The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (45 page)

Saint-Exupéry, like Kojève and Koyré before him in the 1930s, was much influenced by the advances in physical science between the wars. “Anyone who proposes to comprehend life by trying to penetrate beyond what is immediately given, is in somewhat the predicament of the physicist who studies phenomena so minute that any attempt to observe them causes a change in their comportment. . . . No useful purpose is served by making of life an object of study, for there is nothing ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ it. . . . The attempt to ‘possess’ life in the capsule form of principles assimilable to the intelligence must therefore be as unsuccessful as that of the petit bourgeois to possess it in the form of the goods it offers. . . . Life is not a sphinx’s question with our salvation hanging in the balance. . . . Language does not resolve the ambiguity of life, it is part of it.” One of the characters in
Citadelle
is content that God should remain inaccessible, for otherwise “I have finished my becoming. . . . Men cease to become when they find a solution.”
17

We must somehow put back together the “broken world” into which we are born, always remembering that there are no “eternal principles” on which we can base our work. Throughout
Citadelle
there are references to the “cathedral,” the “Empire,” the “domain,” which, in addition to the sum of their parts, contain something that Saint-Exupéry calls “the divine knot” or “the meaning of things,” an intangible entity which transforms otherwise everyday things or words. He likens poetry, and the ordinary words of which it is composed, to a cathedral and the commonplace stones of which it is built. And he approaches poetry and cathedrals as the phenomenologists do, not as examples of some theory or other, but as events, the magnificent result of acts,
efforts
intended “to inspire and not to persuade.”

LIFE WITHOUT ALIBIS

As Walter Kaufmann has said, Sartre’s writings bear the stamp of his experience from the outset. He was very much affected by the events of the 1930s—the mass unemployment and the Depression, the rise of fascism
in Germany and Italy, the purges and terror in Stalin’s Russia—and in the Second World War as a soldier he fought against Hitler. He was captured, returned to Paris and became a member of the Resistance.

These events shaped his thinking, but he was criticized by several of his fellow countrymen who said that his philosophy was secondhand, a pale imitation of Martin Heidegger’s. Though it is true that Heidegger’s views preceded and overlapped with Sartre’s, it is also true that for many, Sartre was by far the clearer exponent of existentialism, not just in his essays but also in his novels and plays, which attracted a far greater audience than Heidegger’s dense—indeed, often impenetrable—prose. Far more than Heidegger, Sartre came up within the excellent tradition that recognizes certain writers as straddling philosophy and literature—Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau.
18

That clarity of Sartre’s began with his saying that a man is not a homosexual, or a waiter or a coward in the same way that he is six feet tall or blond. “The crux of the matter is suggested by such words as possibility, choice and decision. If I am six feet tall, that is that. It is a fact no less than that the table is, say, two feet high. Being a waiter or a coward, however, is different: it depends on ever new decisions.” In his essay “Portrait of the Anti-Semite,” he again shows that a man is not an anti-Semite in the way that he is blond: he chooses to be an anti-Semite “because he is afraid of freedom, openness and change and longs to be as solid as a thing. He wants an identity, he wants to be something in the manner in which a table is something, or a rock.”
19
This has strong echoes of Gide (see chapter 3).

Sartre’s choice of illustrative examples in his work is instructive, showing how the war affected his thinking: his choice of cowardice, for instance, or the example he gives in his lecture entitled “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” referred to earlier. Here, he considers the young Frenchman who, at a certain point in the war, cannot decide whether to stay at home in occupied France and become a collaborator, looking after his ailing mother who badly needs him, or leave for Britain and join the Free French, who will one day—he hopes, he assumes—help in the liberation of his country. The young man had sought Sartre’s advice, and although Sartre does not actually say what advice he gave, he rehearses the arguments for both sides
in such a way that we pretty much understand what it was.

In that lecture he begins with the main doctrine of existentialism, encapsulated in the phrase we have already met: “existence precedes essence.” For Sartre, at bottom there always remains “a possibility of choice,” and this is crucial. When we see a paper knife, he said, we know that it had a maker and that the artisan who made it had an idea of a paper knife before he set out to create it. “One cannot suppose that a man would create a paper knife without knowing what it was for.” On this basis, God—for believers—is a kind of “supern[atur]al artisan”; when God creates, “he knows precisely what he is creating.”
20
Even after the death of God, in the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, Sartre goes on, the notion of God is suppressed, but not that of “human nature”—human nature as something fixed, universal, found in every man. It was this conception of a fixed human nature, he says, agreeing here with the proto-existentialists, that led to fascism. Like Gide, like Malraux, like Saint-Exupéry, he rejected this idea.

If God does not exist, “it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end.” And there is one place, at least, where it leads: “It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plain where there are only men. . . . For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s actions by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism—man is free, man
is
freedom.”

In the case of the boy torn between staying with his mother and risking the tag of “collaborator,” and leaving for Britain to join the Free French, Sartre had two things to say. He allied with the pragmatists in arguing that the boy would not stay with his mother because of some “mother love” deep within him, but that he would show his “mother love” by staying: he had a choice, and by exercising that choice he
behaved
his values—“feeling is formed by the deeds that one does . . . I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to act . . . if you seek counsel—from a priest, for example—you have selected the priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise. . . . You are free, therefore choose—that is to say,
invent
. No rule of general morality can show you what you
ought to do [italics added].”
21
The young man’s values did not effectively exist until he acted.

But Sartre also said that, when we act, when we
choose
, we must do so knowing that we are, and are not, alone. “In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be. . . . Man is nothing else than what he purposes, he exists only insofar as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions . . . there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions. . . . But for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art . . . reality alone is reliable . . . the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.” There
is
a human universality, he goes on, “but it is not something given; it is being perpetually made”; and that is because we are all aware of purposes, that other people exist who may have identical, similar, or quite different purposes, and we are aware of them. Sartre called this “intersubjectivity,” and it affects our moral choices. These moral choices are comparable to the construction of works of art, in that works of art are the product of actions, and when we construct a work of art no one questions why we produced
this
work and not another. This is why existentialism is a humanism, he says: it allows that freedom is to be willed
in community
, it is to be achieved, acted upon. If my purposes are to be absolutely free, if my decisions, my choices, are to be absolutely my own, then it follows that everyone else must be free. Otherwise, freedom is a contradiction in terms.

Therefore—and this goes back to the young man in occupied France—the decisions we take, while not forced in any way, must be made in the awareness of how society, community, would be if everyone made that same decision. If the young man
acted
his love for his mother, as he is free to do—if he chose to—what would be the consequences of that action if universally applied? Are we free to make these choices? Yes, but there will be consequences that we cannot necessarily foresee.

Many people, then and now, have regarded existentialism as a tragic and pessimistic doctrine. The first charge is true, but not the second.
“Life,” Sartre liked to say, “begins on the far side of despair. . . . Work out your own salvation with diligence,” “diligence” being the crucial word. Life is serious and our decisions matter, not always immediately, but eventually. “All man’s alibis are unacceptable; no gods are responsible for his condition; no original sin; no heredity and no environment; no race, no caste, no father, and no mother; no wrong-headed education, no governess, no teachers; not even an impulse or a disposition, a complex or a childhood trauma. Man is free; but his freedom does not look like the glorious liberty of the Enlightenment; it is no longer the gift of God. Once again, man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.”
22

Absurd and tragic as man’s situation is, that does not rule out integrity, nobility, valor or effort. These are the ways of
defying
the world, of being in it and knowing and relishing that we are in it. There are no alibis.

SCORN, AND THE BREATHING SPACES IN LIFE

The last word in this chapter returns us to Albert Camus, who in his book of reflections
The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942) considers the figure who Homer thought was the wisest and most prudent of mortals but who to others was no more than a highwayman and who, by various misfortunes, was condemned in perpetuity to push a huge stone to the top of a slope, at which point the stone rolled back down to the bottom, where Sisyphus had to start all over again.

This is in itself a pretty obvious metaphor for the ordeals of life, but what interested Camus were the brief interludes when Sisyphus was free of his burden and what he thought about during the stone’s descent; how his life—the decisions he had made—had brought him to this point. Camus saw that the answer was scorn. That however bleak the fate, however eternal the burden, however dreadful the ordeal, there will always be breathing spaces; and that is what happiness is, this is what freedom is—essentially, a series of decisions and acts that lead to consequences. Not all the consequences will be good or fulfilling but we must scorn those that are not and dwell on those that are, creating for ourselves brief moments of respite.

Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the warmth of acts.

19

War, the American Way and the Decline of Original Sin

T
he wartime successes that had produced the atomic bomb, radar and penicillin promised much for peacetime, and engendered a sense of optimism that the applications of science would make possible improvements across a wide range of activities. The prestige of science rubbed off on the social sciences, psychology in particular, and on expertise generally, but change was happening anyway. It was Alan Petigny who identified the “permissive turn” in American society in the 1940s, which was essentially a challenge to traditional and religious views of the way life should be ordered.

Although we shall be making the case for a “psychological turn” in America especially, in the wake of the war, it would be wrong to ignore earlier moves in that direction. Tufts Medical School had established the first American course on psychotherapy as early as 1909, the year that saw the foundation of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. In 1908, the Episcopalian Emmanuel Movement, based on the Emmanuel Church in Boston, had founded a journal,
Psychotherapy
, which carried articles by theologians, neuroscientists, Freudians and philosophers. Some people were already talking of “self-realization” rather than “self-mastery.” In 1924,
Atlantic Monthly
identified what it called “a psychological revival,” listing a raft of books on psychology and sex life, psychology and business efficiency, psychology and the Christian religion, psychology and parenthood, psychology and preaching, even psychology and insurance and psychology and golf.
1

The sociological study reported in
Middletown
(mentioned earlier) found, among many other things, that the residents of the town took out twenty-six times as many books on psychology and philosophy in 1923 as they had done twenty years earlier, while at much the same time at Riverside Church in New York, Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote that counseling, not preaching, was his main interest; and his favorite sermon subjects were “the mastery of depression, the conquest of fear, the overcoming of anxiety, and the joys of self-realization.” The goal of pastoral care was changing, he said, from “adjustment” to “self-realization,” and “a new era in the history of the care of souls” had arrived.

A further change occurred in 1939, when Rollo May published
The Art of Counseling
, grounded not in the usual American traditions but in the work of European analysts—Freud, Jung, Rank and Adler. May was a young pastor who had studied at both Adler’s Vienna clinic and New York’s Union Theological Seminary. He believed that men and women were “finite, imperfect and limited,” that counseling was as much a moral as a psychological encounter, and that counseling that did not take account of “subconscious impulses” was “superficial.”
2

SELF-UNDERSTANDING, NOT SELF-CONDEMNATION

Joshua Loth Liebman may not be remembered today as much as other contemporary writers (he died young, in 1948), but in his day he was every bit as widely read. His
Peace of Mind
, published in 1946, was top of the
New York Times
best-seller list for fifty-eight consecutive weeks, a record until it was overtaken by Norman Vincent Peale’s
Power of Positive Thinking
(see p. 360). Liebman, a Boston-based rabbi, began by drawing attention to the shortcomings of both religion and psychology. Many religious books, he wrote, succeeded only in making people feel more guilty and sinful, while many psychology books, although seeking to reassure, in fact made people feel abnormal, regarding themselves as “case histories.” His aim in
Peace of Mind
, he said, was to explain what modern psychology had discovered about human nature, over and above what religion said, including why people lose their faith.

Everyone wanted salvation, he argued, but it was no easy matter to “look within.” Traditionally, religion had had a monopoly on the ways of doing this but, in the half century until the Second World War “and rapidly within the last decade, there has been developed a new method of gaining insight into the deepest emotional and psychologic disturbances that threaten man’s peace of mind.” The Freudian technique, he said, was so shocking, so unflattering, that many people were frightened of using it. Like other sciences, psychology had no moral goal, it was not a philosophy of life; and therefore, as he put it, it was only a key to the temple, not the temple itself. It must be supplemented by religion.
3

But religion was wanting too, he admitted, and that was because religion was pre-scientific, and in particular was formulated before the psychological revolution. He agreed that many people thought religion had shrunk in the wake of the scientific onslaught, and that they worried it might shrink further after the psychological revolution. But, he pointed out, “wiser religious leaders today are coming to see the fallacy of identifying truth with the frozen concepts of the past. . . . Religion must not hesitate to use the microscope of psychology, with its depth analysis of the human mind.” He did not think there was the gulf between psychology and religion that some claimed, because Freud really had a spiritual purpose, “even though he may not have been aware of it.” In fact, in psychotherapy man and God become one, and for that reason there was “no danger” that psychiatry could ever displace religion, just as it was no longer possible for religion “to sweep back the rising tide of psychological knowledge.”
4

Religion, he said, for all its wonderful achievements, has been responsible “for many morbid consciences, infinite confusions, and painful distortions in the psychic life of people.” Religion—not God—was to blame for this: the likes of Paul, Augustine, Calvin and Luther had all been obsessed with the notion of wickedness. (It is worth remembering that this is a Jewish author writing of Christianity.) He drew attention to the fact that the overall strategy employed by the church to cope with wickedness has been repression. With few exceptions, Western religions have insisted that people can be good only through the stern repression of sensual thoughts and impulses; and, most important, he concluded, that strategy has not worked. “Religion too frequently has encouraged men to make a complete
detour of their un-angelic nature.” Psychotherapy, on the other hand, “has been able to evolve a reassuring approach to the problem of evil.”

As many others had done before him, Liebman compared psychoanalysis with the confessional, but he made the important distinction that whereas atonement is the aim of the confessional, psychotherapy does not require someone to feel sorry for their “sins” as they
outgrow
them. Liebman acknowledged that there is little growth available via the ecclesiastical route of confession, reproof and penance. Indeed, he went so far as to say that “the confessional only touches the surface of a man’s life,” the spiritual advice of the church throwing no light on the
causes
that lead someone to the confessional in the first place. Moreover, priestly strictures about people needing to show more “willpower” were ineffective.
5

Psychotherapy, on the other hand, is designed to help the individual work on his or her own problems without “borrowing” the conscience of a priest or pastor, and “it offers change through self-understanding, not self-condemnation.” And this, said Liebman, was the way to inner peace. The human self, he maintained, was not a gift from God but
an achievement
, and this was how we should regard it. The religion of the future must take a leaf out of the psychiatrist’s notebook. Emerson had it right when he wrote that there is “a crack in everything God has made,” and this changes things, even the Commandments. In the style of the book of Exodus, he told his readers: “Thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses.” And henceforth it is not “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” but “Thou shalt love thyself properly and then thou wilt be able to love thy neighbor.” We must accept our imperfections, we must learn to accept the pluralism in ourselves, as well as the notion that failure is as much one of “the great human experiences” as is success—all of which we encounter in the heroic battle for self-discovery.

“The primary joy of life is acceptance, approval, the sense of appreciation and companionship of our human comrades. Many men do not understand that the need for fellowship is really as deep as the need for food.”

Liebman thought that atheism had psychological causes, too, that it stemmed from a “distrust” of the universe brought about by early childhood events, when parents let their children down “catastrophically.” He
maintained that the emotions generated by these experiences are more powerful than any rational arguments, leaving the victims unable and/or unwilling to believe in man or God. “The
inconsistent
home breeds a spiritual schizophrenia; parents are warm in their actions but embrace a God that is stern and avenging.”
6

A “SHRUNKEN” GOD

Furthermore, we have to realize, said Liebman—and this was new for many of his readers—that God is not omnipotent but
limited
(in other words, religion
has
shrunk in some way); and this implies that we have to be
partners
with God, co-workers, aided by the truths that psychiatry adds to religion. He accepted that religion could be “a kind of poison,” stressing man’s evil proclivities, and so it had become essential that theology “don the more tolerant robes of psychiatric wisdom if it is to be a true ministry to our civilization and its discontents.” Religion, he insisted, must be brave enough to admit its errors and, guided by psychology, “must now recognize how profoundly it has gone astray in its attitude toward emotion.” Dynamic psychotherapy in a religious context “can make life whole again. . . . We now know enough to liberate man.”

Liebman’s close comparison of religion with psychotherapy—his admission that in many respects they perform the same function, fill the same gap—said plainly what many individuals were already concluding for themselves. The book was a holding action for religious souls but its arguments that religion could be improved by psychotherapy only underlined, for those who had left the church, or who were considering doing so, that a modern technology was available in place of an outmoded and in some cases unnecessarily cruel tradition in which, as Alan Petigny has put it, “religion as a relationship to the supernatural was replaced by religion as therapy.” (Liebman himself held to his faith; when he died tragically young in 1948, Boston’s schools closed early as a sign of respect.)

Liebman had tackled the parallels between religion and psychology head-on. Others had as big an effect but in an indirect or unexpected way. They were part of the context rather than the narrow focus, but nonethe
less exerted a profound influence. One crucial figure here, who helped to spawn the “permissive turn,” was Dr. Benjamin Spock, who became interested in methods of child-rearing and in Freud at much the same time. As with the very different attitudes to art at the turn of the twentieth century, so child-rearing practices then were very different from now, and that difference is largely due to Dr. Spock.

Until the early 1940s many parents—especially first-time parents—sought advice on child-rearing from the Bible or their local preacher, many of whom, it has to be said, regarded children “as the tainted product of original sin.” Indeed, the grandfather of Spock’s own wife had written a book about child-rearing called
Christian Nurture
, published in 1847. Others had thought that children’s characters were the product of heredity and evolution as much as anything else, and therefore not readily susceptible to alteration or modification. Such practices as tying children’s wrists in such a way as to prevent them sucking their thumbs were widespread.

Spock trained as a pediatrician, and was drawn to psychoanalysis partly by nature but also because his wife, Jane, had undergone it (she was later admitted to an asylum, suffering from alcohol dependence, among other things). Psychoanalysis was still on the fringes of American medicine when Spock signed up for twice-weekly seminars at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and entered analysis himself. In analysis, and in the seminars, he was introduced to what he felt were the “deep” reasons behind such processes as breast-feeding, weaning and toilet training. Gradually he came to the view that there were no bad children, as the advocates of original sin said, but only badly handled children. He discovered the work of Erik Erikson and Margaret Mead, who showed how children were raised differently in other cultures, some less strictly, more relaxedly, than in America. This triggered in Spock a search for a practical way to adapt Freud’s ideas to child-rearing—at that time, Freud himself was not popular, in particular his notion of childhood sexuality. Spock first applied Freudian concepts in 1938.
7

The invitation to write a child-care book came from the publisher Doubleday, with the rather odd stipulation that it should cover the psychological development of the child but that that section “does not need to be very good.” What Spock brought to the book was a thoroughgoing common
sense. Children shouldn’t be intimidating, he said; unlike in the Calvinist view, children are good at heart, not little villains; parents should trust themselves; they should calm their fears about budding childhood sexuality in the context of the oedipal situation. Spock had a sense of humor and a practical streak. Parents need not have an answer for everything; they should not spend their time telling their child “thou shalt not,” but aim to produce “a democratic person at home with him- or herself.” They should be flexible.

One of the reasons for the phenomenal success of Spock’s book was that it gave many parents who had themselves had a strict or unhappy upbringing the chance to do better by their own children, to break with their own past and be more loving than their own parents had been. And America embraced Spock. America loved his new rules, about discipline, self-demand feeding, about cuddling being more important than cleanliness, about avoiding spanking and other physical punishment (but not feeling guilty about it, either, when they felt it was necessary).