The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (65 page)

Deutsch emphasizes that there are great differences between Tipler’s idea of God and what most religious people believe in today. The people near the omega point would be so different from us that they couldn’t communicate with us. And they couldn’t work miracles; they did not create the universe or the laws of physics, so they could never violate those laws. They would be opposed to religious faith and have no wish to be worshipped (who would do the worshipping?). Technology would be so advanced at that point, he thinks, that they could resurrect the dead. This would be possible because by then computers would be so infinitely powerful that they could create any virtual world that ever existed, including our world in which humans have evolved. All this, in an infinite system, would enable computers to improve our world materially, to become one in which people will not die. This, Tipler says, is a form of heaven.
39

What people would actually
do
at the omega point (people very different from us, beyond what we can imagine) is a matter of informed speculation, say both Tipler and Deutsch, because the omega point is a singularity, in which the laws of physics break down. But they insist that present-day physics and mathematics support the narrative up to the omega point.

This is all very heady—in fact, way over the heads of most of us—but what Deutsch and Tipler give us, they believe, is a glimpse of an ideal world, or universe, which science is inexorably leading us to.

Does all this teach us how to live? In the immediate and near future,
it tells us, an education in physics and mathematics is likely to help us understand the future better. It seeks to give us some idea of the changes that are coming our way, it gives us an idea above all of how knowledge might change—computation has no need of a God or gods—and it offers an ideal end point to history, which subjectively will last forever (a form of mathematical immortality), with the prospect of a (sort of) resurrection for, in theory, anyone who has ever lived.

It is a breathtaking vision and, needless to say, both Deutsch and Tipler have been heavily criticized (not just by Midgley) for “unwarranted speculation” about events so far in the future as to be meaningless to most people. But they insist their theories are based on today’s real knowledge of physics and computation. Evolution has shown us that life has proliferated on earth for roughly 3.5 billion years and it has taken that time for us to become aware, for example, of the future demise of the sun. We must learn to think in such time frames.

•   •   •

Evolution brings us back to earth, though it was no less imaginative or controversial than the omega point when it was first conceived. But as more and more has become known (and it is one of the great episodes of intellectual heroism in the twentieth century, along with modern physics), evolution has provided us with an alternative vision and one which, moreover, has had a distinct impact on our moral views, which religions claimed as their special territory for so many centuries. Our post-Darwin, post-Nietzsche, post-Christian moral life is the subject of the next chapter.

The one puzzle that remains with evolution is why, although most scientists are so enthusiastic about it for the understanding it gives us in so many realms, few others remain convinced. Even Richard Dawkins, one of evolution’s staunchest advocates, admitted in
The Blind Watchmaker
that Darwinism “seems more in need of advocacy than many other similarly established truths in other branches of science. . . . Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories.” There are two reasons why evolution is in need of such advocacy, and they go to the heart of this book. They will be discussed in the conclusion.

26

“The Good Life Is the Life Spent Seeking the Good Life”

I
n 1948, T. S. Eliot published a short, sharp book entitled
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.
He had done so, he said, because he felt that anxiety had been growing over the previous six or seven years about the word (and the notion of) “culture.”

He worried that no culture had ever appeared or developed “except together with a religion”—they are “different aspects of the same thing”—and that the artistic sensibility is impoverished by any divorce from the religious sensibility. “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidence of this decline is visible in every department of human activity.” He saw this against the background of Christian culture in Europe, which he regarded as “the highest culture that the world has ever known.” Religion, while it lasts, he wrote, provides the framework for culture, protects the mass of humanity from boredom and despair, and gives meaning to life.
1

As this shows, Eliot had an elitist view of progress. It is the function of the superior members of a society, and superior families (his words), to preserve the culture, and it is the function of the producers of culture to change it. High culture, he said, is more “conscious” than lower culture, and this is its function. There was no distinction, he thought, between religion and culture in primitive societies, but in modern times there had been a movement toward “aggressive unbelief,” producing a culture
severed from religion—a process that “might well” confirm the general lowering of culture. Without a common faith, the search for unity—in a community, a nation, or a people—can be only an illusion, and a country like Britain had become “unconscious” of the importance of religion. In our modern culture, he said, we need fewer books and more conversations; life is about manageability; about the passions of individuals rather than the huge impersonal forces that affect the masses, which are just necessary conveniences of thought.
2

One of the outcomes of these modern trends, he thought, was the belief that superiority always means superiority of intellect and that education should be devised to “infallibly nourish it.” This led, he felt, to the most dogmatic of modern beliefs, that
equality of opportunity
is what counts, which for him could be achieved only if “the institution of the family is no longer respected.” Thus were ruled out self-sacrifice on the part of parents, ambition, foresight, parental control and responsibility. Education in the modern sense, he claimed, implies a disintegrated society in which it has come to be assumed that there is one measure of education according to which everyone is educated more or less.
3
Eliot thought that in this matter society had become unidimensional, and that by educating everyone we cannot help but lower standards, from which we will all eventually suffer.

This went right against the grain of much that was in train in many areas of the world at the time, but especially in Western Europe and North America. In the wake of Eliot’s book, the West—the highest culture, the most advanced, as he insisted—entered on the most secular period there has ever been; and the widespread popularity of film and radio, of the gramophone and then television, brought about a flourishing of popular culture that was also unparalleled.

By Eliot’s lights, culture should have collapsed, and many fellow thinkers who outlived him (he died in 1965) no doubt agreed. But as this book has tried to show, there was no shortage of attempts to find meaning, ways to live, in the wake of the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Gulag, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Mao and his wife and the Cultural Revolution. Earlier chapters have explored how painters, poets, psychologists, biologists and other scientists have confronted and constructed the post-religious secular world that Eliot so feared. There remains one realm
unexplored, a form of intellectual activity less concentrated than science, less suited to the visual images that so dominate our lives these days and much harder to distill within the short-term attention span of our very diverse late-capitalist popular culture. This is the realm of contemporary moral philosophy, a totally secular activity.

THE END OF METANARRATIVE

We begin with a transformation that, as transformations are apt to do, turned Eliot’s approach on its head. It was a transformation described as the “apotheosis of secularization.”

At 3:32 p.m. on Saturday, July 15, 1972, the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, Missouri, was dynamited. A onetime prizewinning version of Le Corbusier’s “machine for modern living,” designed by Minoru Yamasaki, it was now deemed an uninhabitable environment for its low-income residents. This moment, says the architectural historian Charles Jencks, was the symbolic end of modernism and marked the passage to the postmodern. It signaled the end of abstract, theoretical and doctrinaire ideals—in architecture in this case—but postmodernism was at much the same time invading all areas of life.

In literature, in film, in art and philosophy, as well as architecture, a new ethic and a new aesthetics came into play. As the cultural historian David Harvey has put it, the most startling fact about postmodernism was its total acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and chaos of modern life. Universal and eternal truths, “if they exist at all, cannot be specified.” All “meta-narratives” which seek to explain the broad sweep of history—Marxism, Freudianism, Christianity, the secularizing influence of modernism, for example—are eschewed. Despite postmodernism itself being a feature of a Western way of life, the Western way of life was now criticized for its long-term neglect of the “other.” Other worlds, and the inexhaustibility of this world, were what counted now—heterotopia, not utopia.

We cannot aspire to any unified representation of the world, “or picture it as a totality full of connections and differentiations rather than as
perpetually shifting fragments.” The individual could no longer be understood as “alienated,” because that presupposes a coherent center from which to be alienated.
4
Alienation is replaced by fragmentation.

Fredric Jameson said that all this was nothing more than the cultural logic of late capitalism—postmodern pluralism fueling an ever more frenetic pursuit of this-worldly pleasures (increasingly varied and increasingly available), consumption in this world replacing otherworldly forms of comfort and salvation.

True enough, but not the whole picture. What Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels astutely anticipated was the “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” of late capitalism, driven ceaselessly by technological advances “in which the desire for the new is so intense that new fashions and new ideas ‘become antiquated before they can ossify into custom.’” The never-ending carnival of consumerism, where information, or “fact,” is as plentiful (and ever-changing) as objects, where the half-truths and half-lies of advertising set a cynical standard for public discourse, where in any case facts and events in the news change so quickly that no one can absorb anything into any kind of totality—in such circumstances ready-made belief systems have an undeniable attraction.

These ready-made belief systems are not necessarily traditional religions but what Philippa Berry, paraphrasing Jacques Derrida, calls “a numinous and nonhuman force loosely called ‘spirit.’” In part, this overall stance was a reflection of the digital world then emerging in computer science, where “bits” of information came in one of two types, 1 and 0. Post-modernism turned its back on this, arguing that polarizations in politics (left-right), in philosophy (reason-emotion), in history (classicism-Romanticism), in literature and art (narrative-discursive), in science (progress-retribalization) and in everyday life were oversimple and misleading.
5

“BRICOLAGE” BELIEFS

In religion it has been slightly more complicated. At one level the polarization between faith and doubt has come under attack, at another the focus has been on the concept of the “other,” as originally envisaged by
Karl Barth (see chapter 16). New modes of spirituality have been explored that have been described as post-religious, post-skeptical or post-dualistic (all together, described as “quasi-religious”). These typically draw on pre-Christian and non-Christian sources and, as Clifford Longley wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
, “People have moved away from ‘religion’ as something anchored in organized worship and systematic beliefs within an institution, to a self-made ‘spirituality,’ outside formal structures, which is based on experience, has no doctrine and makes no claim to philosophical coherence.”
6
Opinion polls show that one in four Americans believes in astrology, one in five in reincarnation; in Britain, more people believe in UFOs than in God. The New Age fits in here too, combining high consumerism and belief in all manner of things.

These phenomena are characterized, Berry says, by their “bricolage” quality—bits and pieces, picked up as we go along—by the fact that they are both like and unlike traditional religions, and it is not yet clear whether they are quasi-religious or post-religious. David Barrett, in his 544-page survey
The New Believers
, an account of sixty-nine contemporary religions, cults and sects, found that there were a lot of “counterfeit Christianity” movements among them, and that the most postmodern of the cults were the “New Age” variety whose adherents claim that the previous age was dominated by male characteristics, “leading to aggression and obsession with power.” “The New Age concept is based on a balance of male and female qualities.”

New Age has been described as a smorgasbord of spiritual substitutes for Christianity. It is essentially an astrological idea, the basic belief being that sometime in the 1970s we passed from the astrological age of Pisces, the fish, into the age of Aquarius, the water-bearer. The age of Pisces stretched back to the beginning of Christianity and took in the Renaissance, the Reformation and the rise of humanism. It was the age of authority, when Judeo-Christianity was dominant and controlled man’s thinking. The age of Aquarius, beginning around the turn of the twenty-first century, would herald a new spirit, leading to “consciousness expansion,” to man’s wholeness. The New Age consistently teaches that a personal God does not exist. It is intended to fill the post-Christian spiritual vacuum.
7

WHAT IS MISSING IS “PRACTICE”

Although postmodernism made the intellectual running for several decades in the late twentieth century, the bricolage ethic it fostered created an ideal environment for philosophical figures who offered clarity and—though against the tide—a coherence that postmodernism denied. Alasdair MacIntyre was one who seemed to be more systematic than most about these matters.

A Scotsman and a Marxist, who emigrated from Britain to the United States in 1970 and later became a Catholic, MacIntyre set out his views in an important series of books on moral philosophy:
After Virtue
(1981), mentioned earlier,
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
(1988),
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry
(1990) and
Dependent Rational Animals
(1999). To see how we should live in a world without God, he had the idea of going back, ideologically, to ancient Greece, to the time of Aristotle, to a time before the great monotheisms evolved. He saw the current situation as pretty dire, because in this world of corporate liberalism there is not only no agreement on God, but also no agreement on what would count as a reasoned argument for or against him. The individualistic ethic by which we live now amounts to people advocating “whatever they think will give them control,” or will achieve the outcome they prefer (another postmodern claim was that power was and is all-important). Moral principles are chosen today on the grounds of their effectiveness. We live, said MacIntyre, in a world of “emotivism,” the doctrine that “all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are
nothing but
expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”

MacIntyre believed this to be wrong because “we can in fact rationally determine the best possible life for human beings and therefore can have moral judgments that are more than mere preferences.”

What is missing from modern life, he said, is the concept of “practice,” and here he used the example of playing chess. In any practice there are two kinds of “good” attaching. There are the external “goods”—money, power and fame, derived from being good at the game and reaching the top.
And there are internal “goods,” achieved by participating in the practice itself. These provide an education in the virtues—the virtues of honesty (no cheating), courage (keeping going when you are losing), generosity toward others (who may be better than you), magnanimity (to those less good than yourself). You must also rely on others to judge you—you cannot be a chess grand master just because you say so.

Societies, MacIntyre says, in order to
be
societies and offer the best chances to the greatest number, need the practice of certain virtues—honesty, courage, justice, as in the example given above. Good societies should be made up of people who know each other and can practice and polish the virtues. The fault with liberal democracies, he says, is that they are really disguised oligarchies, where corporate liberalism (or capitalism) derives its power from fragmentation: typically, individuals have no chance to come together to pursue the common good and therefore no chance to develop the virtues. Liberalism, he goes on, claims to be neutral about what constitutes the best way forward, but this very neutrality is also a disguise designed to maintain corporate liberalism’s control over the manufacture of goods, with the overall effect of keeping the experience of virtue in society to a minimum. And it is virtue that people find satisfying and fulfilling. Even tradition, which once provided a framework for virtue, is being eroded.