I have a couple of posts coming that aren’t quite direct follow-ups to what I wrote last week about Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on atheism and belief, but deal with issues related to the whole modernity/belief/atheism tangle. For the first one, I wanted to juxtapose two pieces whose intended audiences don’t necessarily overlap that much — a London Review Books essay on Japan and “the ghosts of the tsunami,” and a Grantland career retrospective on the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, of “Robocop” and “Showgirls” fame.

The LRB essay, by Richard Lloyd Parry, investigates some of the ghostly visitations — visions, feelings of possession, poltergeist-ish phenemona — experienced by survivors of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the north of Japan. Parry plausibly links these experiences to Japanese ancestor veneration, which he argues is the “true faith of Japan,” the enduring religion of an allegedly-secular island. The tsunami “did appalling violence” to the rites and rituals of this faith: Carrying away “household altars, memorial tablets and family photographs,” destroying temples and with them the “memorial books listing the names of ancestors over generations,” and creating the kind of conditions — violent death, an interruption of rituals, the eradication of entire families — that Japanese folk belief associates with the creation of “gaki, ‘hungry ghosts’, who wander between worlds, propagating curses and mischief.”

Which is exactly the kind of manifestation that seemed to follow, for many Japanese. Here is one case study Parry cites, of a man named Takeshi Ono who visited the devastated coastline almost on a lark, and soon came to regret it:

… his wife and mother described the events of the night before, after the round of needy phone calls. How he had jumped down on all fours and begun licking the tatami mats and futon, and squirmed on them like a beast. How at first they had nervously laughed at his tomfoolery, but then been silenced when he began snarling: ‘You must die. You must die. Everyone must die. Everything must die and be lost.’ In front of the house was an unsown field, and Ono had run out into it and rolled over and over in the mud, as if he was being tumbled by a wave, shouting: ‘There, over there! They’re all over there – look!’ Then he had stood up and walked out into the field, calling, ‘I’m coming to you. I’m coming over to that side,’ before his wife physically wrestled him back into the house. The writhing and bellowing went on all night until, around five in the morning, Ono cried out, ‘There’s something on top of me,’ collapsed, and fell asleep. ‘My wife and my mother were so anxious and upset,’ he said. ‘Of course I told them how sorry I was. But I had no memory of what I did or why.’ It went on for three nights. The next evening, as darkness fell, he saw figures walking past the house: parents and children, a group of young friends, a grandfather and a child. ‘They were covered in mud,’ he said. ‘They were no more than twenty feet away, and they stared at me, but I wasn’t afraid. I just thought, “Why are they in those muddy things? Why don’t they change their clothes? Perhaps their washing machine’s broken.” They were like people I might have known once, or seen before somewhere. The scene was flickering, like a film. But I felt perfectly normal, and I thought that they were just ordinary people.’

Ono’s experience ends with a visit to a local Buddhist priest, who attempts, with apparent success, a kind of exorcism — the first of many such rites that the priest, whose post-tsunami ministry Parry discusses in detail, would be called on to perform.

Now alongside the case of Ono, consider the case of Verhoeven, as described by Grantland’s Alex Pappedamas, in a story taken from Rob van Scheers’s biography of the director:

… it’s 1966, and Verhoeven is out of the Navy and struggling to get a foot in the door of the sleepy Dutch film industry. Then his girlfriend gets pregnant. Verhoeven is facing the end of a film career he’s barely started; in a moment of panicked soul-searching, he accepts a religious pamphlet from a woman on the street and winds up at a Pentecostal church in the Hague, where the parishioners speak in tongues. “The weird thing,” he says, “was that you could physically feel — because that was what it was all about — the Holy Ghost descending, as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” Later, after Verhoeven and his girlfriend manage to arrange an abortion, they go to see the original 1933 King Kong, and Kong appears to Verhoeven as “an avenging angel from the Old Testament.” Verhoeven rejects the religious component of the vision, but comes away from the whole experience convinced of the fragility of his psyche and his need to “close the doors of perception” to avoid ending up like Friedrich Nietzsche, mad in the streets of Turin, hugging a whipped horse. Afterward, he tells van Scheers, “as an antidote, I started to film in a hyper-realistic way. My work became my anchor in reality. Hence the need to show [sex and violence] so explicitly … In the Netherlands people always got enormously worked up about that, and of course there was an element of provocation in it — but the background to it was my always wanting to have both feet firmly on the ground. Fear, it was fear that I might slip away mentally. This is why my films have always been firmly anchored in reality instead of ideas.”

Now obviously there are differences between a paranormal experience in a ravaged Japan and a feeling of divine visitation in a moment of personal uncertainty and moral crisis. But the two cases have enough in common to make the differences in reception and response worth pondering, especially in the light of one of the most interesting recent arguments about what “secularization” really means.

The argument comes from the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and his doorstop-thick magnum opus “A Secular Age,” which is recommended reading if you have six months of your life to commit to the project, with no distractions intruding whatsoever. If not, you could read my colleague David Brooks on Taylor’s ideas, or pick up the reader’s guide that another talented Christian philosopher recently produced — or just read this excerpt, which happily gets at exactly the issue that I’m interested in here. Here’s Taylor:

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed. This is not a mere “subtraction” story, for it thinks not only of loss but of remaking. With the subtraction story, there can be no epistemic loss involved in the transition; we have just shucked off some false beliefs, some fears of imagined objects. Looked at my way, the process of disenchantment involves a change in sensibility; one is open to different things. One has lost a way in which people used to experience the world. … Indeed, “enchantment” is something that we have special trouble understanding … we tend to think of our differences from our remote forbears in terms of different beliefs, whereas there is something much more puzzling involved here. It is clear that for our forbears, and many people in the world today who live in a similar religious world, the presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers. … We have great trouble getting our minds around this, and we rapidly reach for intra-psychic explanations, in terms of delusions, projections, and the like. But one thing that seems clear is that the whole situation of the self in experience is subtly but importantly different in these worlds and in ours.

Do read the whole thing. In a sense, it’s hard to imagine a better illustration of Taylor’s argument than the Verhoeven-Ono contrast. In the case of the Japanese man’s experience, you have the porous self made manifest — his experience of the tsunami’s ghosts is explicitly one of external forces entering his “psychic and physical” space, collapsing “the boundary between self and other,” and there’s no clear place where belief or dogma intrudes to control the experience, to make it somehow “optional” or “voluntarily embraced.” Then in the case of Verhoeven, you see the modern “buffered self” in action: An unusual experience is met with an “intra-psychic explanation,” which treats the feelings that overtook Verhoeven in the Pentecostal church as by definition internal. Whatever they are, they can’t possibly represent something crossing over into his consciousness from outside: Instead, they can only be approached as “coded manifestations of inner depths,” as Taylor puts it later in the excerpt, that we “define” and “deal with” very differently than Ono did with his ghosts — in Verhoeven’s case, by doing everything possible to avoid having the experience recur, out of fear for his very sanity.

But my question, which surfaced when I read (okay, browsed) Taylor’s argument the first time and came up again while I was thinking through these cases, is whether the buffered self/porous self distinction is supposed to describe a difference in the lived, felt substance of religious experience itself, or whether it’s ultimately an ideological superstructure that imposes an interpretation after the fact. Taylor’s argument seems to be that the substance of experience itself changes in modernity: He leans hard on the idea that (as he puts it) “the whole situation of the self in experience is subtly but importantly different” for people who fully inhabit the secular age. Which would seem to imply that when Verhoeven was in that church, his actual experience of what felt like the dove descending was “subtly but importantly different” from the experiences that the not-as-secularized believers around him might have been having — more attenuated, more unreal, and thus easier to respond to in the way he ultimately did. And it would imply, as well, that if Takeshi Ono’s worldview had been more secular to begin with, he wouldn’t just have reacted to his visions differently (by, say, visiting a therapist rather than a Buddhist priest); he would have had a different experience, period, in which he somehow felt more buffered and less buffeted throughout.

This isn’t just an academic distinction; it has significant implications for the actual potency of secularism. To the extent that the buffered self is a reading imposed on numinous experience after the fact, secularism looks weaker (relatively speaking), because no matter how much the intellectual assumptions of the day tilt in its favor, it’s still just one possible interpretation among many: On a societal level, its strength depends on the same mix of prejudice, knowledge, fashion and reason as any other world-picture, and for the individual there’s always the possibility that a mystical experience could come along (as Verhoeven, for instance, seemed to fear it might) that simply overwhelms the ramparts thrown up to keep alternative interpretations at bay.

But if the advance of the secular world-picture actually changes the nature of numinous experience itself, by making it impossible to fully experience what Taylor calls “enchantment” in the way that people in pre-secular contexts did and do, then the buffered self is a much more literal reality, and secularism is self-reinforcing in a much more profound way. It doesn’t just close intellectual doors, it closes perceptual doors as well.

I should note that I’m somewhat skeptical of this interpretation of modernity, which is part of why I’m also skeptical that true secularism is quite as strong a phenomenon as many observers seem to think. At the very least, to the question, “could Verhoeven have responded to his possibly-mystical experience differently than he did?”, I’m inclined to answer, “of course.”

But then again that statement is compatible with at least some version of Taylor’s thesis. Which is why the crucial question, for the future of belief and secularism alike, probably isn’t whether Taylor is right on some level, but just how right he is.