With the Baltimore riots the usual voices take their expected seats in the arena of public sphere. Why are there riots? Because the system has failed.

What must be done? Fix the system.

What must be done first? Stop the violence, return to order, conversation not violence.

I’m continuing to make my way through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and I must say that I can’t remember living with such a long but enlightening book.

Voices in the public arena will make their usual noises:

• This is the result of generational racism
• This is the result of the welfare state
• What is required are programs of assistance for the poor
• What is required is individuals taking responsibility for themselves and their families

And so it goes.

What isn’t in question is that “a system” will be the solution. What Taylor helps illuminate is that universal faith in “system” to provide sustenance, justice, meaning, opportunity, etc. so that the people of Baltimore can become all that they can be, Harvard grads, dot.com millionaires, YouTube sensations, Hollywood stars, community leaders, every one. And we think God and heaven are difficult to believe in based on contradictory evidence?

Even those who are asking God for a fix are asking that God fix “the system”. Where Taylor is helpful is showing us that this is a relatively new thing, a think that developed over the last 500 years and is so strongly believed that we can’t imagine thinking any other way. Sure, God is no longer axiomatic, but look at all that IS axiomatic.

Even those who wish to topple the system wish not to abolish system but rather to replace it with a new system that will bring justice, or will elevate those they deem as being worthy or at least those who have never had a turn.

The modern understanding of the order of mutual benefit central to the exclusive humanisms which arise out of the Enlightenment has indeed, such a component. The difference is that it is now intra-human. human. This order is appropriate and realizable by us, precisely because we are, under certain circumstances, capable of universal benevolence and justice. On the more radically materialist variants, this order may find no more succour in nature, now “red in tooth and claw”. We may see the human family surrounded by an indifferent, different, even hostile universe. We may even come to see what terrible, destructive desires human beings are capable of. But through all this, the idea can remain that certain conditions of training, discipline, “civilization”, or affirming, non-punitive upbringing will release the motivations of detached benevolence, or awe for the moral law, or universal sympathy, on which this order can be built.

Charles Taylor. A Secular Age (p. 256). Kindle Edition.

In order we trust.