Pagans and Christians in the City
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30. Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
31. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 5.
32. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 3.
33. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 6–7.
34. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
35. See, e.g., United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013). For discussion, see Steven D. Smith, “The Jurisprudence of Denigration,” U.C. Davis Law Review 48 (2014): 675–701.
36. See, e.g., William Voegeli, “That New-Time Religion,” Claremont Review of Books 15, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 12 (reviewing several books that interpret current cultural conflicts as a clash of competing religiosities).
37. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 3.
38. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 5.
CHAPTER 2
Homo Religiosus
Our subject is T. S. Eliot’s thesis that the future of Western societies will be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism.” And so our first order of business, it might seem, would be to clarify just what “paganism” is, so that we could then consider what “modern paganism” might look like and how it might contrast with modern Christianity. Never fear: we will indeed address those matters in due course. But both paganism and Christianity are species within the genus of “religion,” and so, with apologies for the delay, our comparison will be improved if we first step back and try to get a grasp on what sort of thing “religion” is.
But that step back calls for a second one, because saying what “religion” is turns out to be no quick and easy task. Indeed, some scholars have concluded that the very idea of “religion” as a distinct thing or category is an artificial modern invention, devised for political or academic purposes.1 So, rather than attacking the question head-on, we may do better to sneak up on it from behind, so to speak, by starting with a different question that is closer to home—the question of human personhood. Not “What is religion?”—not to start off with—but rather, initially, “What are . . . we?”
Persons and “Interests”
That question—“What are we?”—is one that law, politics, history, and the social sciences seldom ask but always answer, at least implicitly. All these disciplines are concerned with people—with human beings—and so they necessarily proceed on the basis of presuppositions about what sorts of entities we humans are.2 Indeed, not only in academic studies but also in our day-to-day affairs, such presuppositions are implicit if mostly unnoticed in all our mundane discussions, decisions, and interactions. All these constantly involve people; all thus necessarily import assumptions about how people are constituted and what makes them—or rather us—behave in the sometimes comfortingly predictable, sometimes puzzling or bizarre, ways we behave.
Within legal studies (my own field), the subdiscipline that is probably most self-conscious in its assumptions about the nature of persons is law-and-economics. Economics, Richard Posner explains, “assum[es] that man is a rational maximizer of his ends in life, his satisfactions—what we shall call his ‘self-interest.’ ”3 This interest-seeking conception of the person is taken as axiomatic not only in economics, though, but also in many other academic neighborhoods, as in the virtually ubiquitous rational choice theory.
Perhaps more surprisingly, an interest-seeking conception can animate even thinking devoted not to maximizing satisfactions, but rather to articulating the meaning of justice. Thus, in the contractarian theory offered by John Rawls, probably the most influential political philosopher of the past half-century, the content of justice is derived from a thought experiment that conjectures about the political principles that would be selected by hypothetical persons in an “original position” situated behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents them from knowing the particular situations they will occupy in life.4 These contracting parties are presented as rational interest-seekers. Thus, Rawls describes “the principles of justice as those which rational persons concerned to advance their interests would consent to as equals.”5 These “rational persons” are motivated by a desire “to win for themselves the highest index of primary goods.”6 And Rawls explains that the “rational person . . . follows the plan which will satisfy more of his desires rather than less.”7
Usually the term “interests” is closely associated with “desires,” as Rawls says, or with “satisfactions,” as Posner puts it. What makes something an “interest,” in other words, is that humans in fact desire or feel a need for it, and feel (or at least expect to feel) “satisfaction” upon attaining it. Understood in this way, “interests” seem to be, at least in principle, empirically verifiable facts—and thus compatible with a hardheaded scientific approach to social understanding and to public decision making.8
To be sure, the term is elastic enough to be adapted to other purposes and meanings. For example, a theorist will occasionally try to add a normative dimension by distinguishing between merely “subjective” and more “objective” interests—or between what we do in fact want and what we should want, or what we would want if we were properly reflective. In this vein, Ronald Dworkin contrasted what he called “experiential interests” that we value “because and when they feel good” with “critical interests” that “represent critical judgments rather than just experiential preferences.”9
Nothing prohibits theorists from using the term in these expansive ways. If the term is construed too broadly, though, it risks becoming empty. For example, if the term is used in a more normative sense, as with Dworkin, the claim that “people should act to realize their (reflectively justifiable) interests” risks dissolving into the tautology that “people should act for the ends for which they should act.” Which is true enough, no doubt, but not very illuminating. On the whole, therefore, the “interest-seeking” conception seems most rigorous and useful—even for normative projects, like Rawlsian justice or economics in its prescriptive mode—when “interests” are understood as referring to actual human desires and satisfactions.
If the conception of persons as interest-seekers is powerfully influential, one reason is that the conception has much to recommend it. It resonates with a great deal in our experience. All of us do have interests or desires that we try to satisfy as fully and efficiently as possible (subject to a variety of constraints, perhaps). And yet, although the interest-seeking conception seems realistic and useful for many purposes, it does not comfortably fit all aspects of human experience. Sometimes people deliberately act in ways that do not seem calculated to advance their subjective wants and needs.
The most striking examples, probably, are instances in which people knowingly sacrifice a great deal—including, sometimes, their lives—for some moral purpose or noble cause. Like Antigone in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, a daughter or son gives up a satisfying life or a lucrative and fulfilling career in order to care for an aging parent. Or a person voluntarily sacrifices his or her life in defense of country, or to rescue someone in distress. At least in the ordinary sense of the term, these people do not appear to be acting to promote their own “interests.”
To be sure, as we have already noticed, the term “interest” is elastic enough that it can be stretched to cover these instances. We can simply say that a particular moral or heroically altruistic person felt a subjective desire to care for a parent—he must have, or why would he have done what he did?—or that he felt an “interest” in risking and sacrificing his life in order to defend his country. But this is often not how it appears, either to the person or to others who observe. The person and we would say that she sacrificed her own interests to help another, or to do what was right, or from a sense of duty. As noted, moreover, if the concept of “interests” is expanded to cover all these cases, the idea risks becoming empty and tautological. To say that “people act to advance their interests” is just to say that “
people act to do whatever they think or want their actions to do.” Which is to say nothing at all of any substance.
Religion as we conventionally think of it is an area in which the interest-seeking conception fits awkwardly.10 Even in an ostensibly “secular” age, millions of people still donate large sums of money to churches, or take time off from work or sacrifice recreation time to attend worship services that are often less than scintillating. They participate in church-sponsored service activities or regularly devote time to religious study, reflection, or prayer.11 Once again, like all human conduct, religious conduct can be described in interest-seeking terms. “John goes to church because he wants to meet people,” or “Susan donates to her church because she believes this will help her get to heaven.” Scholars have accordingly applied economic analysis to religion; such analyses have been illuminating at least with respect to some aspects of the subject.12 And yet, this sort of description does not capture all of religion; indeed, a purely interest-seeking piety is often thought to be a lesser or illegitimate kind of religion.
As an old saying has it, “man does not live by bread alone.”13 The interest-seeking conception captures and explains a good deal about humans and our dealings, but it does not seem to capture or explain everything about us. Perhaps not even the most important or essential things. Something—something that is arguably crucial—is left out, or is included only in distorted form. But what?
Persons and Meanings
Some thinkers suggest that an understanding of humans merely as interest-seekers fails to recognize that central part of human life that tries to discern meaning or purpose in life, and then to live in accordance with that meaning or purpose.14 In this vein, the psychologist Viktor Frankl argued that “man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but rather to see a meaning in his life.”15
Frankl’s view grew out of his own horrific experiences in Nazi death camps (in which his wife, father, mother, and brother died). He observed that the prisoners most likely to endure the grim brutalities of the camps were not necessarily those who were outwardly most healthy or fortunate, but rather those who had some purpose in their lives. Generalizing this insight, Frankl founded a school of psychology that he called “logotherapy.” “According to logotherapy,” he explained, “the striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.”16 What people most urgently need, he insisted, is a “why” for life;17 given this why, “man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.”18
Although developed in less excruciating circumstances, philosopher Susan Wolf’s more recent reflections on meaning run parallel to Frankl’s views. Wolf observes that many of the most important reasons we act do not fit with the psychology of self-interest—or, for that matter, in more purely “moral” imperatives. These reasons, rather, “engage us in the activities that make our lives worth living; they give us a reason to go on; they make our worlds go round. They, and the activities they engender, give meaning to our lives.”19 “What gives meaning to our lives gives us reasons to live even when the prospects for our own well-being are bleak.”20
If meaning can give us reason to live even when conditions are grim, the reverse is also true: the lack of meaning can make life seem empty or intolerable even when we seem to be flourishing—when it seems that all our “interests” are being satisfied. The point is poignantly developed in an autobiographical account by Leo Tolstoy, who explained how his own life, though outwardly prosperous in every imaginable way, became unbearable to him precisely because it seemed so meaningless.
My question, the one that brought me to the point of suicide when I was fifty years old, was a most simple one that lies in the soul of every person, from a silly child to a wise old man. It is the question without which life is impossible, as I had learnt from experience. It is this: what will come of what I do today or tomorrow? What will come of my entire life?
Expressed another way the question can be put like this: why do I live? Why do I wish for anything, or do anything? Or expressed another way: is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death that awaits me?21
To his dismay, Tolstoy discovered that he had no answer to these questions. “I could not attribute any rational meaning to a single act, let alone to my whole life.”22 This condition left the novelist with feelings of “fear, abandonment, loneliness” until he found meaning in religious faith—the faith not of the theologians and churchmen, in his case, but of the ordinary working people.23
So people do not merely pursue “interests”; they also seek—and seek to live in accordance with—“meaning.” But what is meaning, exactly? We talk about people having (or not having) a “meaningful” life, or about having (or not having) “purpose” in life. But what does “meaning” in this existential sense entail?
Sometimes the proponents of meaning appear to be contemplating something purely subjective and personal—something like the “projects” or “goals” that different people set for themselves. In this vein, Viktor Frankl sometimes described meaning as an “aim,” a “purpose,” or a “task”;24 these descriptions might suggest that the sort of meaning he had in mind was little more than a personally chosen goal that an individual might care about and pursue.25 Susan Wolf, similarly, says that meaning does not need to come from anything grand or heroic; it can be supplied by humble activities like gardening or practicing the cello.26
On this view, claims about the need for meaning may seem to boil down to something quite platitudinous: “Your life will be happier and more fulfilling if you have goals that you’re pursuing, or projects that you care about.” And yet, this merely subjective conception was insufficient for both Wolf and Frankl. Although meaning is associated with subjective satisfaction, Wolf observes, not all activities that people find satisfying are meaningful. After all, some people get subjective satisfaction from “smoking pot all day, . . . doing crossword puzzles, or worse (as personal experience will attest), Sudokus.”27 These activities may provide subjective satisfaction. But they do not make for “meaning” in life, Wolf contends, because they lack objective value.28 Wolf thus defends a “bipartite conception” in which “meaning” must have both a subjective and an objective dimension:29 it “arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.”30
And what is “objective” value or attractiveness, exactly? Wolf admits that she has no very satisfactory account of what “objective” value is; nor, she thinks, do other philosophers.31
While emphasizing the personal quality of meaning, likewise, Frankl stressed as well an objective, unchosen dimension of meaning. He disagreed with “some existentialist thinkers [like Sartre] who see in man’s ideals nothing but his own inventions.” Rather, “the meaning of our lives is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.”32 Without some larger or more encompassing meaning, the more mundane and personal meanings would lose their efficacy: “The question which beset me [in the death camps] was, ‘Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.’ ”33
Frankl occasionally talked in almost mystical terms of an “ultimate meaning” that “necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man,”34 or of an “infinite meaning of life” that “includes suffering and dying, privation and death,”35 and hence that could work to redeem even the horrific and senseless savagery of the death camps. The focus on “ultimate meaning” became more overt in Frankl’s later work. Neither in his earlier nor in his later work, however, could Frankl offer any very clear account of what “ultimate meaning” might be.36
Is “Meaning” Meaningful?
The difficulty of giving a good account of “ultimate meaning,” or (as Wolf acknowledges) of providing a satisfactory explanat
ion of the “objective value” that seems a necessary condition for meaning, may provoke a familiar objection: perhaps the very notion of “meaning,” or of “ultimate meaning,” is nothing more than a confusion of thought. More generally, the idea of “ultimate meaning” seems closely akin to the idea of a “meaning of meanings,”37 as Terry Eagleton puts it, or of a “meaning of life”—notions much scoffed at by skeptical thinkers. Queries about the “meaning of life” can have an adolescent or even comical feel to them; they evoke associations of Douglas Adams’s supercomputer (“Deep Thought”) that calculates the meaning of life to be . . . 42.38 Eagleton remarks that the very idea of a meaning of life “seems a quaint sort of notion, at once homespun and portentous, fit for satirical mauling by the Monty Python team.”39 The dedication of his book on “the meaning of life” reads “For Oliver, who found the whole idea deeply embarrassing.” (Tellingly, Eagleton was not deterred by the embarrassment and did not stop at the dedication; instead he proceeded to write a book on the question—though not one that purports to disclose what the meaning of life really is.)
In the deconstructive vein, the Oxford philosopher Antony Flew methodically dissected Tolstoy’s autobiographical account of his own angst-ridden quest for meaning and tried to show that the novelist was fundamentally confused.40 It was appropriate enough for Tolstoy to ask “Why?” or “What for?” with respect to various particular activities in his life—writing a book, educating his son, and so forth. But Tolstoy had perfectly good answers to those particular and sensible questions, Flew thought. Unfortunately, Tolstoy “would not take an answer for an answer”;41 he persisted in asking the “What for?” question beyond the point where the question made sense. He was like the child who keeps asking “Why?” when the most basic and only possible kind of response has already been given.42