Even so, the two dimensions of secularism can be taken and appreciated separately. It is entirely possible to endorse political secularism without embracing a more comprehensive secularism20 (and perhaps, at least in principle, vice versa).21 And of the two versions, the philosophical or comprehensive secularism is more far-reaching in its implications—and (for some) more unsettling.
The Abolition of the Sacred
The comprehensive secularization associated with a scientific or naturalistic worldview implies, as Max Weber put it, the “disenchantment of the world.”22 Science and secularism can thus be viewed as completing a process that Christianity set in motion. The classical world was “enchanted”; it was full of gods. Every hill, every valley, every stream or lake had its proper deity. Though capable of jealousy and vengefulness, these deities could also be quite alluring—like the nubile nymphs who inhabited woods and rivers (and who gave their name to the term “nymphomania”), or like the comely Calypso who on her island of Ogygia hosted the forlorn wayfarer Odysseus and consoled him with seductive singing as a prelude to more intimate amenities. Then Judaism and later Christianity came and banished all these fearsome or delightsome gods in favor of the one true God—a stern and lofty sovereign, alas, who was incorporeal and metaphysically detached from time and space. So the world itself—the knowable world, the world we humans actually live in—became less immediately charged with divinity. The naturalism of modern comprehensive secularism in turn dissolves that far-off God as well, leaving the cosmos bereft of sacredness and enchantment altogether.
This view of the world suggests a different kind of existential orientation. In previous chapters we considered two such orientations. One, associated with paganism, is an immanently religious orientation that affirms the reality of the sacred but locates that sanctity within nature, or within life in this world. The other, associated with Christianity, asserts a transcendent sanctity that, while entering into the world, ultimately lies beyond nature. By contrast to these orientations, the modern secularism associated with scientific naturalism denies the existence of the sacred altogether. The modern conception is ontologically egalitarian, so to speak; in a universe consisting of matter and energy and nothing else, there is no space or category for a different order of being (or beyond being) corresponding to either Christian or pagan descriptions of “the holy,” or “the sacred.” There are only different, more or less complex arrangements or systems of matter.23
So a man is more complex than an amoeba, and is capable of functions that an amoeba cannot perform: an amoeba cannot write a philosophical treatise or play a violin concerto. But in terms of their basic substance, both boil down to the same common elements—the same kinds of molecules, just more or fewer of them, and differently arranged. And of each we can say that “it is what it is”: neither man nor amoeba has some sort of “purpose” or telos that transcends its temporary material existence. In this vein, biologist E. O. Wilson observes that “no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment.”24
A poignant, quietly heroic (or perhaps mock heroic) statement of this brave new spiritually desolate condition comes from the philosopher Bertrand Russell:
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.25
Is the Disenchanted World Fit for Humans?
As this picture began to emerge in the course of secularization, a question was often raised along with it: Can human beings actually live under the apprehension of such a forbiddingly empty, intrinsically meaningless world? Writing in the aftermath of World War II, the Princeton philosopher Walter Stace was doubtful. Science, he said, had given us “a new imaginative picture of the world. The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion.”26 This new worldview, Stace thought, “though silent and unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world.”27 That was because “if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless.”28
From out of this Qoheleth-like, “all is vanity” despair, Stace nonetheless mustered up the faint hope that “philosophers and intellectuals generally . . . [might] discover a genuine secular basis for morals.”29 And indeed, both well before and since Stace, “philosophers and intellectuals generally” had and have devoted themselves to this project. So, how have they fared?
One common approach, usually described as utilitarian or consequentialist, sees morality in instrumentalist terms as the business of prescribing how life should be lived so as to satisfy human desires or preferences as fully and efficiently as possible. As discussed in chapter 2, this kind of morality is taken as axiomatic in disciplines like economics and rational choice theory that are based on the “interest-seeking” conception of the person. And indeed, an interest-satisfying or preference-fulfilling consequentialism does seem to be the normative posture most congruent with the disenchanted world of philosophical naturalism. Humans exist—the product of a long evolutionary process—and they have desires and preferences: these, it seems, are natural, empirically observable facts. Some actions or policies will satisfy these desires or preferences more fully or more efficiently than others; this also is a matter subject to empirical study (even if the questions are often complex and the answers contested). Thus, an interest-oriented instrumentalism seems the natural and prescribed posture within a naturalistic worldview.
But the consequentialist, instrumentalist approach also generates familiar objections. It has seemed to many that however legitimate it may be in its own right, the enlightened pursuit of self-interest or the satisfaction of desires is just not what we understand morality or ethics to be about.30 And if the goal of morality is nothing more lofty than the satisfaction of desires, why should anyone ever care about the good of others, except in a self-serving, quid pro quo way? What is the warrant for generosity, altruism, self-sacrifice? For heroism? For love?
The utilitarian David Hume tried to address such challenges by postulating a human quality of sympathy; we happen to be constituted so that we actually do care about our fellows,31 and so we help them because our own happiness is connected to theirs. Well, maybe, sometimes anyway—but there is surely a good deal in observable human behavior to cast doubt on Hume’s happy and highly convenient anthropology. For a man reputed to be the consummate hardened skeptic, Hume seems remarkably sanguine on this point. And it is hard to know what exactly to say to the idiosyncratic person who introspects and finds no such sympathy or fellow feeling in himself. Why should that person avoid trampling on others if he can profit thereby? The sociopath, it seems, or the egoist is not inherently either more or less intrinsically praiseworthy than the philanthropist or the saint; these are just people who happen to be constituted with different desires and interests.
Consequentialists have rebuttals to these objections,32 of course; we cannot and need not rev
iew the debates here. Those who find the rebuttals unpersuasive will look elsewhere for an account of morality. And perhaps the other most influential effort to ground morality on assumptions of secular rationality lies in the Kantian approach, resting on a declared “categorical imperative” to act only on maxims or principles that we can will to be universal laws.33 The imperative is thought to arise out of our nature as rational beings.
But again, doubts arise. If you can improve your personal situation by acting on self-serving considerations, why should you refrain just because you wouldn’t want everyone else to act on the same considerations? (“Because you would be acting against reason,” says the Kantian—“performatively contradicting yourself.” “No problem,” say you; “that doesn’t bother me.” “But then you would not have the purity and freedom of a wholly rational agent.” “Like I said, Immanuel, it doesn’t bother me.”) And in any case, if like Kant you happen to be queasy about performative self-contradiction, then with just a little ingenuity you should be able to formulate a universalizable maxim for anything you’re inclined to do. (“Take what you want if you’re confident you won’t get caught and are tough enough to protect your own stuff.” “Always act in the way most beneficial to [fill in your own name here].”)
Perhaps you’ll be told: “Your maxim can’t include proper nouns, especially including your own name.” But why not? Where’s the logical inconsistency in using proper nouns? Someone may say: “Because that kind of maxim wouldn’t be a moral one”; but to say that would be to beg the question. Suppose, though, that some Kantian pounds the table and insists on the prohibition. Well, you can get around it through the same tactic of generic individuation legislators sometimes use to avoid constitutional prohibitions on “special legislation.” If the New York legislature can’t enact a law specifically for New York City, it can pass one covering “any city with a population of over eight million,” or whatever. With a little ingenuity, I can do the same thing with my moral maxims; so can you.
The part of Kant that seems most promising, and that moralists perhaps most rely on, is his injunction that we should always treat people as ends rather than as means.34 This edifying prescription seems to supply more substantive moral content than does a formalistic command to avoid contradicting oneself. But once again, why must we do this—treat everyone as ends? Why, on naturalistic assumptions, that is? It seems difficult or impossible to derive the injunction from the basic categorical imperative, even if we accept that imperative: without logically contradicting yourself, you can adopt (and can enthusiastically will to be universal law) the maxim that “[Fill in your name] is to be treated as an end, and everyone else is to be treated as a means.” What you perhaps cannot consistently do is assert in an exclusive way that “I deserve to be treated as an end” or “I have a right to be treated as an end”—because any grounds of desert or worthiness you might offer for yourself (self-consciousness? rationality? linguistic capabilities? a capacity for free choice? a capacity to formulate a life plan?) would apply to other humans as well. But then, why would you need or want to formulate your maxim in this more vulnerable way anyway?
From a detached perspective, such claims (“Beings with rationality and a capacity for free choice have intrinsic worth and hence are to be treated as ends not means”) look like frail attempts to salvage or smuggle back something from the more meaning-laden, consecrated world—namely, the sacred—that the naturalistic, disenchanted world is supposed to have eliminated. Without some such tacit smuggling operation, the move from “James has the capacity to formulate a life plan” to “James is intrinsically valuable and entitled to respect” looks like a stark non sequitur. Looked at from the outside, those who invoke Kantian ethics thus seem intent on recovering something like the Judeo-Christian idea that every person is sacred—or of infinite worth, or possessed of intrinsic dignity—because made by and in the image of God.
But on purely naturalistic premises, this appeal would seem to be unavailable. Human beings are rather highly complex systems of interacting molecules formed through aeons of blind natural selection. “Straw dogs,” as John Gray affirms.35 Or, as Stephen Hawking explains, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”36
So both the consequentialist and Kantian strategies seem less than compelling. It is impossible, of course, decisively to dispose of several centuries of moral philosophizing, or of a system as intricate and sophisticated as Kant’s, in a few paragraphs. (It may also seem presumptuous, and irreverent, to treat so summarily and casually positions that earnest philosophers have pondered and pontificated on for many decades now.) We need not pretend to anything conclusive here, though; it is sufficient to say that philosophers have tried to provide a secular basis for ethics, but whether they have succeeded is questionable.37
Suppose for the sake of argument, though, that the secular arguments have succeeded—succeeded, that is, in supplying a secular basis for ethics, or “morality.” Would that be enough to make the world a commodious abode for humans? How can “morality,” often perceived mostly as a source of irksome restrictions, instead affirmatively make life worth living? We saw in chapter 2 that thinkers like Viktor Frankl and Susan Wolf argue that what people ultimately need is neither the satisfaction of their “interests” nor mere “morality,” but rather something those thinkers describe as “meaning.” And meaning, as Wolf argues, requires objective value—something she admits philosophers have had difficulty explaining.38 Even a successful version of “secular morality,” though imposing duties, might not supply such meaning; it might leave human life more morally respectable, perhaps, but also more restricted—and still empty and pointless.
So then, what to do? One alternative would be to accept the truth, bleak though it may be—to build on Russell’s “firm foundation of unyielding despair”—and thus perhaps to live out our days in this disenchanted and purposeless world in (as Stace recommended) “quiet content, accepting resignedly what cannot be helped, not expecting the impossible, and being thankful for small mercies.”39 There is venerable precedent in antiquity for this course of quietist resignation, in the Epicurean way of life.40 Or, if we find this deflationary approach to life insufficiently fulfilling, we might instead embrace the necessity of fictions or illusions that offer direction and value to our lives, even though, upon reflection (from which we would be prudent to abstain), these would have to be regarded as merely illusory.41 There is not really any point to our lives, but it is pleasant to pretend otherwise.
From a different perspective, though, all this gloominess will seem puzzling, and gratuitous. That is because nothing in science requires us to accept the picture of a purposeless, meaningless, disenchanted cosmos described (sometimes, it almost seems, with a kind of smug bravado, or sometimes with a heavy touch of indulgent self-pity) by scientists like Wilson or philosophers like Russell. Conversely, much in human experience contradicts and subverts that picture.
Or at least, so many believe. In this respect, it is clear that the predictions of religion’s decline spawned by the secularization story have turned out to be embarrassingly mistaken, or at least grossly premature. The embarrassment is apparent in two phenomena, one quite obvious and the other less so.
The obvious phenomenon is the persistence of traditional, transcendent religion. The less obvious development is the reappearance in surprising cultural quarters of immanent religion—or of what might be described as modern paganism.
The Persistence of Transcendent Religion
Writing in 1968, the sociologist Peter Berger expressed a common view in predicting that “by the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a world-wide secular culture.”42 By century’s end, though, it had become apparent that Berger and like-minded thinkers were badly off base, at least in their projections. Religion had not withered away; indeed, it showed no sign of receding (although there were indications of some migration).
Berger admitted as much. “The assumption that we live in a secularized world is false,” he later declared. “The world today, with [the] exceptions [of Europe and of ‘an international subculture composed of people with Western-type higher education’], is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken.”43
In a similar vein, in a recent book called God’s Century, three political scientists argue that religion continues to be a powerful force in politics worldwide and is likely to remain so in coming decades. Indeed, both religion and religious influence on politics have actually grown stronger over the last several decades.44 Canadian political scientist Ran Hirschl reports resignedly that “approximately half of the world’s population, perhaps more, now lives in polities where religion not only has remained public but also has been playing a key role in political and constitutional life.”45
Ardent secularists may deplore this development, depicting traditional religion as backward-looking and ignorant or contemptuous of science. The depiction fits some believers but not others. There is, to be sure, a substantial “fundamentalist” constituency in America and elsewhere that rejects the theory of evolution, for example.46 But there are also many other believers, including devout scientists, who see science and religious belief as complementary, not conflicting.47
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 32