hand we have secularization and there is an arrow like that. In other words there is a I got a causal story here, the more modernization took place the more secularization took place. That was the real story. And this story, this causal, functional story was meant to be both universal and linear, that is it was meant to apply anywhere were the independent variable modernization set in, the dependant variable would set, that that's anywhere but it was also linear and that is the more modernization the more the secularization in a in that kind of linear form. Now there is big, big problems with this and here we get to I am going to go shooting off in various directions because it's too interesting not to. But I hope we won't get confused. Here is indeed a very interesting starting point for another reflection that's going on in the media, so I mentioned earlier in the New School and at the Center. Of course this whole putting together of all these developments into one thing called modernization is very problematic and Sudipta Kaviraj is working on his theories concerned with this, about how these different factors that are put together as a single process, modernization. Well, even if you take them its all present in various, various modernization the order in which they happen may make a big difference. Historically too, the actual form that modernization takes already this package is beginning to fray, fall apart. But just forget that for the minute, right and just look at the cause of arrow between these two packages, and here I really wanted to challenge these these two basic thesis of universality and linearity. Universality, here I start right off with a an intuition that is so developed in our discussions about multiple modernity and so on what the great difference is, that even when we think of this universal processes like like modernization take when they take place in Europe or in India or in Japan or China, so we have talked very often about multiple modernities and this this intuition led to the idea that, may be in order to study this whole business of secularization we really have to start somewhere else and view from nowhere, that the universal standpoint. So I took an immensely well, it might be thought to be a cowardly decision to beginning, I think it was prudent and wise but you will tell me that at the end, the decision was to restrict my whole account to one one very big and very internally multiple case ,but nonetheless that I took Latin Christendom really. And from 1500 on, not even following it out in all its successor society because as people have pointed out Latin America I mean, [0:13:54] ____ had a very small part in this, so it was more or less North Atlantic area. So let me get that, let me get the process there, I took that as the as the unit even though when you start looking into it it already starts to fragment into different national and regional trajectories because at least this was something that I thought one could see in somehow unified terms. And here is another pointer to something beyond to what I am talking about, now that we may come back to. That means that in order to have a bigger understanding of the whole process you have to think of this as a terribly provisional work, because of course this has not happened in a on that score and it really hasn't happened in the kind of you know in a bell jar, it has happened in direction with similar or other developments, similar parts of the world which it is influencing and which has influenced it. And so in the end this this study of the Latin Christendom case for itself would have to be totally torn out and amended and changed and so on when we tried to fit it together into a larger picture, if we - at the end of the process of studying other various examples end up ultimately doing this. So this is a very, very worrying thing and I have constant sense of bad conscience which is immensely increased by some of my friends who kept telling me however, how can you possibly leave out the relationship to the Indian empire and how can you possibly and the answer is I can't write that extra chapter, I am you know already exhausted get off my cases. But that's which is not which is not at the highest intellectual level, but I I offer this as a provisional response at least I got of these book and which is you know, if you ask my family that's quite a miracle that it actually happened at all. So let's go back to that circumscribed area. So what do we see, what kind of a narrative do we see? Let's retreat back now to think about the form of a lot of Western meta narratives, or may be I should retreat even farther and say something to satisfy or not satisfy, but to address the post modernists in the audience if any, that its obvious that I not losing faith in master narrative. Yeah, I am knocking one or some but that doesn't mean I am knocking the wall and actually I would go on the offensive and say, I don't think we ever do without them. And as I say I mean these people often say and I think this is this sounds funny in one line but I think its true, but if you ask post modernists to expound what they believe when they say something like, well there was an epoch in which everybody was into, master narratives and then drawing past the hotel, wrote his book and then we sorry and you feel something like a pragmatic paradox is being enacted before you eyes and how can it be how can it be otherwise. So that's my defense of that. Well back to the form of Western meta-narrative which we have to worry about because the form is going to be important as well as the particular content of this one I am going to talk about, this one between that and that. And the forum has very often taken that other stage theory, state your theory. I mean I think we are very much in the date of great Scots of the 18th century, of Adam Ferguson and so on, stages of human human development which in the 18th century ended with commercial society and others Ferguson in his 100 gatherers and nomads and agricultural and commercial society and each of the stages produced another kind of way of human lives, set of values and so on. And stage of commercial society of course produced a society which is said to be oriented to war, it is oriented to peaceful production, that was capable of developing modes of life in which the invisible hand of Adam Smith could operate and you have a kind of harmony that a possibility before us. We have to remember again, another foot note on the side that that the defining characteristic of the European intelligence here was ambivalence and there also was another voice saying, but look what we have lost, we lost the age of heroism, we are also midgets and inside of Adam Smith's own great work you have this this back and forth. But nevertheless just look at the positive side of this, the positive side is you move from one stage to the other and when you get to the higher stage for instance, thinking of (Hugh)[0:18:38] and talking about, you know an enquiry referring the principals of morals and he talks about how the list of virtues is so different is so different is so back among the Greeks. I mean you cant knock through if you aren't educated the way those people, read all the Greek and Latin literature and so when you are looking at the list of virtues and you see this tremendous emphasis on courage and greatness of soul and so it doesn't fit into the ethos of the commercial society. You have to make historical remark which he does that this is something fitting for an early arrangement, the only way to defend the society was by war and that was what you needed and now we something something different. Here you have this idea that look we can't go back, alright? We can't go back, it's the ideal I call the ratchet effect right? There is a ratchet effect, you know you crank it up here and then the machine won't move back. So we couldn't go back to a society in which we really valued bulldog courage and machismo and so on, boy in fact to not be untrue, anyway. But the idea is you can't go back to that now that we have reached this phase. This is very important form of property of these meta-narratives if we buy into, that they have this idea of a ratchet effect that can't go back. Now and when we get to the particular secularization story. That is the one of the basic notions that we can't go back. You know it was for a variety of reasons modernization does these things to religion, produces secularization and you can't reverse the process, right. Either I mean there is two sub general stories here; either it's the progress of science and enlightenment, kind of given type of thing which makes belief in a religion impossible. Or it's the growth of more differentiated and loosely unified society, we are taking this eye this concept of differentiation which destroys the social conditions of of large degree of homogeneity and so on in which religion can flourish. Now people are thrown back on their own, they are liable to have differences from each other; their religious unity is going to as it were being frittered away. In both these from either of these perspectives you see that the the move is not reversible. So this idea of a linear move which is not reversible and which is universally applicable. Okay, the only wrong with that everything is terrific about that except the facts except what actually happened in history and this is one of these triumphs of a kind of ideological picture over reality when you start to look at it because leave let's leave aside the universality the non-universality of this which I a little beg that question because I I thought from the beginning that source was not worth tying to study at. As it where in turns that it will apply every where. But I need to defend that later on. What really breaks down is the is the linearity that the that it was the very non linearity. The kind of story I am trying to tell, well the also the universality when it breaks down even within the west, the kind of story I am trying to tell is different from this big meta-narrative in two important respects. That it takes some truth, I mean it takes I think with the kernel of truth in this meta-narrative, in in the following form. That certainly, many of the developments that we think of as constituents of modernity undermine even you might argue, make impossible certain total, social forms of religious life that existed in the past. For instance, I mean the I am particularly attached naturally to the French Ancien Régime Monarchy because that's worse, I mean our roots are, as you know where I come from going way way back. And you can see that this is a a monarchy predicated on some notion of there being a connection to cosmic order and the order of of all the stage predicated also on the idea of that cosmic order or something that is willed by god and therefore this in certain sense, the monarchy fits into the plan of god connected to the notion of what I call strong notion of the secret that is if you could make a distinction between points - of the act or people or places or times which are really sacred, which are close to the sacred and the other ones, contrast cases which are profane profaned times against festivals, profaned acts against especially the mass you know, ordinary plain people as against kings and priest and so on. And this very strong sense of the sacred is part of that whole consolation. Now without going into a very in great detail, I think you can show how the development for instance of nonhierarchical societies, societies that are moved by can see themselves as coming to the existence by the mobilization horizontal mobilization of a whole lot of different individuals, societies that are operating in the world in which disenchantment is taking place, going to make it for instance here without losing it. I am using this enchantment in a very narrow sense whereas Weissbourd slips between the narrow and the general sense. I am trying to use it here in a very narrow sense and I am going to give you a completely circular definition on that which is also something you have to do if you want to avoid the perennial danger I am operating in here of trying to use concepts and giving them a phony universality. Its not that I have a general definition of magic. But there is a general category, which Christian reform be it Protestant or Catholic, of the rights and acts, the Christian reform as it moved on and eliminated certain rights characterized as magic, characterized them as magic and therefore wrong because they were attempts to control god, right as against being genuine acts of worship. So if you take the Protestant case of course that applies even to the mass, but if you take the Catholic case it applies to all sorts of things that you know, peasants kept doing with with using hosts as love charm or whatever, but you know it was something that was absolutely unacceptable to the territory. So you get a very interesting Western concept of the magic or which is as it were invented by and circumscribed by a set of exclusions which come from a certain theological basis, which then infects I am going on this parenthesis right along but I promise I will wind back in again which then affects a whole lot of consciousness of - of what sort of this quasi scientific anthropology, I mean the Frazer'an you know, magic religion. And science fits into that, right. And then you get this terrible problem of Western anthropologists running out there with this notion of magic and Alex Prichard now and Meet the [0:26:03] ____ et cetera and and we get all the difficulties which arise out of that. You see why I have been through this whole periphrases because this is the this is the absolutely central difficulty of this whole work that I am trying to do it anyway faces it that trying to do this, then if you think you have an absolute general concept for a certain kind of religious life which you got already up here and fine and you know its going to apply anywhere you need it you are, right. And see you got to avoid that and therefore I have given this rather in a sense, I don't mean circular definition but this definition of magic which deliberately understands it as it derived out of a certain process in this case are reform in Christian context in the last last millennium. All right, end of Parenthesis, if you take that notion of magic and disenchantment is the reform movement that that eliminates it, right? And that's what of course what the German word [0:27:06] ____ means all right. But then they went on to use it very often for any decline over which some years later, there were. So I think it is terribly confusing because very evidentially there is a great deal of western religion which involves disenchantments. In other sense it was not not at all a kind of religion that was another very powerful form of religion namely all these reformed modes. So in any case we have okay, can I close the parenthesis without totally confusing you, where were we, let me tell you. We were in fact saying that that a certain, I should be closing this I suppose, a certain number of traditional forms that existed before whole forms like the the French monarchy as existed prior to 1789. In the face of certain developments like the disenchantment in this sense, in the face of developments like the arising of horizontal horizontally constituting societies obviously couldn't they couldn't continue. So this is the very important kernel of truth behind very important Kernel of truth behind the the secularization thesis. There are such incompatibilities. But they don't lead to uniform linear decline of sub religion as such because, what very often happens is that religion reconstitutes itself in the face of this undermining into other forms and then there even our next stages, I think I have looked at both by the three stages and we were a reconstitute form could also be undermined by other times of cultural change and so on and so on. So you have a picture in which which ends up in a very mixed picture because sometimes what reconstitute is you know it constitutes itself to take the place of the previously dominant religious form may be an anti religious form. See, there are trajectories particularly that you see in the Latin Catholic countries where that has mainly been the case. It has been like ideologies or if you are assuming these ideologies that some of which have which have taken over and even fought long battle with with the Catholic Church. In other trajectories, you have like the Anglo Saxon ones, the Scandinavian ones and so on. The one that's carrying on through this country and on into Pentecost and as it moves across the world, you have very definite reconstitutions of a very powerful religious kind. And one of the most important modes of reconstitution which keeps us where the relationship to God very much central to society, not in the older form of the Ancien Régime monarchy that the society is somehow is connected to the sacred and there is a sacred coronation right and so on. But in the quite new form, the form that I called, may be very unfairly to Dworkin and very - may be foolishly neo Dworkinian, that is the in which we have societies belonging to this modern age, in which we conceive our political societies as coming together as a result of mobilization of of numbers of people, numbers of individuals ultimately around certain common markers, America and so on around. I mean very often the markers are markers defined by principles let's say around Republican principles like the French Revolution, the American Revolution. But very often they are also markers which point to certain historical, ethnic, linguistic or religious traditional societies. So we are we are Danes, we are Germans oh thank you very much, the French etc. The French is very interesting case because this line between the universal criteria and the ethnic is constantly being crossed in the sense that the society coming together around universal principles kind of it were ethnisize itself over time. I mean that first of all by unifying people around the French language and then by developing this common this common identity overtime. So this is not a a very firm boundary. But the point I want to bring out here is that we have this very interesting phenomenon that in some societies the markers around which the mobilization takes place in some way or other are related to religion, example the most important early one I think is this. Republican's foundation which I read along with Villa as being found as round of notion of there being a providential plan, god. God created human beings equal and entitle them to certain rights and so on and that this republic distinguishes itself by having for the first time in history it carried out integrally that plan. And nowadays we have a very interesting potential [0:32:14] ____ Cup in the United States between a number of people who are still looking at that as they were that the foundation in that light that God is part of that plan and people for whom the plan if you like it was designed or whatever you want to call it has as it were mutated out of the feisty context into a context of nature or just a civilization on, so that you have, I think you have in this society, I mean talking about the United States a lot of the aggresivity around some of the politics here is based on the fact that for some people an original what I call, neo Dworkinian identity is integral to the state. For other people it actually betrays what they see as definitive, it's that both sides are accusing the other side of being un American. I mean that's why we have the same kind of fights north of the border about gay marriages and so on but nobody is willing to kill about them up there. And that's the I mean this should gel I mean the sense of tremendous anguish about them is less its not non existing but it's less. Then you get quite other kinds of conventional identification like certain suppressed nations like erstwhile French Canadian, Poles, Irish who connect up with a - with a Catholic conventional apartments. And I can go on multiplying examples. Now this is a new form couldn't have existed, it wasn't on the screen of course at the time of Louis, the XI and so on and but very much came on the screen in the 19th century and this too I think was greatly destabilized in many western countries by roughly the authenticity revolution of the 1960's and around then. And so we can and so they is it worth, the picture in these counters moves on to another formation of the religious and the spiritual, much more fractured, much more plural and so on. However what's interesting about the modern west and the modern world in general is that this whereas if you like the Ancien Régime model is really off screen you know. This is a famous account of the you know, the Bourbon who, as everyone said you know, when they came back in the restoration they learned nothing and forgot nothing and the one that that learned the least and forgot the most was the last legitimate Charles the 10th who succeeded, you know in 1825 and he thought yeah, all this is legitimate stuff - its true that mainly, everybody were perfectly happy to carry on with the Ancien Régime it's and just all those chaos and so on haven't read all that Voltaire and upset things. So he set up the original coronation rights in the mass cathedral in 1825 including a number of people who were scruffy by coming up to get - be healed by the king touch and so on. And it fell totally flat. I mean just you know, zero effect on the population, it didn't everyone didn't say wow, we are back in the [0:35:18] ____ everyone said, what the hell was going. And so you have this case where it just you really have the ratchet effect operating about that way you couldn't go back. On the other hand although a certain number of what I am calling neo Dworkinian identities have been very profoundly shaking in the west to the point may be may be of no return, I don't know it's early to say. I think if the British the British one which for all the people was - was based on kind of Protestant Christianity and so on it no longer exists. But in a certain sense both French neo Dworkinian identities both the Catholic royalist and in a certain sense the the adversary jack of an atheist one have also been drained of their force by the I think the power of this authenticity revolution that I am seeing. There are other areas where this is not the case. And not only other areas but here is where - since I wrote the book, I realized that you know, the the theoretical language has got to be changed again but but don't tell my publisher I won't I don't want to go through a second edition right away because otherwise it is very, very interesting I hope I am not going to confuse you too much. But it's very interesting to think about it, the role of narrators again in national identities. They are not only in essential for social science. But I think they really are - already essential for national identities. And so very often situations which look totally secular that is nobody is building their identity on religion at one level. On another level I am thinking of what [0:36:58] ____ was talking about today the way in which - or as somebody was talking in the discussion, the way in which the possible entry of Turkey into the European Union has led a lot of people to say impossible. Why is it impossible? Well, it's not a Christian - so I mean that's what's going on here? What's going on here is there is a certain narrative it's very let me give you an analogy. In 19th century in Germany there was a thing that people openly called [0:37:28] ____ protestantism that is a protestant that has had a sort of mutated into well, may be yes, may be no, god - but certainly a certain culture is developed, freedom and so on out of what Luther did etcetera. And these Catholics are extremely dangerous people who are going to upset that and therefore we got to put them in their place. So you have here a very powerful identity identity story which comes out of the closet because it's threatened by another identity which is as it were antithetical to an earlier phase of that story it's Catholic or not Protestant. So the sense of being in the Protestant lineage comes out to the surface. I think that's what you see happening in a lot of European discussion. Today that people who are totally secular in their treatment of their regular politics and their national identity and and the [0:38:28] ____. But suppose he I don't think him to be back, but in one point he said, [0:38:35] ____ that's Finnish right. Well, the unpacked story is something like like this you know it's pretty awful that Christian [0:38:44] ____ and all sorts of way. I mean there is a talk about and so on but they have one good idea. They had duality of church and state. And then we gradually developed that in various ways until we get the final like the separation of Church and state that we have. Now but those Muslims and you can what's his name Bernard Louis and other people say that that doesn't exist there right. So they they are not even in the in square one of nascent letters, they can't get out of they can't get pass and go and so on. And you have instead of looking at the issue of a properly secular society as something which is based on certain principles which you can get up from a number of different directions, you have a kind of narration chauvinistic a little bit of chauvinistic narration of our story that were special because we could get there. And one of the things that made us made it possible for us to get there is this Christian path which therefore suddenly becomes a positive marker. So you see, this is extremely complicated situation. I mean the same something like that is going on in Yugoslavia, what's going on in ex Yugoslavia between number of Croats and the number of Serbs native Serbs who are you know, where the orthodox patriot? We get them out here and and say something etc and because that is part of the story and in a certain sense would last a [0:40:12] ____. I mean in a certain sense this becomes I think a tremendously important issue which we are struggling with in my country at the moment, we are in this commission, looking at the whole issue of of the place of religion and so on and the fact that there is a certain way of telling this story, that is very powerful. In which the the Catholic past plays a true role. Can block other attempts to sell the story which move you beyond that even among people who don't go to church any more, that's the interesting and worrying fact. And so there are two stories that you could hallow about. Turkish addition to the European many, many but I mean two kinds of stories you could tell about Turkish entry into European Union. One will be in a circumstance it's a realization of the whole occasion of the European Union because it's managing into arrive at a secular society in the best sense of the word which can even overarch this historic enmity, right, by coming from different directions. And that could be both and a tremendously positive story. But there is another story or what makes us what we are, which is that it builds on this picture of the past which actually blocks that. So this whole issue of like neo Dworkinian story is something that's much more complex. And that's a you will find with what you will call really hot religious identities, in other words where religious identities are connected to very powerful face commitments by people and involve practice, right. There are a number of cold religious identities, historical religious identities which are still very strong in another way and are actually managing to block all sorts of all sorts of ways forward. So let me go back now to the issue of the ratchet effect. And I said that in this more complex story that I am trying to tell, not of a linear movement but of destabilization re composition destabilization re-composition, you end up with a with a great gamet of the end points and they are end points so they are end points for us now, right. And which will cross a whole range of societies in in ex Latin Christendom and so on. You get some extremely high level of practice like here or extremely you know, close to zero practice like the ex Eastern Germany. And if you if you if you are a Protestant Eastern Germany isn't a separate country, I would say it isn't geographically and legally but boy, in the mind you just go to you know, just go to Potsdam or East Berlin and you will see it's still very much in the mind a separate country. And so you get this tremendous kind of and results depending on if you like what what form of re compositions occurs. Some of them anti religious, some of them religious but what you have here is no general rule that the thing has to move linearly or even up and down in one in one direction. But secondly so but both in to that story I have allowed for kind of mini ratchet effects or of certain ratchet effects by saying something like Ancien Régime French Monarchy you know if you set it today, that was the most wonderful society and let's set about doing that. Okay, well move number one is move number one is I mean you you wouldn't know you know your king I mean what what would you actually do to get there? Was it plainly nothing? On the other hand, where we had I think a real mistake in the way that these ratchet effects were seen in the past is in not seeing that certain features which were very powerfully existing in those earlier amalgams and some what changed forms can nevertheless reoccur. For instance you will find, interestingly enough, in a lot of the Pentecostal Protestantism a connection with with healing, with the festive and so on which you found earlier in earlier forms of Catholicism and which were very often wiped out by Protestant movements when they took over those Catholic society. But then they you know, recurred. But then they recurred of course in a totally different context, it's not like the earlier Catholic context. And but nevertheless these can reoccur. And in a certain sense I came to the slogan at the end of my book that I took over from from (Barbella) [0:45:04] you know that in religion nothing is ever lost. There are in other words features of pre axial religious life, there are features of the sort of high civilizations which were based on both the actual religion and so on but there are number of things. There are features of the reformation there et cetera which can - kind of very strange historical web collage. It can it can return, so the aim would be distinct that because certain whole forms whole amalgams are no longer possible, that everything they contained is no longer possible. That's not - that is not really the case at all. And on the contrary in the present predicament in which you have this great I mean multiple occasion of new different choices and possibilities and opportunities in religious forms and spiritual and not religious and etc, all these different things. In the course of seeing these multiply you do see returns in some in some sense analogous to a lot of features of earlier forms of religious life, precisely if you like this new context the context of the countries that have gone through the authenticity revolution to the large extent and we have this multiplication of religious options, this new context can in various part of its detail, things are very close to what was embedded as part of the detail of the earlier ones and so we have to be careful. The whole thing can come back but but is it worth that we can't prejudge before hand to see what happens, what particular bits of it can come back, right?. So you have for instance in great recrudescense in some way of the festive which is what some French sociologist called, the festive, I mean the fact that in pre reform Christianity I mean pre Catholic versus as well as Protestant before, there was a lot more place for pilgrimages, for festivals in which everyone turned out and so on, in other words its collective collective acts of piety of of celebration and so on and so on. And although the intermediate phase of much more disciplined restoration, Catholicism or Protestantism, the second great conventional age as people called it had a much more sober kind of religion which which would repressed the festive. That comes back today, you think of the world youth days and so on. Not to speak of course of the fact in here, I am reaching the bounds of my whole study because now I can hold it as it were tight in a tight space anymore, Latin Christendom, if you just go across southern boundary of this country you get into another you know development of Latin Christendom namely, Mexican Christianity and so on in which the festive never really died and is still very powerful there and its partly such that that it can come back etc. So we have we have this but now I am talking about the next phase as it were this were where one tries to this now can be fitted into a larger a larger picture. And that I deliberately kept off the you know, off my agenda because otherwise it would have gone on forever. So we have I mean really, what we would ideally want to do now is to see how analogues movements, different movements how first of all we get a new take on some of the movements I am talking about by saying how some of them are worked out in in contact with non European societies even as as I think - hinted talking about [0:49:18] ____ protestantism and this was in Germany or similar movements in this country or Huntington you know, another example and so how Huntington is an example of [0:49:30] ____ protestantism modern Harvard, right. You have already we saw how that consciousness was worked out through the content with scenes of dangerous Catholic Church and so on. So you get this essence of what Europeans are very often is defined by what the natives origins are or a series of moves of British Imperialism which starts off with the Irish as the other the dangerous other and then it various regionals and then it has various natives and so on. So, that that part of the story has to be brought back in. But also the other direction, where by this kind of religion and this is a fractionating story, what this kind of religion was based on. I mean it - in a certain sense as reform Christianity moved ahead, it also modified itself and took on deistic forms in which it really quite severely changed, I would say distorted certain important features of Christianity. For instance, belief becomes almost entirely thought of in terms of propositional belief whereas the Greek word [0:50:41] ____ have have trust in. So we get this picture of what a proper religion is, which has the right kind of beliefs and to raise from that the right kind of morality. And that's what true religion is and it totally deserts superstitions. And then this had some kind of impact in certain parts of the third world. I mean you can see in Ram Mohan Roy and so on some kind of coming to grips with that, also [0:51:06] ____ had some with the with that which had an influence there. So, the whole the bigger picture, now there is the Center for the Transcultural Studies and the New School go and long may they live. Go on for the next 50 years and continue this on and somebody will be getting up and giving a lecture in which the whole broad sweep will be brought together in one incredible and irrefutable picture. With that I stop. Thank you very much for your attention.