The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  His view of Jesus was the same as Bonhoeffer’s, that he was “a man for others.” Robinson insisted Jesus was not a “God-Man,” did not have a dual nature, was not a God incarnate walking about on earth; rather, he was a man who never claimed anything special for himself, but so loved others that he always put them first (and that, Bonhoeffer said, was what Christians should seek to do). One of Bonhoeffer’s main points, which Robinson followed, was that to lead a moral life one should not wait when confronted with evil; that to wait always means we begin to put our own interests before others’, which are the urgent ones.

  Most theothanatologists did not appear to think that God would remain dead. The traditional idea of God was dead, yes, but after a period of waiting, a new pattern, a new idea of what used to be called God, would come into view. Meanwhile, we should wait and hope. They did not turn to the other figures discussed in this book. To that extent, their minds were closed.

  21

  “Quit Thinking!”

  I

  n the lengthening wake of the Second World War, with more and more people turning away from God, three movements in the arts sought to show how we might make sense of—and address—the changes that were occurring, and how we might seek new ways of fulfillment. The first of these was minimalism; then the “culture of spontaneity”; and third, one that concerned a new understanding of the body’s role in the search for meaning, the culture of “kinetic knowledge.” What they had in common was what the jazz musician Charlie “Bird” Parker advised his disciples: that in expressing themselves they should—as D. H. Lawrence had advised Bertrand Russell in an earlier time—“Quit thinking!”

  “THE ABLATION OF DESIRE”

  As the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, art less and less referred to anything outside itself, and there was a refusal to find patterns of any kind, either among objects or events. Rather, there was an insistence on the absence of order, the random quality of experience. This was, many felt, the death of God followed to its logical conclusion.

  Such thinking certainly applies to that foundational work of minimalism, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Beckett is famous for his bleak view of life, his obsession with suffering, his preoccupation, as his friend and publisher John Calder summed him up, with “the search for meaning in the world . . . [he was] unable to come to any conclusion about purpose, unable to believe in any creed or even any personal philosophy other than maintaining a dogged stoicism.” Or, as Beckett himself put it in a discussion with Georges Duthuit, an art critic with whom he played chess in Paris, “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”1

  Born in 1906 near Dublin, Beckett was the son of well-to-do Protestants. After Trinity College, Dublin, and a spell of teaching, he traveled across Europe, meeting his fellow Irishman James Joyce in Paris. They became friends. Beckett then settled for a while in London, and in 1934 began psychoanalysis with Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic. Bion was a colleague of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, who had brought to the fore his concept of the “transitional object.” Many babies, as they are weaned from the breast and come to face the beginnings of independence, make use of a “transitional object” such as a soft cuddly toy or a small blanket, from which they cannot be separated. Winnicott thought this phenomenon entirely healthy (provided it didn’t last too long).

  It is certainly possible, according to some psychoanalytical critics of Beckett’s work, that it influenced the playwright’s view of God as a sort of transitional object in the lives of many adults, a purely psychological entity, but one that wasn’t temporary. Though Christian symbolism peppers his works, as it peppered Joyce’s, Beckett dismissed the God that is worshipped in churches as “a very small God”—one who is portrayed like a king, a man, who apparently enjoys being worshipped and taking credit for the “accidental good things around us,” and who is “never blamed for the multiple evils of the world.”2

  Waiting for Godot was written in four months, starting in early October 1948, a time when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh in the mind, when the full horror of the Holocaust was still emerging, as were the details of Stalin’s Great Terror. Beckett also had horrors of his own: the play was written during two years when, fearful that a growth found in his cheek was signaling his end, he squirreled himself away to write. In that time he produced Godot and what is often referred to as the “trilogy”—Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Godot was not produced until 1953. Despite mixed reviews, his friends having to “corral” people into attending, it turned out to have been worth the wait.

  It is a spare, sparse play; its two main characters (there are five in all) occupy a stage that is bare save for a solitary tree. The play is notable for its long periods of silence, its repetitions of dialogue (when dialogue occurs), its lurches between often witty metaphysical speculation and banal cliché, the near-repetition of the action, such as it is, in the two halves of the play, and the non-appearance of the eponymous Godot. Despite all of this, it is wonderfully entertaining.

  Godot was cleverly summed up by one critic: “Nothing happens, twice!” The two tramps are waiting for Godot: we don’t know why they are waiting, where they are waiting, how long they have been waiting, or how long they expect to wait. Beckett stated more than once that Godot is not God, but in his apparent remoteness, it must be said, he is very like God; and the two tramps need a savior to help them out of their dilemma. Of course, if God does not exist, as Beckett held, there was no “him” or “it” for Godot to be like in the first place.

  In personal terms, Beckett was a mild and courteous man, but his view of our predicament was extreme. He spent several years in the French Resistance during the war (a war in which Ireland was never a combatant), which forced him into months in hiding. This gave him, as many have remarked, an intense and dangerous experience of waiting. He concluded that the speculations of Sartre and the other existentialists were pointless. For Beckett, science had produced a cold, empty, dark world in which, as more details emerged, the bigger picture drained away, if only because words were no longer enough to account for what we know, or think we know. In a letter to his fellow playwright Harold Pinter he said, “If you insist on finding form [for my play] I’ll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That’s the kind of form my work has.”3

  Beckett was convinced that man is unimprovable and that evil exists. The first step was to recognize it in oneself; second, even life’s victims are often evil themselves—evil is all around. His view was that the original sin lies in being born at all—Beckett at his most extreme. Birth, he maintained, is foisted on us by our parents, and life is the punishment for it. This led him to the view that the only antidote to the continuance of human suffering “must lie in an awareness of consequence, so those responsible enough to realize what the consequences are likely to be, can develop the discipline to overcome nature’s compulsion to procreate.” John Calder tells us that the sight of children saddened Beckett. “He thought there should be children’s lanes on streets”—for baby carriages and nannies and strollers—so the rest of us, Beckett in particular, could avoid them.

  Women, he said, are more endowed by nature with the desire to procreate than are men, and so he often cast women in highly stylized roles, as temptress, whore, the destroyer of peace, “forcing her physical demands on man, who becomes torn between his natural lust and his desire for freedom.” It follows from this that companionship and friendship among males are what he highlighted in his most moving works: “It is the antidote to loneliness, and without the complications of sex.” Beckett also pinpointed the difference between friendship and comradeship. Comradeship is love created by need and experience—with comrades there is a degree of tension “because the goal is not arrival but the jo
urney.” Waiting for Godot contains a realistic version of love as comradeship, a bonding that will surely last so long as the protagonists survive. In the play, Vladimir and Estragon agree and disagree without rancor. This, too, may have been a lesson learned amid the hardships and dangers of the wartime Resistance.

  There are elements, almost, of Buddhism in some of Beckett’s views. He was fond of quoting the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, who said that “wisdom consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” For him, as for the Buddha, the pain of living cannot be avoided; it can at best be reduced, partly by the reduction of desire.4

  His view of happiness and its attainment was also very much his own. Happiness is possible in the course of a life, but, if we examine it closely, only when it is already in the past. “Present happiness, if one is aware of it, is really a celebration of some event that has just been accomplished: this could be some career triumph or a successful sexual coupling, but as soon as one is aware of being happy the reason for it has ended.”5

  For Beckett, even art was no real help. It was a kind of trap to divert our eyes from the dreadful realities of life and the true horror of our predicament. We must turn back again so as to starkly face the horror, which was for him the only way to be truly alive.6

  Life is like picking at a wound; we have a strange love-hate relationship with the sore. He thought that modern ideas about God had become increasingly abstract, like paintings, and, “like paintings, abstract Gods fail to convince anyone other than those who conceive them.”7 One of the primary purposes of all religions has been to solemnize respect for authority and instill obedience through habit and fear. Part of living, therefore, entailed for him a constant attack on Christianity, and he did this by having his characters pick at the absurdities of belief and ritual, raising the questions the priests never raise, gradually removing the Church’s vestments until it was embarrassingly naked.8 Picking away at the sores of life, and at a church that didn’t focus on these sores, that ignored the malignity all around, was for him a way to live; a suitably small repertoire of actions that reflects our minimal stature and effectiveness. To get through life we need two things: the courage of the Stoics and the “wisdom to discard”—another ablation—not only possessions but also what he called the mythology of success and the sense of our own personal value and our desires, which are the fuel of ambition. Only if we do that can we enjoy the wait.

  DOUBTS OVER DEPTH

  Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Jasper Johns took Beckett’s minimalism further, adopting styles that were deliberately neutral, carefully devoid of affect, their objective being to blur the boundary between illusion and reality, between art and everyday life, between being extremely serious and being bland. Creativity would no longer be the private monopoly of “creative” people. This went totally against the high ideals of modernism, the minimalist sensibility embracing the elimination of craftsmanship, even of the artist himself, or at least “a drastic reduction of his role as an interpreter of experience.” Artists such as Donald Judd, Kenneth Noland, Carl Andre, Frank Stella and Robert Morris openly removed from their art all metaphorical allusiveness and meaning. And pop art had much the same intention: one favored technique was to use facsimiles of industrially produced artifacts without commentary or attitude—the central aesthetic was: let things be, let them be themselves. It was, in a way, a form of phenomenology.

  Ad Reinhardt was a perfect example. He specialized in monochromatic canvases that were intended to defy interpretation or analysis. By the same token, the minimalists stuck to the surface of things and steadfastly refused to look beneath. “It is part of the vulgarism of our culture,” said Carl Andre, “to ask ‘What does it mean?’ A work of art means what it appears to mean and nothing more. Art should make no attempt to refer to anything outside itself, that we can experience more authentically elsewhere. . . . Urban experience emphasizes the superficial, and denies interiority. Our culture contains too many objects already. We now require a significant blankness.”9 Together with Andre, the minimalists and the pop artists repudiated uniqueness and objected to permanence, adopting what one critic called “a self-protective silence,” refusing the pains of self-revelation.

  These artists were very serious about what they saw as the lack of a need for depth, about the fact that “depth” was for them a false metaphor, that it somehow put off living until later (because “depth” is itself a metaphysical mystery that requires time to explore). They were keen to show that we are too concerned with thinking and attach too much meaning to the very concept of meaning.

  The arch-advocate of this view is Thomas Pynchon, whose “ambitious but intentionally inconclusive” novels dramatize the sheer difficulty of holding oneself together in a world without meaning or coherent patterns. His books work by exploring what we might call the pathology of the quest for meaning. His characters suspect “plots” everywhere, but there is never any clear sight of the “Ultimate Plot that has no name.” And this, as several observers have pointed out, leads to paranoia, “which serves as a substitute for religion because it provides the illusion that history obeys some inner principle of rationality, one that is hardly comforting but that is preferable to the terrors of anti-paranoia.” The point of Pynchon’s books is that they manufacture an illusion of meaning, a plot where everything fits—“Paranoia is the discovery that everything fits.” But since Pynchon’s plots lead nowhere, his work becomes a parody of the romantic chase after meaning and the selfhood that goes with it.

  In the many shadows of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Great Terror, the Berlin Wall and so much else, the minimal sensibility cast doubt not just on the existence of God, but also on the very possibility of deep spiritual life, even an artistic life. Indeed, at times it mocked such an aspiration.

  THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE EGO

  One rainy night in 1953 on the Lower East Side of New York City, Rob Reisner, a budding writer and impresario, came across the jazz legend Charlie Parker, all alone on the street. Reisner couldn’t believe his luck and immediately engaged him in conversation. It turned out that “Bird,”I then at the height of his fame as one of the most innovative jazz musicians of all time, was pacing the nighttime streets, alone, because his wife was in the course of giving birth and he was trying to manage his anxiety.

  Within two years of this encounter Parker was dead, at the tragically young age of thirty-five. He had had a legendary capacity for drugs and alcohol, which had led to his arrest, incarceration in a psychiatric hospital and the need to carry a pistol in his pocket, alongside the precious mouthpiece of his saxophone, just in case he should get “jumped” by one or other of the unstable characters that peopled the drug underworld.

  Reisner, who later became curator-librarian of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, was interested in the wider significance of Parker, and of jazz itself. In the definitive biography, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, which he edited in 1962, comprising interviews with eighty-one contemporaries and assessing Parker’s cultural importance, Reisner identified “the hipster” as being “to the Second World War what the Dadaist was to the First. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and over-civilized to the point of decadence. . . . He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions—so what values are left for him?—except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that ‘be cool,’ and look for kicks.”10

  To be “cool” sounds like a minimalist ideal, and so it was. But Reisner was identifying a different, though no less influential, trait: spontaneity, improvisation. The art forms of jazz (bebop in particular), the works of the Abstract Expressionists and action (or “gesture”) painters, the writings of “beat” novelists and poets such as Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson, the dance styles of Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp, the Zen potters like Mary Caroline Richards—all these emplo
yed spontaneity in much the same way as the Dadaists did, as Reisner foresaw. Its use aimed to avoid the constricting and restricting influence of the ego, to unleash what were felt to be the far healthier forces of the unconscious. And this applied to drugs, too, which were also felt to liberate inner impulses kept in check by our conscious minds.

  The “spontaneous gesture,” says Daniel Belgrad in his study of the culture of spontaneity, was “a sign of the times.”11 Science, corporate liberalism, the mass media were together reducing American life (and by implication Western life) in its aims and enjoyments. This was seen as a form of oppression and alienation not anticipated by Marx—amid material abundance here was spiritual poverty. Against this, Belgrad identified various enclaves around the country dedicated to resisting this ideology: Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the “bohemias” of North Beach, San Francisco, and Greenwich Village, New York. At the San Remo bar in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, a visitor would soon have run into scores of people engaged in some aspect of the post-war aesthetic of spontaneity . . . Paul Goodman, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollock, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac.

  The culture of spontaneity developed an alternative metaphysics that can be summarized as “intersubjectivity and mind-body holism.” Corporate liberalism embraced objectivity, which was the basis of its advanced technological mastery over nature. Spontaneity countered this with intersubjectivity, “in which ‘reality’ was understood to emerge through a conversational dynamic. Objectivity understood ‘rationality’ to be defined exclusively by an intellect that separated objective truths from subjective perceptions; thus it posited a dichotomy of mind and body. By contrast, the [American-led] avant-garde defined ‘rational’ as a viewpoint determined by the interaction of body, emotions, and intellect.”12