Daemon Voices

by Philip Pullman

  I haven’t mentioned the obsession with targets and testing and league tables, the management-driven and politics-corrupted and jargon-clotted rubbish that so deforms the true work of schools.

  I haven’t mentioned something that might seem trivial; but I think its importance is profound and barely understood. That’s the difference between reading a story in a book, and watching a story on a screen. It’s a psychological difference, not just a technical one. We need to take account of it, and we’re not doing it, and I fear the school of morals is suffering as a result.

  I haven’t mentioned simple human wickedness. Or laziness, or greed, or fear, or the strongest regiment of all in the army of darkness: stupidity. Any of those can bring down the school of morals in a day.

  I haven’t mentioned death. I haven’t mentioned hazard, or the environmental recklessness that will do for us all if we don’t change our way of life.

  These are mighty forces, and I think they will defeat the school of morals, in the end. But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender. Nor does it mean we should turn the school of morals into a fortress, and surround it with rules and systems and procedures, and look out over the ramparts with suspicion and hostility. That would be a different kind of surrender.

  I think we should act as if.

  I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference.

  I think that while believing that the school of morals is probably doomed, we should act as if it were not. We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding; we should act as if life were going to win. We should act as if we were celebrating a wedding: we should act as if we were attending the marriage of responsibility and delight.

  That’s what I think they do, in the school of morals. And Miss Goddard’s portrait hangs on the classroom wall.

  THIS LECTURE WAS GIVEN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA IN 2005.

  God and Dust

  NOTES FOR A STUDY DAY WITH THE BISHOP OF OXFORD

  On not believing in the existence of God, on good and evil, on reading His Dark Materials, the meaning of Dust and the Republic of Heaven

  MORNING SESSION

  The first thing to say about the bishop’s arguments in his book (Richard Harries: God Outside the Box, SPCK, 2002) is that I agree with every word of them, except the words I don’t understand; and that the words I don’t understand are those such as spirit, spiritual and God.

  It may seem disingenuous to say I don’t understand them—surely I know what they mean? Take the words involving spirit: of course I know what my dictionary says:

  Spirit: the animating or life-giving principle in a person or animal; the intelligent non-physical part of a person; a prevailing mental or moral condition or attitude, a mood, a tendency; the real meaning as opposed to lip-service or verbal expression; an immaterial principle formerly thought to govern vital phenomena, etc.

  Spiritual: of or concerning the spirit as opposed to matter; concerned with sacred or religious things; holy; divine; refined, sensitive; concerned with the soul or spirit etc., not with external reality.

  Soul: the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being, often regarded as immortal; the moral or emotional or intellectual nature of a person…

  And so on. I know how others use these words, and I know how I would use them myself, and I have no difficulty understanding sentences containing them—I can manipulate them like coins or counters in a game and not break any rules and achieve a meaningful result within the context of the game.

  Nevertheless, it’s not a game I choose to enter. I would never begin to talk of a person’s spiritual life, or refer to someone’s profound spirituality, or anything of that sort, because it doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t talk about that sort of thing at all, because when other people talk about spirituality I can see nothing in it, in reality, except a sense of vague uplift combined at one end with genuine goodness and modesty, and at the other with self-righteousness and pride. That’s what they’re displaying. That’s what seems to be on offer when they interact with the world. And to my mind it’s easier, clearer, and more truthful just to talk about the goodness and modesty, or about the self-righteousness and pride, without going into the other stuff at all. So the good qualities that the word spiritual implies can be perfectly well covered, and more honestly covered, it seems to me, by other positive words, and we don’t need spiritual at all.

  But in fact my reaction to the word spiritual is even a little more strongly felt than that; I even feel a slight revulsion. I’m thinking of those portraits of saints and martyrs by painters of the Baroque period and the Counter-Reformation: horrible grubby-looking old men with rotten teeth wearing dark dusty robes and gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour; or beautiful young women in sumptuous clothes with wide eyes and parted lips gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour; or martyrs having the flesh ripped from their bones gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour—gazing at the Virgin Mary, or a vision of the cross, or something else that’s hovering in the air just above them. And you know that what they’re seeing isn’t really there; that if you were there in front of them, you wouldn’t see the Virgin sitting on a little cloud six feet above the floor—all you’d see would be the rotten teeth or the sumptuous clothes or the torture and the expression of fanatical fervour. They’re seeing things. They’re deluded, in fact.

  So the word spiritual, for me, has overtones that are entirely negative. It seems to me that whenever anyone uses the word, it’s a sign that either they’re deluding themselves, or they’re pulling the wool over the eyes of others. And when I hear it, or see it in print, my reaction is one of immediate scepticism.

  This is a problem for me to deal with, no doubt, because I know people of obvious honesty and sincerity and intelligence who use the word without embarrassment; but for someone to talk openly about “my spiritual life,” for example, is rather like someone talking about their sexual life—isn’t it private? Isn’t it something you ought to keep to yourself?

  Another word I have difficulty in using sensibly—to put it no more bluntly than that—is the word God. I don’t believe there is such a being, and I don’t think you can say anything true or useful about a being who doesn’t exist, and I don’t think it makes any sense to say, for example, “God loves each one of us as though we were the only person in the world.”

  This strikes me as being an assertion entirely unsupported by anything verifiable.

  Furthermore, I think that the argument put forward in the chapter of “The Silence of God” in God Outside the Box, that—in the quoted words of R. S. Thomas—“It is this great absence which is like a presence,” is an attempt to have your cake and eat it; it’s cheek on a colossal scale. Simone Weil: “Absence is the form in which God is present.”

  Presumably we’re talking about serious things here—as serious as the talk in a court of law, for example; and yet if you were being cross-examined and you said, “It’s the very fact that I did it that proves I didn’t,” I think you’d be lucky to escape a charge of contempt of court. The argument seems to run: “God is nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard; there is nothing to show he exists at all; and yet to believe in him is evidence not of mental derangement but of profound spirituality.”

  God comes into God Outside the Box all the time, and that’s precisely the difficulty I’ve had with it. Paragraph after paragraph of good human sense, all of which I agree with, and suddenly up pops a sentence that says, “It is part of God’s love for us that he has such a glorious vocation and destiny in mind for us.”

  I want to say: how do you know that? As soon as you say that, you leave me completely. There’s no need for it, I find myself thinking; it doesn’t add anything to the truth of what you’ve just said; it�
�s as if you were talking to someone who seemed level-headed and sensible, and suddenly heard them saying, “The fairies want us all to be kind to the flowers.” And then you said, “But there aren’t any fairies!” And the other person said, “Oh yes, the garden’s full of fairies. It’s the fact that you can’t see them that proves they’re there.”

  At some point you have to shrug and move on to talk about something else, such as the football results. You will never make intellectual contact on the subject of fairies with someone who is convinced that they exist. Similarly with God. I say, “He doesn’t exist,” and you say, “Oh, but he does,” and I say, “Oh, no he doesn’t,” and you say, “Oh, yes, he does…”

  And we get nowhere.

  The believer has to explain the lack of evidence for God in terms that become more and more ingenious. One such example is that offered on page 153: we are not close to God physically, because we couldn’t be: the material world serves as a necessary sort of screen between us and him. If we were too close to him, we’d be drawn in like moths to a candle flame, unable to resist his goodness, beauty, splendour, etc. So as an act of mercy, God has put the screen of the material world between us, and given us freedom of thought and movement.

  Well, it’s ingenious.

  So were the epicycles.

  In the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the Earth was imagined to be the centre of the universe, and everything revolved around it. The trouble was that the sun and the moon and the planets didn’t seem to move regularly, as you’d think they should. They’d go a bit too fast or a bit too slow, and sometimes they’d even seem to go backwards for a bit, and altogether it was very hard to see the perfection up there that there should be.

  But astronomers realised that they could interpret the actual movement they saw by saying that the planets moved not in perfect circles but in epicycles—little loops along the big circle of their orbit. That took care of the irregular movement; everything made sense again.

  Until the better instruments and closer observation that came with time showed that the epicycles didn’t explain everything. There were still movements that didn’t make sense, that couldn’t be understood in terms of orbits and epicycles.

  So they invented epicycles on epicycles: not only loops in the orbit, but loops around the loops around the orbit. Once more everything was explained. It was complicated, to be sure, but God was wonderful, after all, and how much more wonderful that he had created the ingenious brain of mankind in order to understand and glorify the complexity of his work!

  But the instruments got better and better and the observations kept on piling up, and yet more irregularities appeared. It began to look as if an infinite regression of ingenuity would be required to deal with the complexity of the whole thing.

  Until the simple notion came from the mind of Copernicus: if we interpreted the evidence differently, the ingenuities were unnecessary. Suppose that everything went round the sun instead of going round the Earth: at once everything became gloriously clear, and simple too. No need for epicycles at all!

  So it is with those who have to explain why, given that God exists, we have no evidence for him. The explanations become more and more complicated, more and more ridiculous, like P. H. Gosse and his explanation for fossils: naturally, God wouldn’t have created an imperfect world, and a world without a history would have been imperfect; so he put the fossils there at the same time as he created everything else, to give it the appearance of a history.

  These epicyclic explanations are all unnecessary; all the futile clutter of complexity upon complexity, ingenuity upon ingenuity, paradox upon dazzling paradox—it’s all swept away at once, it all becomes gloriously clear and simple, once we realise that there is no God and never was. We don’t have to go into fits of distorted logic, or to insist that nonsensical things are true (but true in a deep way, not like ordinary truth) if we just accept that God is not there. The absence is really an absence, and means no more than that: there’s no one there.

  * * *

  —

  EVIL IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS THAT MAKES SENSE WHEN IT’S AN adjective, but which raises difficult questions when you use it as a noun. We can say, “That is an evil deed” or even, “He was an evil man,” though I think someone has to be dead before you can sum them up and say for certain—but it is a step too far to go from that to saying that there is something, a quality, a presence, a force of evil in the abstract.

  Because that sort of objectifies it, personifies it, reifies it. It doesn’t mean it exists.

  Nevertheless when we look at some historical phenomena, and some not so far in the past, we can seem to see people caught up in a sort of vortex of emotion and activity that leads to deeds so evil, so grotesquely far beyond anything we can see ourselves doing, that we feel unable to explain except by appealing to some power beyond the rational, the normal, the everyday. I mean, of course, the Nazi regime, or the massacres in Rwanda, as well as the sort of folie à deux murders committed by the Wests, the Moors murderers, and so on. I don’t mean individual psychopaths for a moment; we can sort of grasp the notion that some people just don’t have a sense of right and wrong—I mean the sort of thing when people seem to be possessed by a power greater than themselves. When others are drawn in too, and they seem to surrender their conscience. What’s the explanation of that?

  One explanation would be that there is a power of evil, a sort of disembodied power, which floats around freely until it enters into human beings and makes them behave like this. It would be a good explanation if it were possible to believe in it, but it isn’t, for me. I don’t think there’s any such thing. I think a better explanation is Bishop Richard Holloway’s: that when human beings come together, in a crowd or a mass movement or a body with one sort of aim, their psychologies can resonate together and reinforce each other. If you looked into it scientifically you’d probably find it was a matter of very small subliminal clues of behaviour which are picked up under the level of conscious awareness, and mimicked, which in turn are picked up by the people who send the clues out, thus modifying their behaviour, and so it resonates back and forth, getting amplified as it does. The same sort of thing probably happens when flocks of birds seem to wheel and turn as one, as if they’re controlled by a sort of super-mind. They’re not, but they look as if they are. In the end it really does probably feel as if this force is bigger than you are as an individual, and you have no choice but to go along with it, and you’re not to blame for whatever happens.

  This is the sort of thing that was probably meant by the phrase “institutional racism” with reference to the police, after the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. A lot of the criticism of that came from people who thought that every police officer was thus being called racist, but it was different from that, I think.

  It would be easier to understand if you looked at a positive example of this seemingly disembodied thing instead of a negative one, and called it esprit de corps. Esprit de corps is the sort of positive, good, beneficial, praiseworthy form of this psychological resonance and amplification; soldiers in a regiment are imbued with a sort of invisible armature of decent and brave behaviour by this feeling, which again is picked up by a hundred little examples, some too small to see consciously, of pride in one another and in the regiment’s history and in all the little daily traditions of courtesy and fellowship as well as great examples of honour and courage in battle. I think we can understand that without having recourse to the supernatural.

  And “institutional racism” is probably an example of exactly the same psychological process, but working in a negative way, morally speaking: young officers see and hear their elders and superiors using language or making jokes, or overlooking remarks that they make, which have a racist tendency. The general assumption is that that’s the way we, the force, the canteen, the people in uniform—us—that’s the way we see things. It all resonates
and gets amplified.

  And because a lot of this is subliminal and unconscious and never actually put into “racist” words—it might be there in the slightest sigh or eye-rolling when anyone objects, or a lapse into false jocularity in the presence of a black officer, or that sort of thing—it’s easy to deny that it exists, and it’s even easy to believe that it doesn’t.

  I think these examples of psychological resonance and amplification are quite enough by themselves to explain how human beings can seem to be possessed by “evil.” We don’t need a devil. We don’t need a “force of evil.”

  Similarly, I personally don’t feel the need to evoke any supernatural power when trying to explain examples of great human goodness. Human beings are perfectly capable both of the most appalling wickedness and of great and incomprehensible goodness and self-sacrifice. I particularly dislike that sort of cynical view of things that says human beings are evil all through, selfish by nature and design, incapable of doing anything generous or good except for some hidden selfish motive. Christians are supposed to believe this, because of Original Sin. Nothing that a human being can do unaided is any good at all, and the only way you can get anything decent or good out of a human being is by the grace of God. So we are to blame for our defects, but we’re not allowed any credit for our merits. My view is that we are responsible for both.