New Insight

Northwestern University professor Charles Taylor has won the Templeton Prize, $1.5 million worth of recognition. It's larger than the Nobel Peace Prize. And it's unusual for a professor of philosophy and law to be awarded the accolade. Sun Times. Tribune:

"The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging to both," Taylor, 75, said in accepting the award Wednesday in New York. "But it is equally true that the culture of the humanities and social sciences has often been surprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual."

In his speech, Taylor took aim at Nobel laureate cosmologist Steven Weinberg, who once said: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

"On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who lived through a good part of the 20th Century could say something like this," Taylor said.

"We urgently need new insight into the human propensity for violence ... [that] must take full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion," he said. "But we don't even begin to see where we have to look as long as we accept the complacent myth that people like us--enlightened secularists, or believers--are not part of the problem.

The great evils of the 20th century were perpetrated by the secular ideologies of the Nazis and Communists, though in the past religion has been used by imperfect men as an excuse for great wrongs. Taylor's work may give us some insight into confronting the current threat by Islamic terrorism and identifying the political and spiritual dimensions of the conflict. But he seems to regard all cultures as "equally valid", rejecting "American ideals of individualism and modernity", and merely describes terrorists as "wounded in spirit". He cites pacifists as his moral exemplars. As Mark Steyn has pointed out in the last issue of National Review, doing an interview on NPR about his book America Alone, Gandhi's passive resistance wouldn't have succeeded if he hadn't had an empire as enlightened as the British to deal with.

I will have to read more, but this seems too forgiving an approach to me, though I am glad he has taken on the clueless secularists.

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