Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (6 page)

4.
Medieval Christianity certainly understood this dichotomy. For most of the year, it preached solemnity, order, restraint, fellowship, earnestness, a love of God and sexual decorum, and then on New Year's Eve it opened the locks on the collective psyche and unleashed the
festum fatuorum
, the
Feast of Fools. For four days, the world was turned on its head: members of the clergy would play dice on top of the altar, bray like donkeys instead of saying ‘Amen', engage in drinking competitions in the nave, fart in accompaniment to the Ave Maria and deliver spoof sermons based on parodies of the gospels (the Gospel according to the Chicken's Arse, the Gospel according to Luke's Toenail). After drinking tankards of ale, they would hold their holy books upside down, address prayers to vegetables and urinate out of bell towers. They ‘married' donkeys, tied giant woollen penises to their tunics and endeavoured to have sex with anyone of either gender who would have them.

But none of this was considered just a joke. It was sacred, a
parodia sacra
, designed to ensure that all the rest of the year things would remain the right way up. In 1445, the Paris Faculty of Theology explained to the bishops of France that the Feast of Fools was a necessary event in the Christian calendar, ‘in order that foolishness, which is our second nature and is inherent in man, can freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, and this is why we permit folly on certain days: so that we may in the end return with greater zeal to the service of God.'

The moral we should draw is that if we want well-functioning communities, we cannot be naive about our nature. We must fully accept the depths of our destructive, antisocial feelings. We shouldn't banish feasting and debauchery to the margins, to be mopped up by the police and frowned upon by commentators. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted
from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful. We should be allowed to talk gibberish, fasten woollen penises to our coats and set out into the night to party and copulate randomly and joyfully with strangers, and then return the next morning to our partners, who will themselves have been off doing something similar, both sides knowing that it was nothing personal, that it was the Feast of Fools that made them do it.

5.
We learn from religion not only about the charms of community. We learn also that a good community accepts just how much there is in us that doesn't really want community – or at least can't tolerate it in its ordered forms all the time. If we have our feasts of love, we must also have our feasts of fools.

i.
Libertarianism and Paternalism

1.
Once we are grown up, we are seldom encouraged officially to be nice to one another. A key assumption of modern Western political thinking is that we should be left alone to live as we like without being nagged, without fear of moral judgement and without being subject to the whims of authority.
Freedom has become our supreme political virtue. It is not thought to be the state's task to promote a vision of how we should act towards one another or to send us to hear lectures about chivalry and politeness. Modern politics, on both left and right, is dominated by what we can call a libertarian ideology.

In his
On Liberty
of 1859,
John Stuart Mill, one of the earliest and most articulate advocates of this hands-off approach, explained: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.'

In this scheme, the state should harbour no aspirations to tinker with the inner well-being or outward manners of its members. The foibles of citizens are placed beyond comment or criticism – for fear of turning government into that most reviled and unpalatable kind of authority in libertarian eyes, the nanny state.

2.
Religions, on the other hand, have always had far more directive ambitions, advancing far-reaching ideas about how members of a community should behave towards one another.

Consider Judaism, for example. Certain passages in the Jewish legal code, the
Mishnah, have close parallels in modern
law. There are familiar-sounding statutes about not stealing, breaking contracts or exacting disproportionate revenge on enemies during war.

However, a great many other decrees extend their reach dramatically far beyond what a libertarian political ideology would judge to be appropriate bounds. The code is obsessed with the details of how we should behave with our families, our colleagues, strangers and even animals. It dictates that we must never sit down to eat a meal before we have fed our goats and our camels, that we should ask our parents for permission when agreeing to go on a journey of more than one night's duration, that we should invite any widows in our communities for dinner every spring-time and that we should beat our olive trees only once during the harvest so as to leave any remaining fruit to the fatherless and to the poor. Such recommendations are capped by injunctions on how often to have sex, with men told of their duty before God to make love to their wives regularly, according to a timetable that aligns frequency with the scale of their professional commitments: ‘For men of independent means, every day. For labourers, twice a week. For donkey drivers, once a week. For camel drivers, once in thirty days. For sailors, once every six months' (Mishnah, Ketubot, 5:6).

3.
Libertarian theorists would concede that it is no doubt admirable to try to satisfy a spouse's sexual needs, to be generous with olives and to keep one's elders abreast of one's travel plans. However, they would also condemn as peculiar and plain sinister any paternalistic attempt to convert these aspirations into statutes. When to feed the dog and ask widows over for supper are, according to a libertarian worldview, questions for the conscience of the individual rather than the judgement of the community.

In secular society, by the libertarian's reckoning, a firm line should divide conduct that is subject to law from conduct that is subject to personal morality. It should fall to parliaments, police forces, courts and prisons to prevent harm to a citizen's life or property – but more ambiguous varieties of mischief should remain within the exclusive province of conscience. Thus the stealing of an ox is a matter to be investigated by a police officer, whereas the oppression of someone's spirit through two decades of indifference in the bedroom is not.

This reluctance to get involved in private matters is rooted less in indifference than in scepticism, and more specifically in a pervasive doubt that anyone could ever be in a position to know exactly what virtue is, let alone how it might be safely and judiciously instilled in others. Aware of the inherent complexity of ethical choices, libertarians cannot fail to notice how few issues fall cleanly into unassailable categories of right and wrong. What may seem like obvious truths to one party can be seen by another as culturally biased prejudices. Looking back upon centuries of religious self-assurance, libertarians stand transfixed by the dangers
of conviction. An abhorrence of crude moralism has banished talk of morality from the public sphere. The impulse to question the behaviour of others trembles before the likely answer: who are you to tell me what to do?

4.
However, there is one arena in which we spontaneously favour moralistic intervention over neutrality, an arena which for many of us dominates our practical lives and dwarfs all other concerns in terms of its value: the business of raising our children.

To be a parent is inevitably to mediate forcefully in the lives of one's offspring in the hope that they will some day grow up to be not only law-abiding but also
nice
– that is, thoughtful with their partners, generous-spirited towards the fatherless, self-conscious about their motives and uninclined to wallow in sloth or self-pity. In their length and intensity, parents' admonishments rival those laid out in the Jewish
Mishnah.

Faced with the same two questions which so trouble libertarian theorists in the political sphere – ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?' and ‘How do you know what is right?' – parents have little difficulty in arriving at workable answers. Even as they frustrate their children's immediate wishes (often to the sound of ear-splitting screams), they tend to feel sure that they are guiding them to act in accordance with norms which they would willingly respect if only they were capable of fully developed reason and self-control.

The fact that such parents favour
paternalism in their own homes does not mean that they have cast all their ethical doubts aside. They would argue that it is eminently reasonable to be
unsure about certain large issues – whether foetuses should ever be aborted beyond twenty-four weeks, for example – while remaining supremely confident about many smaller ones, such as whether it is right to hit one's younger brother in the face or to squirt apple juice across the bedroom ceiling.

To lend concrete form to their pronouncements, parents are often moved to draw up star charts, complex domestic political settlements (usually to be found fastened to the sides of fridges or the doors of larders) which set forth in exhaustive detail the specific behaviours they expect from, and will reward in, their children.

Noting the considerable behavioural improvements these charts tend to produce (along with the paradoxical satisfaction that children appear to derive from having their more disorderly impulses monitored and curtailed), libertarian adults may be tempted to suggest, with a modest laugh at such a palpably absurd idea, that they themselves might benefit from having a star chart pinned to the wall to keep track of their own eccentricities.

5.
If the idea of an adult star chart seems odd but not wholly without merit, it is because we are aware, in our more mature moments, of the scale of our imperfections and the depths of our childishness. There is so much that we would like to do but never end up doing and so many ways of behaving that we subscribe to in our hearts but ignore in our day-to-day lives. However, in a world obsessed with
freedom, there are few voices left that ever dare to exhort us to act well.