The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (72 page)

And here again we see a temporal coincidence, except that perhaps
again it wasn’t really a coincidence. As religion declined, as Nietzsche announced the death of God, so arrived more or less on cue the theories and practices of Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalysis was based largely on a recognition of the disruptive fires of desire in the form of the libido, a sexual force of great power, infinitely malleable but ineradicable. Freud’s influence was second to none in the twentieth century.

To what extent are these temporal coincidences, if such they are, related, and to what extent do they account for the fact that science, despite its undoubted successes both intellectual and moral, has not engaged the imaginations of as many people as might have been expected? In fact, the impact of detail and desire go together—they both speak to an
immediacy
that the abstractions of science do not. Relevant here is Habermas’s theory that the idea of the cosmos brings with it the concept of unity, which has proved so influential in religion, metaphysics and other forms of philosophy. But if we accept David Deutsch’s idea that there are in fact a number of cosmoses, parallel universes, in a multiverse (a concept easier to accept than Tipler’s omega point), then the idea of cosmic unity goes out the window too. We may still view the totality of the multiverse as a single entity, perhaps, but that is a much less overbearing idea than that of one single cosmos. In the modern world, in modern science, the idea of unity as a basic concept is under threat, as much as is the idea of one overbearing truth. The theory of everything, so sought after by physicists, which aims/hopes to find a common thread between the four main forces of the physical world—electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity—will not, even if discovered, affect the idea of parallel universes. The very fact that unity is proving so hard to demonstrate is itself important—it may never regain the overriding force it once had.

So we are thrown back again onto a phenomenological approach, to find solace and meaning away from the “grandeur” of the universe(s) and stick to what we know intimately and immediately. As Ortega y Gasset said, we cannot put off living until the scientists say we are ready.

This matter of size—of grandeur or its opposite—may be all-important. To what extent has religion, especially the great monotheisms, given us a false sense of the size of life? The very concepts of salvation, redemption, transcendence, eternity and infinity, in which monotheisms routinely
deal, invite us—like science, in this respect—to contemplate the grandeur of abstract notions, into which fits quite seamlessly what Cynthia Ozick calls our “haunted desire for human completion”—desire again.
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Is the very idea of completion, wholeness, perfectibility, oneness, misleading or even diverting? Does the
longing
for completion imply a completion that isn’t in fact available? Is this our predicament?

This in turn leads us to ask whether, just as the religious idea of the “whole” has been punctured, other religious notions have been similarly mistaken. For example, has life really become less enchanting because Max Weber said so? Could it be that Weber was seriously wrong in telling us that the post-religious world is disenchanted?

Let us look at the timing of his statement. Weber made his remarks in 1918, when the ravages of the First World War were fresh in the mind, before the blood of millions of dead had congealed, when the world was anything but enchanting. And this was a war, moreover, that in many people’s eyes owed a lot to the nihilistic writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. But in May 1919, Arthur Eddington confirmed the existence of relativity, an experimental observation soon followed by others that led on to quantum mechanics and such extraordinary ideas as the wave-particle duality and the exclusion principle. Other discoveries, such as dendrochronology, carbon valency, the Big Bang theory and the evolutionary synthesis, followed.

To say that such notions are not enchanting is to bend the meaning of enchantment. To many people they were certainly weird (“quantum weirdness,” in particular), equivalent to the magic on which religions relied in an earlier age. But the new enchantment was and is explicable—an advance, surely. Weber died in June 1920, soon after his pronouncement. Had he lived on through the 1920s, he would surely have changed his mind. Had he fully engaged with Darwinian variation, becoming ever clearer in the early years of the century due to burgeoning research in the new field of genetics, and had he come fully to terms with the clinical nature of psychoanalysis, in which interpretation was always made on an individual basis; had he encountered Niels Bohr’s linking of physics and chemistry in the structure of the atom, or Linus Pauling’s explanation as to why some substances are yellow liquids and others black solids—he would surely have concluded that the world was now more engrossingly
enchanting than ever. Similarly, had he lived to witness the rise of film, with silent movies giving way to sound, he would surely have seen this as an even more accessible source of enchantment—for most people, no doubt, much more so than quantum weirdness.

As Bruce Robbins says, the disenchantment narrative ignores a great deal about the premodern world that was far from enchanting (brought home recently in the German film
White Ribbon
). It needs repeating that the world is vastly more enchanted now than it was before the death of God.

By the same token, is redemption any longer a useful concept? Richard Rorty didn’t think so because, as he put it, we are not degraded. Roger Scruton, though religious, half agrees when he argues that modern art is a “redemption of the commonplace” (this we might characterize as a “small” form of redemption). Transcendence has been dismissed time and again by modern philosophers (Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Jürgen Habermas) as a non-phenomenon. For Rorty, again, neither the word nor the concept of the “sacred” is any longer of use, because “everything is up for grabs.” And as already mentioned, if we accept Olivier Roy’s account of the globalization, deculturation and deterritorialization of religion, it is faith that is changing its contours, becoming “thinner,” not the secular life. Terry Eagleton said mischievously that he thought happiness was a “holiday-camp” sort of word. And as for happiness (or self-actualization), there seems to be general agreement that one can’t go looking for it, that it is the by-product of other, more worthwhile activities, and this may be why it is most often encountered in recollection.

The two big ideas that everyone seems to agree about, as regards our subject, are hope and the need for a more inclusive community—this is where we are to find meaning. George Santayana, Scott Fitzgerald, E. O. Wilson, Richard Rorty, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Taylor and Pope Benedict XVI all introduce the matter of hope into their writings. (Nietzsche, of course, regarded hope as a trick played on mankind, causing us to be more optimistic about progress than it really merited, especially since the “false dawn” of the Enlightenment.)

“THE METANARRATIVE OF EMANCIPATION”

For many people, too, hope is engendered by the expansion of the moral community that, despite all, is happening, if fitfully. Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty insist that “no experience of truth can exist without some participation in a community.” Minority ethnic groups, women, homosexuals, the disabled, religious sects and many others are now being accorded greater equality and respect; we are becoming less tolerant of such matters as “collateral damage” in wars, while at the same time more tolerant in any number of ways—this is the process known as “social hope” (something John Gray has dismissed as “shallow”). Being more tolerant may not feel like meaning, but it is to those who are the recipients of the new tolerance, allowing them to live fuller lives.

Of all these minorities, no doubt the most important politically are the ethnic groups. In terms of numbers—and often because of their religious identities—this means that in the foreseeable future they will be the world’s major concern and remain the bitterest sources of conflict. In terms of psychological and philosophical adjustment, on the other hand, the most important development in the future may be what some have called a switch to female values. Nietzsche called truth a woman; James Joyce foresaw, with pleasure and optimism, a world where hope lay with the female side of men. Andrea Dworkin has emphasized that the world we have now is “man-made,” a term by no means complimentary. Wallace Stevens admonished us to “embrace an idea like a woman.” Politically, too, this is a highly relevant issue; who can doubt that one of the ways in which Islam is most backward is in its (often disgraceful) treatment of women.

TRIVIALITY AND CONSEQUENTIALITY

These issues are not unimportant and are part of a larger picture, but in a sense they skirt around the main concern of this book.

On this issue, how we are to live without God, it seems clear that the
crux is the moral life. Philosophers of all stripes (except Thomas Nagel, especially lately) are in agreement with the evolutionary biologists that morality has evolved, along good Darwinian principles. (David Sloan Wilson’s recent exploration of the evolution of catechisms and forgiveness is a tantalizing step forward.) Not only is God not needed to explain this, but evolution is a better
authority
so far as morals are concerned. It is experimentally confirmed that evolution shows rationally why morality is justified, identifies the benefits, and highlights what is lost when the rules aren’t adhered to. In particular—and this may be the most important point of all—the studies show how the requirements of the “selfish gene” lead to the need for, and justification of, cooperation. Biology links ethics to morals.

Ronald Dworkin writes most clearly about the distinction between ethics and morals. Ethics refers to the way we lead our own lives, reflects our responsibility to ourselves, not in a narcissistic way but by understanding life as a
performance
which we can carry through either well or not so well. He invites us to reflect on our lives—conceivably along the lines that Robert Nozick exemplified in his book
The Examined Life
—to construct a narrative that is coherent, moral and non-trivial. The idea that there is a narrative to a life is very powerful for many people. Dworkin thinks our aim should be a narrative that allows us to marvel at the universe and gives us dignity and self-respect. For him, this
is
being religious without God. There is nothing deeper, or grander.

If that is our first duty, our second is to other people, to accord them respect so as to preserve
their
dignity, and the people to whom we should show respect include an ever-expanding group until, eventually, it will include everyone. This is one aim of life, what Bruce Robbins calls “the metanarrative of emancipation.”

The need to be “consequential” is more controversial, given that not everyone can be equally consequential, and if we judged a life solely by its consequences most people would be found to lead inconsequential lives, or lives that are only accidentally consequential. Dworkin’s point about life being a performance, which can be carried out either well or not so well, is surely another aspect of consequence: we construct the performance of our own lives to have a coherence, a coherence that is in some
sense non-trivial and truthful—those two qualities together giving us self-respect and dignity—and allows us, as Nozick said, to become a vehicle for beauty as well as truth, coherence itself being a form of beauty.

SECULAR REVELATION: WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW WE HAD WITHIN US

To this we can add an idea of Seamus Heaney’s. Heaney is endlessly quotable: poetry adds to the volume of good in the world; a new rhythm is a new life given to the world; poetry produces a sense of at-homeness and trust in the world; poetry is a natural process, simultaneously proffered by the phenomena of the world and engendered by the frolic of language; it is the transmission of intuited knowledge; poetry is to keep on coming into a fuller life, it is an experience of enlargement; poems stand like cathedrals in the wilderness; they offer an infrangible dignity, unconsoled clarity, unfenced existence, they are the outward sign of an inner grace; they are examples of self-conquest; they show that the reality of the world should not be underprized; they offer a sense of sufficiency, and a spurt of abundance from a source within.

It is this last that we focus on here. In one of his essays, Heaney quotes from Czesław Miłosz’s
The Estate of Poetry
:

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:

A thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had within us
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Isn’t that second line a secular equivalent of a revelation and a profound guide to leading a life? To keep on coming into a fuller life, to not underprize the reality of the world, to explore our unfenced existence, don’t we have to bring forth something that “we didn’t know we had within us”? And how are we to do that? What criteria can we use by which we will know that we have achieved that aim, that our activities—like those of Dworkin’s matchbook-cover collector—are not trivial?

There is almost certainly no one criterion that would fit the bill to everyone’s satisfaction, but there is one poet who has influenced many philos
ophers and other writers precisely because he made a determined and imaginative stab at it, and whose life certainly had a distinctive narrative.

NAMING THE WORLD

Rainer Maria Rilke thought that what lends sense to life is the act of “saying,” of transforming into language all that is in danger of being lost in our hurry to move ahead. In particular, he felt that the details and glories of nature were under threat and that Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife had prevented us from experiencing this earth—which is all there is—as fully as we might, and that it is the post-Christian recovery of this experience that gives “sense to life,” making sheer wondering inquiry the “central sane activity.”

O happy earth, O Earth on holiday,