The Fourth Secularisation

Autonomy of Individual Lifestyles

Luigi Berzano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000022476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines recent forms of secularisation to demonstrate that we are now witnessing a "fourth secularisation": the autonomy of lifestyles. After introducing two initial secularising movements, from mythos to Logos and from Logos to Christianity, the book sets out how from Max Weber onwards a third movement emerged that practised the autonomy of science. More recently, daily life radicalises Weber's secularisation and its scope has spread out to include autonomy of individual practices, which has given rise to this fourth iteration.

The book outlines these first three forms of secularisation and then analyses the fourth secularisation in depth, identifying its three main dimensions: the de-institutionalisation of the religious lifestyle; the individualisation of faith; and the development of new social forms in the religious field. These areas of religious practice are shown to be multiplying partly as a result of the general aestheticization of society. Individuals, therefore, aspire to personal styles of life with regard to beliefs and the choice of their own religious practices.

This book will be of great use to scholars of religious studies, secularisation and the sociology of religion.

1
From a single style to multiple styles

Lifestyles have by now entered the language and interpretative models of social sciences, especially when researching the condition of youth and consumption. The apparently clear concept is in fact multidisciplinary, used by economics, sociology, psychology and anthropology. When it is applied to the analysis of individual or collective behaviour, it includes various fields related to projects, aspirations, consumption, behaviour and identity-building. The concept of lifestyles is particularly useful here in understanding religious-type forms of participation, belief and identity-building. The interest is in seeing whether such forms may indicate spiritual experiences and feelings, transform everyday (profane) time into festive (sacred) time, slow down the erosion of institutional bonds with historical religions and/or counteract the process of dissipation of religious systems into simple systems with secular meanings.

Georg Simmel (Simmel, 1890, 1896–7, 1900, 1908) is the scholar who has made the greatest contribution to the construction of a science of lifestyles. He it was who elaborated on the relationship between extension of social circles and the development of styles and identities; and who pointed out that styles of life have the double function of forming and characterizing a group, cementing its unitarity ab intra and differentiating it ad extra from other social groups.

It is the function of levelling and typifying, as well as individualising, so that the more differentiated the structure becomes the more the formal psychic qualities of the individuals who grow within it stand out. Norbert Elias makes the same point: “Individuality and social conditioning are not two different functions of men in their specific relationship. They express the individual’s specific activity in relations with others.… In short, they express the function of coin and the function of currency” (Elias, 1990: 75–76 [our translation]).

From this Simmel concludes that whereas traditional society was characterized by a (single) style of life, modern society is characterized by (plural) styles of life. Many allude to this conclusion of Simmel’s when, speaking of the present, they say, “No rules, only choices”. This is the particular condition of the contemporary individual with unlimited power of access to styles among which s/he may choose according to one’s tastes. In Simmel’s view, the formation of a market of styles available to the individual – and the consequent decline of the style at the market level – is compensated for by the stylisation of the interiority with which individuals endeavour to express their subjectivity (Frisby, 1985: 65 ff.). Simmel believes the emblematic figure of this context is the metropolitan individual who, in addition to the fragmentation of lifestyles, experiences the disorienting overexcitement of fashions and consumption.

Definition of lifestyles

The definition offered here is based on the affirmation that contemporary societies are characterized by classes and groups with no fixed status, where the links between style of life and economic position are loosening and where lifestyles are increasingly founded upon personal choices.

In the setting-up of lifestyles – including religious lifestyles, as we shall see – we can observe various factors deriving from both the choices of each individual and the context in which s/he lives (the typology presented in Giddens, 1991). First, in advanced modernity the individual has to choose among multiple options; sometimes, when traditional options have disappeared, the individual must invent her/his own. Second, in an environment of greater uncertainty lifestyles multiply. The methodical doubt of contemporary societies assigns conditional trust to everybody, whether individuals or institutions, “until further notice”. Abstract systems such as money, which penetrate daily life so deeply, normally offer multiple possibilities rather than pre-determined guidelines or precise recipes for action. Third, today’s individual lives in a context of “pluralisation of the worlds of life”, multiple segmented, differentiated environments. Lifestyles are expressions, and sometimes consequences, of the several settings or places where the individual lives.¹ Mass media also influence the plurality of choice and lifestyles. Electronic media in particular alter the “situational geography” of social life, continually producing new common elements and new differences. Lastly, attention paid to “tailoring” a lifestyle, involving all ages and environments (including the religious), implies the positive dimension of effort, risk and personal participation while it presents the critical dimension of assembly. There are biographical phases, such as adolescence and early adulthood, when the choice of a distinctive lifestyle enables one to indicate one’s IN group as opposed to groups which are OUT. And the interpretation of lifestyles as rites of passage is confirmed by the example of women who, as soon as they find out that they are pregnant, adopt a style of life – clothes, diet, time management, attitudes – suited to their new condition.

As a result, the possibilities of using lifestyles as indicators of social classes and stratification, or of consumption, are limited in the present context where lifestyles are communicative and identity expressions ascribable to the individual’s cultural and axiological system (Bourdieu, 1979, 1980, 1987, 2004; Bourdieu, Passeron, 1970). We therefore define a lifestyle as a social form including “a set of practices, with unitary and relational meaning, which is a distinctive model shared within a collectivity, without having either a pre-existent cognitive-axiological system or a pre-determined socio-structural condition as generative elements, even though it may be influenced by them” (Berzano and Genova, 2015: 177).

Let us now examine the elements of the definition individually (Berzano and Genova, 2015, Chapter 9). A lifestyle is a “social form” in Simmel’s sense, a “form of association”, a “formal mode of reciprocal attitude among individuals”, a model type of reciprocal action, “forms characterizing groups of people united to live side-by-side, either one for the others or one with the others” (Simmel, 1896–97: 72. See also pp. 71–109).

We can therefore talk about a lifestyle as a configuration of reciprocal actions shared by a number of individuals – in the single clusters of shared individual practices which may be observed.

A social form does not perforce mean processes of direct interaction among people co-present in space and time. Even in the few cases where an individual carries out practices autonomously, it is still possible to talk about a lifestyle.

“Practice” means “a social activity considered in the way it is habitually carried out by an individual or a group” (Ansart, 1999: 416). Habitually is the operative word, distinguishing “practice” from Weber’s “social action” (1922, Vol I: 4).

Practices suggest actions characterized by repetitiveness of varying frequency. Even when they do not derive from an explicit reflective process, they depend on individual choice and are therefore endowed with meaning for the actor. The concept is thus different from the traditional all-inclusive practice/theory opposition. Jedlowski (2003: 178) claims that “practice” is used vaguely, but the term suggests (in contrast with “action”) the ideas of routine, habit (habitus), even tradition (cf. Bourdieu).

Parallel values, attitudes and sensibilities within a lifestyle may help in its interpretation. They are auxiliary elements, neither necessary nor sufficient unto themselves: a lifestyle may be unconnected with these three specific components; but if they are present while a framework of practices is absent, it is not a lifestyle.

The distinction between “sense” (the individual’s interpretation of the set of practices making up the lifestyle as a whole) and “meaning” (the individual’s interpretation of each lifestyle component) is precisely observed in this model.

The central point of interpretation-understanding is the intersection between the processes of comprehension (analysis of meaning, “direct observational understanding”, identification of the what) and explanation (analysis of sense, “explanatory understanding”, identification of the why). But whereas the comprehension process is essentially relevant to a simple sign-meaning connection, the explanation process complicates the analysis of the connection by inserting it into the framework of a broader interpretative context (i.e. a sense), thereby enriching meaning, its clarification and extension, by an action of contextualisation.

Lifestyle-analysis will therefore reconstruct the meaning attributed to individual practices, attempting to answer this question: “What does that practice mean to the actor?” It will also reconstruct the sense attributed to the complete set of practices: “Why are those practices adopted as a whole?” The meaning of each practice is influenced by every other relevant practice: a lifestyle’s sense is unitary in that it is a form of organic action where single practices acquire meaning because they are interpreted in reciprocal interaction. The multiple practices may be read through the same interpretative model insofar as each practice is in reciprocal relations with the others: it can acquire full meaning only within this framework. The meaning is relational because it can only be reconstructed on the basis of the semantic insertion of a single practice among the others and their relationship with it; the consequent reconstruction of the meaning of each one will be possible only through the reconstruction of the overall framework of practices and its sense.

The profile of shared practices is not always identical for individuals referring to a lifestyle: it is a model, perhaps an “ideal type”, based on a selection among shared practices and interpretative models, re-unified and intensified (Weber, 2011: 89 ff.) An individual may adopt only some of the lifestyle’s practices, for which very reason s/he will (reciprocally) perceive his/her relationship with a model to which others are related.

Hypothetically there may be no “core” of practices shared by all those referring to a lifestyle: sharing is partial and different for each pair or subset of individuals. Mathematically, rather than being a list of circle-sets with a common superimposition area, a lifestyle may be seen as the intersection of circle-sets with (at least in pairs) some common area but without transver-sally shared areas.

Here the concept of generative element refers to those factors and processes which may constitute necessary and sufficient, logical and temporal, antecedents to the development of an individual’s practices. However, when one speaks of a lifestyle, neither the cognitive-axiological framework nor the socio-structural conditions may be considered as the lifestyle’s generative factors.

This does not mean that values and representations, or resources, bonds and socialisation processes, cannot influence an individual’s lifestyle involvement: all these factors are relevant to the correct interpretation of that influence. For a framework of practices to be a lifestyle their adoption must not be generated by the effects exercised upon the individual’s action by these factors.

What factors and contexts have favoured the multiplication of styles? We shall indicate five of the principal ones: the aestheticization of society; cities and metropolises; reference groups; “loisirs”; and consumption.

The aestheticization of society

Contemporary society, sometimes known as the aesthetic society, has discovered the fascination of lifestyles. Each individual is seeking her/his own style which will represent him/her, differentiate her/him from others and at the same time identify him/her as belonging to a particular group and environment. This growing attention to the stylisation of life forms part of the more general aestheticization of society. Even daily life shows signs of it, with a sharply rising number of people working professionally in fashion, entertainment, art and culture – which have become mass rather than elite sectors. In these contexts a lifestyle acquires the fascination of self-expression, of one’s individuality and the desire to emerge from the “grey conformism” of the mass. Design confers an aesthetic aura to even the most everyday objects, making them cult objects and enriching them with the function sign of belonging, of privilege, of allusion and of winking (Baudrillard, 1968). Thus homo aestheticus also appears in the world of every day, in the environments of consumption, work, free time, loisir and religious behaviour itself. In tandem lifestyles multiply to the extent that one may conclude, as mentioned above, that whereas traditional society had a style, modern society has styles of life. In this passage we observe progressive weakening of processes of “vertical” reproduction of the traditional style of life over successive generations.

Every object becomes an ikon-object recounting our relationship with the world, especially with the group to which we belong, acquiring a sacred function. Once again we can see here aesthetics on the wave of “reasons of the heart” and enthusiasm as sources of emotions and passions. It is a cultural climate which, because of its aesthetic dimension, goes beyond generalised rationalisation of existence. The religious field, too, is involved. Practices and liturgical systems are semanticized, becoming a reserve of symbolic meanings, transferring their original meanings to other communications of symbolic meanings and references very different from religious belonging by birth and social standing. Part of liturgical systems has been transformed into a vast system of signification and lifestyles from which everyone can draw a particular, personalised lifestyle.

A lifestyle is derived from the more general aestheticization of society through fashion, consumption, advertising, and seeking after trendy experiences and tendencies. We find again today what Simmel pointed out in his analyses of fashion at the beginning of the twentieth century. The growth of fascination with styles and trends is accompanied by an analogous increase of interest in the aestheticization of reality and in nee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From a single style to multiple styles
• 2 Spiritual revolution: Multiplication of forms
• 3 The fourth secularisation
• 4 Sense of religion in the secular age
• Index