The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (73 page)

Play with your children! Let us try

To catch you . . .

In one sonnet he spoke of a “boundless inner sky”—words that sit happily on a page with Seamus Heaney. What Rilke was trying to do in his poetry was not dissimilar to what Cézanne had sought to do in his painting, to approach nature—the earth—in an unmediated way, trying to dispense with the accumulated practices of the past, notably Christianity, which have hindered a true appreciation of the earth and the sheer joyfulness of existence. Rilke also thought that the earth could be best enjoyed by singing, singing being unique to humans, and with music weaving a line through the present, “lyrics uniting the time-based events of our words by recalling them back into the presence of one another through the repetition of their sounds.” For him, saying and singing overlapped.

And that is the point. In his
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
, Charles Taylor says that we have lost the power to name things. Taylor is surely as way off the mark here as Weber was earlier. For with the advent of science, our ability to name things has increased expo
nentially. And this, too, is the point, or a large part of it, because naming, saying, singing the world constitute the very criterion by which, it is being suggested here, we may judge whether that something we have within us which we bring forth is to be assessed as a success, even consequential. And along the way, of course, singing the world is—literally—enchantment.

Identifying the electron, the double-helix structure of DNA, the process of natural selection or cosmic background radiation—all this is naming the world. So is identifying viruses and the identification of the ice ages, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age. So is the identification of the formula
E=mc
2
, or the principle of flight, or the phenomena of sea-floor spreading and tectonic plates. But so, too, are these lines of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop:

The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs

and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up

to storerooms in the gables

for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

swelling slowly as if considering spilling over

Bishop, who described herself in childhood as “full of hymns,” was a fervent admirer of Darwin. She thought he had built up a “solid case” based on “heroic observations,” and on her visit to Britain in the 1960s she journeyed by Green Line bus to Darwin’s house. She continued to return to his “beautiful books” because she was convinced, as she knew he was, that, as he confided to his notebooks, “the sublime is reached through the commonplace,” the “slow accretion of facts.” This made her, according to Guy Rotella, “a religious poet without religious faith.”

Rebecca Stott highlights these lines of Bishop’s about a meandering bus journey along the Nova Scotia coastline:

A moose has come out of

the impenetrable wood

and stands there, looms, rather,

in the middle of the road.

Stott describes this episode as a collective epiphany of the bus passengers, “locked in the otherworldly stare of the moose who is ‘high as a church.’” It is a Darwinian sublime, a secular enchantment, but it is not an apotheosis—“the bus departs, leaving only the smell of gasoline behind.” In Bishop’s work, Stott says, the sublime moment is “giddying” but there is no transcendence, no significance that is
above
; it is instead a fall, a falling back into the smell of the gasoline, or the memory of the smell, an
immersion
(Stott’s preferred word) in
this
world.
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Or consider “beautifell,” “As it is uneven,” “beauhind” from
Finnegans Wake
: seemingly inconsequential, but they are not just puns—clever or irritating or juvenile as the case may be: they enable and encourage us to see the world in new ways; or they clarify and crystallize thoughts we have
almost
had, that we wish we had had, or would have had, had we slowed down enough and honed our own observations a bit more. At the same time, and ironically and paradoxically, they recall George Steiner’s words, that aesthetic truths quicken our life, linking temporality and eternity in a way unavailable elsewhere. And remind us of Dworkin’s claim that performance itself has value, is part of the point. Throughout this book, it has been not just what has been said, but the style and force with which it has been said that counts equally.

That phrase of Elizabeth Bishop’s about the sea “considering spilling over” is also a thought we have all almost had, that we grasp immediately and silently thank her for, with a nod of the head—silver words that extend our world, underlining our uncertain and unfinished relationship with the sea and its unfathomable behavior. Zbigniew Herbert’s poem about a pebble, cited earlier, could be set alongside Brâncuşi’s sculpture of an egg, which, as Robert Hughes said, draws much of its expressive power from its “eloquent material presence” and resists analysis because “it does not seem to be put together.” It has a patient entityhood.

These words may not have changed the world as much as, say, the quantum, the electron or the gene (who was it who said no poem ever stopped a tank?). But they don’t need to, to be consequential, if they enlarge the experience of other people, and enchant us. If there is one thing that the
thinkers discussed in this book are agreed upon it is that there is no one overbearing benchmark by which the world may be judged, so let us relish that truth, not continually try to deny it. Observation of the world can be heroic. That is what the people in this book have taught us. Observation can be liberating, enlarging—that is what we thank them for.

“WE WILL GRIEVE NOT, RATHER FIND / STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS BEHIND”

Which brings us back again to that most underrated movement of the twentieth century, the philosophy of phenomenology, the idea that life is made up of
les
minutes heureuses
. And the notion that in a world no longer illumined by God or reason, all attempts to reduce its infinite variety (the universe, experience) to concepts, ideas or essences—whether religious or scientific, whether they involve the “soul,” or “nature,” or “particles” or the “afterlife”—
diminish
the actual variety of reality which is part, and maybe the biggest part, or even the whole, of its meaning.

Religious people can approach the world as phenomenologists every bit as much as the secular can. But how, exactly, are they to calibrate their response? In his
Proof of Heaven: A Neurologist’s Journey to the Afterlife
, referred to in the introduction, Eben Alexander describes the heaven he visited during his coma as containing butterflies and flowers. Were these more beautiful than the butterflies and flowers on earth? If so, how are we to regard the ones we see in this life?—as inferior? If the flowers and butterflies in heaven are not more beautiful, does that not take away part of the purpose of heaven? Alexander also said that heaven was “populated” by angels and souls and that the whole experience was blissful. Does this mean that the people we see on earth are, again, in some way inferior, imperfect? If so, how can we fully enjoy what we have on earth, knowing something better is to come? No wonder John Gray snorts: “What could be more dreary than the perfection of mankind?”
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With a little effort, armed only with imagination, the great majority of us can surely “name” the world in some fashion, or try to. Rilke, Santayana, Stevens, Lawrence, Steiner, Rorty, Scruton and many others have
extolled the unrivaled importance of imagination. The beauty of naming lies in the fact that we need no great undertaking—like a war, the Large Hadron Collider built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland or a politico-social project like building a new town or a nuclear submarine—to achieve something consequential, in the sense that naming the world extends it and fulfills us and helps engender a greater sense of community. That is, in other words, a success both ethically and morally.

And this is perhaps the greatest achievement of contemporary moral philosophers. Probably, everyone of a secular inclination has always known, deep within themselves, that the aim to bring about a wider, more inclusive sense of community—as a reflection of greater equality, liberty and fairness—is the best and, indeed, only way forward. But that this cannot be achieved without a sense of responsibility
to ourselves
, without dignity, without a sense of life as a
performance
, without avoiding
triviality
, without a personal narrative, needed clarifying. This puts into context Thomas Nagel’s admonition that we cannot find meaning by helping others. That is, not
only
by helping others.

The central role of ethics and morals leads us to divide life into three realms: the realm of science, which most of us can’t escape and which has brought us so many advances, technological, intellectual and in terms of expanded
understanding
; the phenomenological world, the world of Sartre’s
petites heureuses
, of art and poetry, the world of small, patient, non-competitive entityhood, which is its own form of understanding and so complements science. And the world of desire.

Not enough has been made of desire, perhaps, since Nietzsche made his pronouncement, though he was himself very much alive to the difference between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Advances have been made in this realm to widen the acceptable arenas of desire: for instance, homosexuals and women have had their lives, if not transformed, at least eased.

But there have been losses, setbacks and stalemates, too, one being in the matter of female circumcision, barbarically still practiced in several regions of the world.

James Joyce, back in the 1920s and ’30s, identified losses too (in
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake
). Joyce saw that with all the changes taking place around him, in Europe in particular, in terms of the family, living conditions, education, contraception, greater mobility and in the mass media, the great casualty in life would be
enduring love
; that this intimate form of fulfillment, available to everyone, would be much harder to achieve.

As the latest divorce figures would seem to show, not only do most people not achieve enduring love, they don’t
expect
it anymore; many may not think it worth achieving, or even be aware that it is an available goal. The recent French film
L’Amour
tells the story of an old couple who have experienced an enduring love and a life rich in music, but now in old age the wife has a stroke, then a second, and eventually becomes incapable of anything at all, let alone love. For her husband there is nothing left
to
love. Music is no consolation. He smothers her, out of enduring love, and commits suicide.

In this one sense, then, modern life is impoverished, is harder for us to find meaning within. Religious people might claim that they experience an enduring love for the church, or their God, but can a church or a God
reciprocate
like a wife, a husband or a partner? Is reciprocity not the essence, the pleasure of desire, the heart of its desirability? Is there anything more consoling, satisfying, fulfilling than to be desired, and to go on being desired? The many child-abuse scandals involving priests would seem to suggest that even a life spent in the church does not offer the kind of fulfillment of desire that adult human reciprocity bestows.

But the religious life also suffers greatly by comparison when it comes to naming. Religions—at least the great monotheisms—look back, by definition. Habermas is right, that many aspects of religious doctrine and ritual are rational, designed to ease the human condition; and this is the aim, too, of the new rituals Alain de Botton has suggested for atheists. But the greatest advance, if it can be called that, made by religion since Nietzsche is the idea that God is totally “other,” defined by . . . well, by being unnamable. By being, in a sense, nothing.

But where does that get us? In his recent book
Anatheism
(meaning “the return to God”), Richard Kearney states that, after the disasters of the twentieth century, traditional ideas of God can no longer be entertained. He discusses the work of such figures as Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Lévinas,
Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva and their views about what form religious belief can take now. But the opacity of both his own and their prose, the density of the lockjaw syntax, the difficulty they all experience in trying to name what Kearney concedes is the unnamable, makes his book the very opposite of poetry—rather than being a stay against confusion, his words at times
are
that confusion.
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He appears to be saying that some people just like being in a “faith-state,” prefer having faith to not having faith, and so will always be on the lookout for something to have faith
in
. Is this evidence for whatever is the object of their faith? No, but then faith doesn’t require evidence, and we are back where we started.

By this account, then, the latest developments in religion cannot give us meaning, or sensible purpose,
by definition
, because they define God as unnamable; they have no part to play in the ever expanding, forward-looking naming of the world. The lines from Wordsworth that grace the heading of this section have his unmistakable—and magnificent—stamp. But if one criticism may be leveled, they imply that what is left behind is static, whereas the world has moved on, in so many ways; and as the French philosopher and theologian Nicolas Malebranche said more than three hundred years ago, “The world is unfinished.”

So let us end by repeating the wise words of that great lover of poetic chestnuts, the philosopher Richard Rorty, referring to those who have named more of the world: “Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones.”