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

by Watson, Peter

  I

  n 1948, T. S. Eliot published a short, sharp book entitled Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. He had done so, he said, because he felt that anxiety had been growing over the previous six or seven years about the word (and the notion of) “culture.”

  He worried that no culture had ever appeared or developed “except together with a religion”—they are “different aspects of the same thing”—and that the artistic sensibility is impoverished by any divorce from the religious sensibility. “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidence of this decline is visible in every department of human activity.” He saw this against the background of Christian culture in Europe, which he regarded as “the highest culture that the world has ever known.” Religion, while it lasts, he wrote, provides the framework for culture, protects the mass of humanity from boredom and despair, and gives meaning to life.1

  As this shows, Eliot had an elitist view of progress. It is the function of the superior members of a society, and superior families (his words), to preserve the culture, and it is the function of the producers of culture to change it. High culture, he said, is more “conscious” than lower culture, and this is its function. There was no distinction, he thought, between religion and culture in primitive societies, but in modern times there had been a movement toward “aggressive unbelief,” producing a culture severed from religion—a process that “might well” confirm the general lowering of culture. Without a common faith, the search for unity—in a community, a nation, or a people—can be only an illusion, and a country like Britain had become “unconscious” of the importance of religion. In our modern culture, he said, we need fewer books and more conversations; life is about manageability; about the passions of individuals rather than the huge impersonal forces that affect the masses, which are just necessary conveniences of thought.2

  One of the outcomes of these modern trends, he thought, was the belief that superiority always means superiority of intellect and that education should be devised to “infallibly nourish it.” This led, he felt, to the most dogmatic of modern beliefs, that equality of opportunity is what counts, which for him could be achieved only if “the institution of the family is no longer respected.” Thus were ruled out self-sacrifice on the part of parents, ambition, foresight, parental control and responsibility. Education in the modern sense, he claimed, implies a disintegrated society in which it has come to be assumed that there is one measure of education according to which everyone is educated more or less.3 Eliot thought that in this matter society had become unidimensional, and that by educating everyone we cannot help but lower standards, from which we will all eventually suffer.

  This went right against the grain of much that was in train in many areas of the world at the time, but especially in Western Europe and North America. In the wake of Eliot’s book, the West—the highest culture, the most advanced, as he insisted—entered on the most secular period there has ever been; and the widespread popularity of film and radio, of the gramophone and then television, brought about a flourishing of popular culture that was also unparalleled.

  By Eliot’s lights, culture should have collapsed, and many fellow thinkers who outlived him (he died in 1965) no doubt agreed. But as this book has tried to show, there was no shortage of attempts to find meaning, ways to live, in the wake of the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Gulag, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Mao and his wife and the Cultural Revolution. Earlier chapters have explored how painters, poets, psychologists, biologists and other scientists have confronted and constructed the post-religious secular world that Eliot so feared. There remains one realm unexplored, a form of intellectual activity less concentrated than science, less suited to the visual images that so dominate our lives these days and much harder to distill within the short-term attention span of our very diverse late-capitalist popular culture. This is the realm of contemporary moral philosophy, a totally secular activity.

  THE END OF METANARRATIVE

  We begin with a transformation that, as transformations are apt to do, turned Eliot’s approach on its head. It was a transformation described as the “apotheosis of secularization.”

  At 3:32 p.m. on Saturday, July 15, 1972, the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, Missouri, was dynamited. A onetime prizewinning version of Le Corbusier’s “machine for modern living,” designed by Minoru Yamasaki, it was now deemed an uninhabitable environment for its low-income residents. This moment, says the architectural historian Charles Jencks, was the symbolic end of modernism and marked the passage to the postmodern. It signaled the end of abstract, theoretical and doctrinaire ideals—in architecture in this case—but postmodernism was at much the same time invading all areas of life.

  In literature, in film, in art and philosophy, as well as architecture, a new ethic and a new aesthetics came into play. As the cultural historian David Harvey has put it, the most startling fact about postmodernism was its total acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and chaos of modern life. Universal and eternal truths, “if they exist at all, cannot be specified.” All “meta-narratives” which seek to explain the broad sweep of history—Marxism, Freudianism, Christianity, the secularizing influence of modernism, for example—are eschewed. Despite postmodernism itself being a feature of a Western way of life, the Western way of life was now criticized for its long-term neglect of the “other.” Other worlds, and the inexhaustibility of this world, were what counted now—heterotopia, not utopia.

  We cannot aspire to any unified representation of the world, “or picture it as a totality full of connections and differentiations rather than as perpetually shifting fragments.” The individual could no longer be understood as “alienated,” because that presupposes a coherent center from which to be alienated.4 Alienation is replaced by fragmentation.

  Fredric Jameson said that all this was nothing more than the cultural logic of late capitalism—postmodern pluralism fueling an ever more frenetic pursuit of this-worldly pleasures (increasingly varied and increasingly available), consumption in this world replacing otherworldly forms of comfort and salvation.

  True enough, but not the whole picture. What Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels astutely anticipated was the “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” of late capitalism, driven ceaselessly by technological advances “in which the desire for the new is so intense that new fashions and new ideas ‘become antiquated before they can ossify into custom.’” The never-ending carnival of consumerism, where information, or “fact,” is as plentiful (and ever-changing) as objects, where the half-truths and half-lies of advertising set a cynical standard for public discourse, where in any case facts and events in the news change so quickly that no one can absorb anything into any kind of totality—in such circumstances ready-made belief systems have an undeniable attraction.

  These ready-made belief systems are not necessarily traditional religions but what Philippa Berry, paraphrasing Jacques Derrida, calls “a numinous and nonhuman force loosely called ‘spirit.’” In part, this overall stance was a reflection of the digital world then emerging in computer science, where “bits” of information came in one of two types, 1 and 0. Post-modernism turned its back on this, arguing that polarizations in politics (left-right), in philosophy (reason-emotion), in history (classicism-Romanticism), in literature and art (narrative-discursive), in science (progress-retribalization) and in everyday life were oversimple and misleading.5

  “BRICOLAGE” BELIEFS

  In religion it has been slightly more complicated. At one level the polarization between faith and doubt has come under attack, at another the focus has been on the concept of the “other,” as originally envisaged by Karl Barth (see chapter 16). New modes of spirituality have been explored that have been described as post-religious, post-skeptical or post-dualistic (all together, described as “quasi-religio
us”). These typically draw on pre-Christian and non-Christian sources and, as Clifford Longley wrote in the Daily Telegraph, “People have moved away from ‘religion’ as something anchored in organized worship and systematic beliefs within an institution, to a self-made ‘spirituality,’ outside formal structures, which is based on experience, has no doctrine and makes no claim to philosophical coherence.”6 Opinion polls show that one in four Americans believes in astrology, one in five in reincarnation; in Britain, more people believe in UFOs than in God. The New Age fits in here too, combining high consumerism and belief in all manner of things.

  These phenomena are characterized, Berry says, by their “bricolage” quality—bits and pieces, picked up as we go along—by the fact that they are both like and unlike traditional religions, and it is not yet clear whether they are quasi-religious or post-religious. David Barrett, in his 544-page survey The New Believers, an account of sixty-nine contemporary religions, cults and sects, found that there were a lot of “counterfeit Christianity” movements among them, and that the most postmodern of the cults were the “New Age” variety whose adherents claim that the previous age was dominated by male characteristics, “leading to aggression and obsession with power.” “The New Age concept is based on a balance of male and female qualities.”

  New Age has been described as a smorgasbord of spiritual substitutes for Christianity. It is essentially an astrological idea, the basic belief being that sometime in the 1970s we passed from the astrological age of Pisces, the fish, into the age of Aquarius, the water-bearer. The age of Pisces stretched back to the beginning of Christianity and took in the Renaissance, the Reformation and the rise of humanism. It was the age of authority, when Judeo-Christianity was dominant and controlled man’s thinking. The age of Aquarius, beginning around the turn of the twenty-first century, would herald a new spirit, leading to “consciousness expansion,” to man’s wholeness. The New Age consistently teaches that a personal God does not exist. It is intended to fill the post-Christian spiritual vacuum.7

  WHAT IS MISSING IS “PRACTICE”

  Although postmodernism made the intellectual running for several decades in the late twentieth century, the bricolage ethic it fostered created an ideal environment for philosophical figures who offered clarity and—though against the tide—a coherence that postmodernism denied. Alasdair MacIntyre was one who seemed to be more systematic than most about these matters.

  A Scotsman and a Marxist, who emigrated from Britain to the United States in 1970 and later became a Catholic, MacIntyre set out his views in an important series of books on moral philosophy: After Virtue (1981), mentioned earlier, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) and Dependent Rational Animals (1999). To see how we should live in a world without God, he had the idea of going back, ideologically, to ancient Greece, to the time of Aristotle, to a time before the great monotheisms evolved. He saw the current situation as pretty dire, because in this world of corporate liberalism there is not only no agreement on God, but also no agreement on what would count as a reasoned argument for or against him. The individualistic ethic by which we live now amounts to people advocating “whatever they think will give them control,” or will achieve the outcome they prefer (another postmodern claim was that power was and is all-important). Moral principles are chosen today on the grounds of their effectiveness. We live, said MacIntyre, in a world of “emotivism,” the doctrine that “all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”

  MacIntyre believed this to be wrong because “we can in fact rationally determine the best possible life for human beings and therefore can have moral judgments that are more than mere preferences.”

  What is missing from modern life, he said, is the concept of “practice,” and here he used the example of playing chess. In any practice there are two kinds of “good” attaching. There are the external “goods”—money, power and fame, derived from being good at the game and reaching the top. And there are internal “goods,” achieved by participating in the practice itself. These provide an education in the virtues—the virtues of honesty (no cheating), courage (keeping going when you are losing), generosity toward others (who may be better than you), magnanimity (to those less good than yourself). You must also rely on others to judge you—you cannot be a chess grand master just because you say so.

  Societies, MacIntyre says, in order to be societies and offer the best chances to the greatest number, need the practice of certain virtues—honesty, courage, justice, as in the example given above. Good societies should be made up of people who know each other and can practice and polish the virtues. The fault with liberal democracies, he says, is that they are really disguised oligarchies, where corporate liberalism (or capitalism) derives its power from fragmentation: typically, individuals have no chance to come together to pursue the common good and therefore no chance to develop the virtues. Liberalism, he goes on, claims to be neutral about what constitutes the best way forward, but this very neutrality is also a disguise designed to maintain corporate liberalism’s control over the manufacture of goods, with the overall effect of keeping the experience of virtue in society to a minimum. And it is virtue that people find satisfying and fulfilling. Even tradition, which once provided a framework for virtue, is being eroded.

  MacIntyre was well aware, of course, that the modern world was nothing like Aristotle’s Athens, and could never be. He used St. Benedict as his model, not so much because he was religious as because he started some small communities—monasteries—in which everyone knew each other, everyone depended on each other, everyone could freely practice the virtues. The spread and duration of the Benedictine jurisdiction show that, given the right circumstances, it can thrive. MacIntyre thought that in the current climate the teaching and organization of modern universities could be modified to create the sort of small community that could kick-start a new way of living together.8

  Another ideal society was suggested by John Rawls, whose totally secular model for arriving at a way to live together attracted a great deal of attention. Robert Nozick, whose own work we will consider presently, called Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) the most significant work of political philosophy since that of John Stuart Mill. Rawls argued that a just society—which Christianity had hardly advanced in its two thousand years—is one that will guarantee the most liberties for the greatest number of its members, and that therefore it is crucial to know what justice is and how it might be attained. Arguing against the utilitarian tradition (holding that actions are right because they are useful), he tried to replace the social contracts of Locke, Rousseau and Kant with something “more rational.” This led him to his view that justice is best understood as “fairness,” and it was Rawls’s way of achieving fairness that was to bring him so much attention. To do this, he proposed an “original position” and a “veil of ignorance.”

  In the original position the individuals drawing up the social contract—the rules by which they will live—are assumed to be rational but ignorant. They do not know whether they are rich or poor, old or young, healthy or infirm; they do not know which god they follow, if any; they have no idea what race they are, how intelligent or stupid, or whatever other gifts they may have or lack. In the original position, no one knows his or her place in society, and so the principles by which they elect to live must be chosen from “behind a veil of ignorance.” For Rawls, whatever social institutions are chosen in this way, those engaged in the choosing “can say to one another that they are co-operating on terms to which they would agree if they were free and equal persons whose relations with one another were fair.”9

  Rawls was criticized for assuming an ideal original position when in real life no such state of affairs can exist, and for the fact that, unlike in his scheme of things, if someone has a higher than average intelligence (say), this does not
deprive anyone else. Rawls’s system, his critics said, was too simple.

  ART AS ESCAPE FROM TIME

  A very different ideal was proposed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). For him, the purpose and meaning of life were to be found in art, and in poetry in particular. For him, art and philosophy overlapped more or less totally. His essay “Philosophy and Poetry” was published in 1986.

  Born in Marburg, the son of a pharmacology professor, Gadamer worked as Heidegger’s assistant. “I always had the damned feeling that Heidegger was looking over my shoulder,” he said later. He did not become known outside his own professional circle until the publication in 1960 of Truth and Method. This established him, in the eyes of many, as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.

  From our point of view, Gadamer’s most important contribution lay in his exploration of culture, in particular his essay “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” in which he considered “art as play, symbol and festival.” He thought that the meaning, or role, or function of art often got lost in the modern world, and that play—the activity of disinterested pleasure—was also overlooked. For him, art had an important symbolic role, to open up for us “a space in which both the world, and our own place in the world, are brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality,” where we can “dwell” out of ordinary time. The disinterested pleasure we take in art is an aid to escaping from ordinary time into “autonomous time.” The other quality of the successful artwork—art as festival, as he put it—also takes us out of ordinary time and opens us up “to the true possibility of community.”10

  Above all, Gadamer thought there is something unique about poetry, that there is, as he put it, a special relationship between poetic discourse—above all the lyric—and speculative philosophy, that there is a peculiar completeness of the poetic word, that it is made in such a way that it has no other meaning “beyond letting something be there.”11 Poetic language, he said elsewhere, is “always bestowing a certain intimacy with the world of meaning.” Poetry is always “a thinking word on the horizon of the unsaid.”