Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

by Alan Jacobs

Taylor writes this in the context of talking about what it’s like to live in a “disenchanted world,” a world governed not by spirits and demons but by the immutable laws of nature. On some level we know “that it was a struggle and an achievement to get to where we are; and that in some respects this achievement is fragile.” Moreover, We know this because each one of us as we grew up has had to take on the disciplines of disenchantment, and we regularly reproach each other for our failings in this regard, and accuse each other of “magical” thinking, of indulging in “myth,” of giving way to “fantasy”; we say that X isn’t living in our century, that Y has a “mediaeval” mind, while Z, whom we admire, is way ahead of her time. If Taylor is right, then we have an incentive to avoid looking at the past, or to look at it only with condescension. We believe in progress, we believe that history really does have an arc and that it bends toward justice. It’s a very comforting thing to believe, and we don’t want to look into the past only to discover that we have lost sight of vital truths and wise practices. Christopher Hitchens, in describing what he believes to be the baleful history of what he calls “religion,” celebrates the power to “escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection.”