The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (53 page)

NEGATIVE EXUBERANCE: THE INTENSITY OF THE INVERTED LIFE

Philip Roth’s novels are in almost every way as bleak as Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays. They pick at the sores of life, especially as those sores concern American Jews living in the shadow of the Holocaust. First and foremost, however, Roth’s work is about intensity, intensity as the only form of meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.

Roth, Jewish himself, argues that Jews in America have the best and the worst of worlds. In
The Ghost Writer
, he castigates his fellow Jews who have embraced the Holocaust as an aspect of their identity, when in reality many of them have led comfortable lives in leafy suburbs well away from the horrors of that episode. As may be imagined, it was not a popular message. Closer to our theme, in such books as
Goodbye, Columbus
and
The Plot Against America
he shows how assimilation of the Jews in those same leafy suburbs has entailed the abandonment of large parts of their religious identity. Assimilated Jews don’t give up a belief in their God entirely, perhaps, but they give up much of the ritual life entailed in being the observant faithful—and that poses risks.

In identifying American Jews as what the sociologists call “marginal” figures in a modern democratic society, Roth spotlights assimilation not as a form of spiritual death, exactly, but as a diminution of identity. Thus, in most of his books the only pleasure in life lies in the realm of sin, and in a secular democracy the only way to be sinful is to go against the majority in the matter of agreed manners, and give offense—what the critic Harold Bloom called “negative exuberance.” Like Beckett, Roth thinks one should
continually approach life in attack mode.

In
Sabbath’s Theater
, for example, the main character, Morris “Mickey” Sabbath, is, as one critic put it, “a walking insult.”
28
“Despite all my troubles,” he says, “I continue to know what matters in life. . . . All I know how to do is antagonize.” And he lives for sex. “You must devote yourself to fucking the way a monk devotes himself to God. Most men have to fit fucking in around the edge of what they define as more pressing concerns. . . . But Sabbath had simplified his life and fit the other concerns in around fucking.” Sabbath delights in
inverting
life. Sex, for him, is innocent of higher meaning. This is so because “anyone with any brain understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life
because there is no other kind
. . . . A world without adultery is unthinkable.”

Sabbath is minimalist enough not to expect any great lucidity from his behavior, nor a return to “the warm nervous conspiracy of family life.” He is defined by what he has been but no longer is—an ex-son, ex-husband, ex–puppet artist—and the only way he knows how to be alive is “to affront and affront and affront till there is no one on earth unaffronted.” He knows himself “well enough for judgment but not well enough for correction.”
29
He is limned by his defeats; his blasphemy, his promiscuity, his effrontery are all designed to create an anti-theology theology, with the aim of spoiling life, to overturn it, to create a “counterlife” (the title of one of his books), but in an orgy of intensity (all Roth’s books are “noisy,” as one critic said, and all the sex is raucous). For Nathan Zuckerman, too, Roth’s other creation, and “the American authority on Jewish demons,” it is not easy to discern “between the heroic and the perverse.”
30

For Roth, for Roth’s characters like Mickey Sabbath and Nathan Zuckerman, all coherence in life is imaginary, and to achieve coherence we must violate the division of, say, life and art in ways that will offend the self-appointed arbiters of both.
31
Like Beckett, Roth worried that art was a trap, a too-neat rejection of the messiness of life—there are always competing claims on our identity, and they remain so.

In
The Anatomy Lesson
, Nathan Zuckerman gives himself over to unrestrained sensual pleasure, to escape the clutches of self-justification so as to lead a wholly indefensible, unjustified life—“and to learn to like it.”
32
For Zuckerman, Sabbath and Roth himself life is full of deadly toxins, and in a
novel like
American Pastoral
(1997) and
The Dying Animal
(2001), as well as those already mentioned, there is a “clamorous bleakness.” Here, too, the only way to avoid spiritual meltdown is rebellion, noise, blasphemy. In
I Married a Communist
, Roth cannot refrain from drawing attention to “a spiritual woman’s decolletage”; in another novel “infidelity comes with the marriage vows”; in another, “self-immolation is undertaken with gusto.” Life must press on with “a tincture of rancor,” “with the illicit pleasures of exposure and revenge.”
33
Overscale eroticism is Roth’s trademark, and his characters’ way out.

Whereas Beckett gives us silence, Roth gives us noise; whereas Beckett gives us the last hope of comradeship, Roth gives us the self-loathing promiscuity of the solitary offender; whereas Beckett gives us waiting, Roth gives us hyperactivity. In a world without God, we have to make the most of our doubt, and we can best do that by committing blasphemy, sleeping with our friends’ wives, giving offense. Because nobody knows anything, we can never know when we are right; we can never know, therefore, what is good. Only by being in the wrong can we know anything of ourselves, and that is the most intense way to be.

And this, too, he shares with Beckett: he enjoys the same level of popularity and significance, but most people could no more live up (or down) to Roth’s philosophy than they could to Beckett’s. Its very extremeness, though, gives us pause, makes us reflect. Does knowing what is wrong help? The fact that his bleak message is laced with humor also links him to Beckett and makes what he has to say somewhat more palatable. Because of this, and despite all, we give him a hearing. As Harold Bloom put it, they both offer us “ordeal by laughter.”

22

A Visionary Commonwealth and the Size of Life

I
n September 1989, Boris Yeltsin, at that stage a member of the Russian parliament but not yet the country’s president, made a much-publicized visit to the United States. The visit was noteworthy for at least two reasons. One was Yeltsin’s drinking—he was drunk at a number of important engagements, including a visit to the White House. The other was his astonishment at the abundance of America—especially in food and housing—which he said had been hidden from him and his fellow Russians by Soviet propaganda. It was partly as a result of what he saw in America that he returned home a rebel against the Soviet system and successfully challenged Mikhail Gorbachev for the presidency just over a year later.

But there was a third noteworthy aspect of Yeltsin’s visit, which has normally attracted little comment. This was the fact that it was sponsored by the Esalen Institute of Big Sur in California. Esalen had been chosen in preference to fifteen other possible organizations, including the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations. The prior negotiations had been carried out on behalf of Esalen by Jim Garrison, the administrative director of the institute’s Soviet-American Exchange Program (Garrison’s book
The Darkness of God: Theology after Hiroshima
is discussed on p. 380).

The prestige of Esalen, as revealed in this set of events, was all the more remarkable for the fact that, strictly speaking, its golden age was well over by then. In his book
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
(2007), Jeffrey J. Kripal says that the late 1960s and the early ’70s were the golden age of Esalen. They were also the golden age of the counterculture.

At its height the counterculture was probably the most sustained attempt there has ever been to fashion a way of living not just without traditional Western ideas of God, but also outside science, capitalism and conventional morality. And Esalen (named after the Esselen Indians of the area) was arguably the quintessence of the counterculture, the fullest and most perfect realization of its values and aspirations.

•   •   •

“We will never know how many people belonged to the counterculture,” says Theodore Roszak, the man who coined the term and wrote its definitive history. “It may be wrong to speak of it having a membership at all. Rather, it was a vision that, to one degree or another, drew the attention and fascination of passing many. More important than the size of the dissent was its depth. Never before had protest raised issues that went so philosophically deep, delving into the very meaning of reality, sanity, and human purpose.”
1

Three elements made up the backbone of the countercultural approach. These were, first, new techniques of therapy, what Roszak called “techniques of inner manipulation,” often organized via therapeutic communities; second, drugs, as the source of alternative forms of consciousness; and third, music, rock and roll. The only reason all this amounted to a
counterculture
, he said, was because “the culture it opposed—that of reductionist science, ecocidal industrialism, and corporate regimentation—was too small a vision of life to lift the spirit.”
2

The therapeutic approach was probably the most basic of the three. It was founded on the idea that “until the advent of psychoanalysis, the vocabulary of our society was woefully impoverished.” In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson had installed—or hoped he had—what he called the Great Society. Basing itself on the civil rights movement but also incorporating several other social issues (feminism, poverty, the environment), it was essentially sociopolitical and designed to help the participants in its programs lead better lives. Many of those who advocated the counterculture, however, saw that building the good society “is not primarily a social, but a psychological task.” The therapeutic approach “strikes beyond ideol
ogy to the level of consciousness, seeking to transform our deepest sense of the self, the other, the environment.”
3

Political and social consciousness, as the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary put it, gave way to “
consciousness
consciousness,” the overall aim being to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihoods, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities that would bring new meanings to lives.
4
It was essentially an anti-rational, anti-science stance, promoting a meaningful life of feeling.

There was at that time, says Roszak, a sense in the air, especially among the young, that Marxism and liberalism had largely ceased to provide explanations of the world; that they were as much a part of the problem as of the solution. Also, survey figures showing that some 38 percent of Americans were unchurched suggested that the mainline churches had lost touch with the experiential basis of spirituality.
5
Popular here was the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s notion of “surplus repression.”
Some
repression, basic repression, is normal, not unhealthy; it is bound to occur in any society, Marcuse said, simply as a consequence of people living together. Surplus repression, however, is that “which the invidious logic of domination demands.” Surplus repression is what “a particular group or individual” imposes on others “in order to maintain and enhance itself in a privileged position.” From this it followed, for Marcuse as for Marx, that “the shortening of the working day” was the fundamental premise out of which everything else flowed. We must set aside the “rationality of domination” in favor of “libidinal rationality, which takes the possibility of freedom and joy as axiomatic.”
6

Marcuse also had an idea of transcendence, though by this he meant historical transcendence, not in any way religious, in that he thought domination, exploitation and repression transcended historical periods, so that we take the status quo for granted. And it was his aim to overcome this state of affairs by showing the basically political nature of existence, which could be overcome only by the Great Refusal, the rejection of social domination “in the name of joy and freedom”—the “Enormous Yes”—using the “transcendental wisdom” of poetry.
7

A second aspect to the psychological changes sought by the counterculture was, as Roszak put it, “the journey to the East.” This leads, he says,
to such figures as Alan Watts, originally a British philosopher and theologian, who had studied at the School of Asian Studies in San Francisco after leaving his position as an Anglican counselor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Watts wrote books on Zen and Taoism, in an attempt to translate their insights into the language of Western science and technology, perhaps the best known being
The Way of Zen
,
The Joyous Cosmology
and
Psychotherapy East and West
. In the latter, Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not just as a religion. Neither Hinduism nor Buddhism, he says, can be classified as a religion, philosophy, science or mythology, or even as an amalgamation of all four, “because departmentalization is foreign to them, even in so basic a form as the separation of the spiritual and the material.”
8

What the counterculture offers us, then, “is a remarkable defection from the long-standing tradition of skeptical, secular intellectuality, which has served as the prime vehicle for three hundred years of scientific and technical work in the West. Almost overnight (and astonishingly, with no great debate on the point) a significant portion of the younger generation has opted out of that tradition.”
9
Roszak acknowledged that there were “manifestations” around the edges of the counterculture that were “worrisomely unhealthy”—pornographic grotesquery, blood-curdling sadomasochism, mock-Dionysian frenzy—but held that the exploration of “non-intellective powers” was its greatest achievement.
10

Roszak asks if we can blame the young for getting involved in an “occult Jungian stew,” when the life of Reason has too obviously failed to bring us the agenda of civilized improvements “that Voltaire and Condorcet once foresaw” and shown itself to be merely a “Higher Superstition.” He says it is impossible any longer to ignore the fact that “our conception of intellect has been narrowed disastrously by the prevailing assumption” that the life of the spirit is “(1) a lunatic fringe best left to artists and marginal visionaries; (2) an historical bone yard for antiquarian scholarship; (3) a highly specialized adjunct of professional anthropology; (4) an antiquated vocabulary still used by the clergy, but intelligently soft-pedalled by its more enlightened members.” The end result, as Michael Novak has put it, is a “middle-class secular humanism which eschews the ‘mystic flights’ of metaphysicians, theologians and dreamers; it is cautious and remote in
dealing with heightened and passionate experiences that are the stuff of great literature and philosophy, limiting itself to this world and its concerns, concerns which fortunately turn out to be largely subject to precise formulations, and hence have a limited but comforting certainty.”

And just look at the new rituals of the young, he says. “They gather in gay costume on a high hill in the public park to salute the midsummer sun in its rising and setting. They dance, they sing, they make love as each feels moved, without order or plan. . . . All have equal access to the event; no one is misled or manipulated. Neither kingdom, nor power, nor glory is desperately at stake.”
11

THE RELIGION OF NO RELIGION

This approach, these values, were reflected above all at Esalen. Jeffrey Kripal subtitled his book
America and the Religion of No Religion
because Esalen was designed, he said, as a utopian experiment “creatively suspended between the revelations of the religions and the democratic, pluralistic, and scientific revolutions of modernity.” It was a place where the therapeutic encounter was the core principle, “a spiritual space where almost any religious form can flourish, provided—and this is crucial—that it does not attempt to impose itself on the entire community or claim to speak for everyone. As an early Esalen motto put it, ‘No one captures the flag.’ At Esalen they hold their dogmas lightly, they describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious. . . . Mysticism here is not some transcendent abstraction without political or moral content. Another way of putting the Esalen ethic is that . . . the humanist is after the openness of
wonder
, whereas the scientist is after the closure of
explanation
.”
12

Esalen came out of the tradition of Aldous Huxley, who had explored ideas of utopia and dystopia, and the “precognitive” writings of Henry Miller, who had lived in Big Sur. The early figures at Esalen were Michael Murphy and Frederic Spiegelberg, the latter an exile from Germany, where he had been friendly with Paul Tillich and Carl Jung. Also influenced by Rilke, Spiegelberg was the one who conceived the phrase and wrote a book called
The Religion of No Religion
. For him, historical religions have
made two major mistakes. They have consistently misread their own symbolic statements as literal truths, and they have traditionally devalued one side of reality (the natural world) for the sake of the other (the transcendent divine).

Spiegelberg thought that the paradoxes at the heart of these two mistakes were what, for most people, made traditional religions unthinkable; and at the same time he adopted an essentially Heideggerian approach, a sense of the astonishment of being. This, he found, could be enhanced by Zen Buddhism, and Indian yoga, which recognizes, particularly in its Tantric form, that “the final temple of the divine is, again, the human body.”
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Moreover, he saw art and psychoanalysis as two Western ways of thinking by which the “higher gnosis” could be achieved.

These ideas of Spiegelberg’s set the scene at Esalen, but were built on by many others—and this variety was key to the institute’s early success. Innovations included the Buddhism taught by Dick Price, with its idea of
anatman
, no-self, “no special status for anything,” in which the “unfolding” of life was regarded as the only divine force; physical movement and non-verbal experience, body awareness and sensory reawakening; J. B. Rhine’s notions of parapsychology and the nature of man; Alan Watts’s ideas as expounded in
Joyous Cosmology
; Timothy Leary and “psychedelic Orientalism”; and the “third force psychology” of Abraham Maslow with its “self-actualizing” “peak experiences.” Sex was never far away. In fact, Kripal says: “Central to Esalen’s enlightenment of the body is a kind of mystical psychoanalysis that is as comfortable with ‘sex’ as it is with ‘peak experience’ . . . that sees the peak spiritual experience as orgasmic and the orgasm as potentially spiritual.”
14

Abraham Maslow, the central figure in “third force” psychology, had been active in the field for some time before he went to Esalen: he had helped Alfred Kinsey with his sex research in New York while teaching at Brooklyn College. He invoked the orgasm as an appropriate metaphor or analogy for his concept of a “peak experience,” which for him was “an extraordinary state of personal history” that “fundamentally alters the individual’s worldview through an overwhelming explosion of meaning, creativity, love and Being.”
15

Maslow described peak experiences as very like orgasms: “the peak
experience is temporary, essentially delightful, potentially creative, and imbued with profound metaphysical possibilities.” One cannot live on such peaks but, he insisted, a life without them is unhealthy, nihilistic and potentially violent. The peak experience sat at the summit of a pyramid built on a hierarchy of psychological and physiological needs. At the base of the pyramid was food, shelter, sleep; above that came sexuality, safety and security; above that, love, belonging, self-esteem; and finally, at the peak itself, self-actualization. This last state was regarded as spiritual but in no way religious. One of the achievements of a peak experience, Maslow thought, was that people became more democratic, more generous, more open, less closed and selfish, achieving what he called a “transpersonal” or “transhuman” realm of consciousness. He had the idea of a “non-institutionalized personal religion” that “would obliterate the distinction between the sacred and the profane”—rather like the meditation exercises of Zen monks, whom he compared to humanistic psychologists. Maslow’s idols in this were William James and Walt Whitman.