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

by Watson, Peter

  CONCLUSION

  The Central Sane Activity

  S

  hortly before Christmas 1996, the author Salman Rushdie was still in hiding, driving south from Sydney with his girlfriend and son to spend the holiday with the novelist Rodney Hall. Rushdie had been in Australia, under guard, to publicize a book and had decided to stay on. His police-protection team had said it was safe because no one would know he was staying on. So they withdrew, though by then, despite the hit squads not having found Rushdie, they had found his Italian translator and his Norwegian publisher, who had been attacked and injured, and his Japanese translator, who had been murdered.

  About halfway through their journey, as Rushdie and his party were passing through the small town of Milton, the tape they had been listening to (Homer’s Iliad) came to an end and Rushdie, who was at the wheel of the rental car, took his eye off the road for a “fraction” of a second to press the eject button. At that very moment an enormous articulated truck swung out of a side road. There was an equally enormous tearing sound, “the horrible death-noise of metal on metal,” as the truck’s cab hit the driver’s door, crumpling it inward. The car wasn’t dragged under the truck, as it might well have been, but bounced off a wheel and across the road, hard against a tree. The windshield was smashed and the driver’s door wedged shut, but the three occupants were largely unhurt—Rushdie himself the most badly, with a fractured arm.

  Milton had a small medical facility and an ambulance was quickly brought. When the ambulance men arrived, they stopped and stared. One of them said, “Excuse me, mate, but are you Salman Rushdie?” Right then he didn’t want to be—he wanted to be an anonymous person receiving medical treatment—but he admitted that, yes, he was. “Oh, okay, mate, now this is probably a terrible time to ask, but could I get an autograph?”

  Across the road, the shocked truck driver wasn’t getting any better treatment. The police had arrived; they, too, had recognized Rushdie and so wanted to know what the driver’s religion was. The driver was bewildered. “What’s my religion got to do with anything?” Was he trying to carry out the fatwa? he was asked. The driver didn’t know what a fatwa was.

  He was let go, but that still wasn’t the end of it. The truck turned out to have been carrying fertilizer. “Having eluded professional assassins for almost seven years, [Rushdie] and his loved ones had almost met their end under a mighty avalanche of dung.”1

  It is a good story, but it reminds us of the sheer monstrosity of the fatwa’s continued existence. The horrors perpetrated against Rushdie, in the name of Islam, may not have matched the scale of the attacks on the Manhattan World Trade Center of September 11, 2001, in terms of lives lost, but the very fact that it was to be more than twenty years before he felt safe enough to publish his memoir carries its own intimate level of horror. Rushdie is an atheist and the book that sparked the fatwa, The Satanic Verses, is in part an ironic discussion of certain verses in the Koran—the off-message message of which, some Koranic scholars have suggested, can be explained only if the Prophet was at the time accidentally taking dictation not from God but from Satan. The ludicrous improbability of such an interpretation makes the ensuing deadly events all the more absurd and criminal.

  • • •

  This book began by showing how the infinity of horrors committed in the name of religion has driven many people away from belief in God, and to look elsewhere for satisfaction, fulfillment and meaning in their lives. Now, toward the end of our journey, we can see that this search constitutes a major plank of modernity, and has been a preoccupation of many serious and creative minds in the past 130 or so years since Nietzsche’s madman made his fateful pronouncement.

  We need to remind ourselves one last time that many people—and perhaps the quieter souls among us—see no problem in God being dead. For them his death is no source of anxiety or perplexity. Such individuals may call into question Robert Musil’s claim that even people who scoff at metaphysics feel a strange cosmic presence, or Thomas Nagel’s comment that we all have a sense of looking down on ourselves as if from a great height. But such individuals are not “metaphysical types” and seek no “deep” meaning in existence. They just get on with their lives, making ends meet, living from day to day and season to season, enjoying themselves where they can, untroubled by matters that so perplex their neighbors. They have no great expectations that “big” questions will ever be settled, so devote no time to their elucidation. In some ways, they are the most secular people of all and perhaps the most content.

  Countless others live in circumstances so meager, so minimal, so fraught with everyday material difficulties that there is no time for reflection, circumstances where such an activity is beyond their means. By such people’s standards a concern with meaning, a preoccupation with the difference between how to live a good life and how to live well, is something of a luxury, itself the achievement of a certain kind of civilization. We must accept that the search for meaning is, by this account, a privilege.

  • • •

  This has been an eventful journey, but it cannot claim to exhaust its subject. Though there are good reasons for having begun with Nietzsche (not least because the late nineteenth century was the time when most prominent scientists stopped believing in God), we could have started earlier, with Søren Kierkegaard or Arthur Schopenhauer. Among more recent figures we might have considered Harold Bloom’s ideas about literature as a way of life, his worship of Shakespeare and Whitman (“For me, Shakespeare is God”); his idea that informed appreciation is a pleasure and that though poems are “sacred vessels,” even poetry is a Darwinian exercise of insidious competition; and his suggestion that a great writer’s aim is to create “heterocosms,” alternative but accessible worlds, open to us all.

  We might have considered the sociologist Robert Bellah’s notion (echoing Descartes) of “civil religion”: that citizens, whatever their confession, venerate in a secular way such entities as national anthems, national flags, war victims, foundation myths, inaugurations and coronations, the funerals of great political figures; and espouse such unifying concepts as, in America, for example, the Constitution (and its various amendments) and what he calls “manifest destiny.” Or we might have considered Richard Sennett, who as a onetime musical prodigy turned sociologist has brought a kind of poetry into his discipline by examining aspects of the secular world that stand outside most traditional sociological categories: respect, craftsmanship, the rituals and pleasures of cooperation—and above all the way we get on with fellow citizens who are “alien” to us. He has examined, in secular detail, how we confront Karl Barth’s abstract idea of the “other,” and in doing so identifies this as a major predicament of our time and seeks practical ways to confront it.

  Or again, we might have looked at the American lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s secular theory of the origins of rights: namely, that rights do not come from God, or nature, or logic but from our piecemeal experience of injustice—rights come from wrongs; we are always more likely to agree on what wrongs exist than what a perfect system of justice would be.2 Or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, where he identifies the aim of life as a tussle between anxiety and boredom, the way out being autotelic activities, activities that are enjoyable in themselves, not for any larger purpose, because there is no larger purpose. On this account, there are four kinds of pleasurable activities—agon, where competition is the main dimension; alea, activities of chance, ilix, activities that alter normal perception; and mimicry, dance, theatre, the arts in general. When you close in on “flow,” however, it appears as yet another word for happiness-fulfillment (though perhaps more precise than other accounts), echoing phenomenology above all other approaches, and indeed the author does refer back to Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Bergson, Rilke and Whitehead all had an understanding of life as “flow.”

  All these and more could have been added to the mix. But
if this exercise has been worth doing, one reason is that it has revealed overlaps between the ideas of many of the figures discussed. Some overlaps have been more obvious than others, but the very fact that they exist surely tells us something, gives us a starting point when trying to work things out for ourselves.

  • • •

  One place to start is with James Wood’s paraphrase of Thomas Mann, “the idea of one overbearing truth is exhausted.” Mann and Wood meant these words in a special way, but they apply more generally, too. The overall intellectual trajectory of the long twentieth century, of modernism and postmodernism, has been to reinforce the argument that there is not—there cannot be—any privileged viewpoint from which to look out upon the world. This has serious consequences for religion, and it doesn’t stop there. During the past 130 years many of the dominant political ideas (colonialism, imperialism, communism, fascism), the great psychological ideas (the unconscious, personality) and the great philosophical ideas (Hegelianism, positivism, Marxism) have been exploded too, to be replaced not by other grand “isms” but by much smaller, less ambitious, more pragmatic notions.

  We are concentrating on religion because God has been—and for many still is—the greatest and most overbearing idea there is or has ever been. But in fact the death of God, our subject here, is only one death among many. In that sense he was not singled out.

  It is difficult to exaggerate the effects of this change. As we have observed, Virginia Woolf was so taken by the changes taking place in the 1920s that she felt human nature itself was being transformed. We don’t need to go that far. In the last thirty or forty years we have grown used to the geneticists telling us that certain aspects of our nature are so fixed that there will always be a “stubborn biological core,” a limit to what we can improve on, unless we are willing to embark on a radical interference with our genetic code.

  As we have noted, religion has not been immune to this generally evolving intellectual climate, which has taken place among some of the worst atrocities ever inflicted by human beings on other human beings, and on many other forms of life too. As a result, even among believers, ideas about God have changed—to the point where he may not be omniscient after all, or all-powerful, or always wholly good, or wholly perfect; where he sometimes veils his face from humankind (turning his back on us); and, most profoundly or oddly, depending on your viewpoint, where he is completely “other,” a different kind of phenomenon altogether (except that the word “phenomenon,” by definition, can’t apply in this case); where he is defined by what he is not, where his existence is asserted precisely on the grounds that there cannot be any evidence—evidence that we wouldn’t understand even if it did exist.

  This seems to be the end point of a certain kind of reasoning—an overbearing idea that lacks any attributes by which it might “overbear,” a breathtakingly insouciant end point in an infinite regression of what a God might be.I Add to this Olivier Roy’s analysis, referred to in the introduction, that globalized, deterritorialized religions now risk being decultured and therefore “purified,” becoming more fundamental and ideologically “thinner.” Far from being “timeless,” religions are still evolving.

  Against all this it is surely a relief to turn to ideas that we can recognize as manageable, modest, reasonable, which are based on observation and evidence, and are mutable. Once we accept that the age of overbearing ideas is over, we are free to move on, to examine the “lesser” ideas that have been found serviceable since Nietzsche slipped into a coma in a Turin street in 1889.

  MEANING IS NOT A SECURITY BLANKET

  Science and psychoanalysis apart, the most profound development in thought since Nietzsche, as far as we are concerned, is the phenomenological approach to the world. Mallarmé sought “words without wrinkles,” Baudelaire cherished his minutes heureuses and Valéry his “small worlds of order,” as we have seen; Chekhov concentrated on the “concrete individual” and preferred “small-scale and practical answers,” Gide thought that “systematizing is denaturing, distorting and impoverishing.” For Oliver Wendell Holmes, “all the pleasure of life is in general ideas, but all the use of life is in specific solutions.” Wallace Stevens considered that we are “better satisfied by particulars.” Thomas Nagel put it this way: “Particular things can have a noncompetitive completeness which is transparent to all aspects of the self. This also helps explain why the experience of great beauty tends to unify the self: the object engages us immediately and totally in a way that makes distinctions among points of view irrelevant.” Or as Robert Nozick, who counseled us to make ourselves “vehicles” for beauty, said: “This is what poets and artists bring us—the immense and unsuspected reality of a small thing. Everything has ‘its own patient entityhood.’” George Levine calls for a “profound attention to the details of this world.”3 (And chapter 24 was entirely given over to poetry’s faith in—and affirmation of—detail.)

  In turn, this coincides with the idea of the episodic in life, Proust’s moments bienheureux, Ibsen’s “flashes of spiritual value,” Shaw’s “infinitesimal increments” and “moments of infinite consequence.” Kandinsky spoke of “little pleasures,” Malraux of “temporary refuges,” Yeats referred to “brief moments of ecstatic affirmation” and Joyce to his “epiphanies.” Abraham Maslow had his “peak experiences,” modeled on the orgasm, and Freud thought that happiness was invariably episodic. Impressionist art was in reality not so much impressionistic as painstakingly given over to capturing the evanescent nature of experience—here, Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, his haystacks and water lilies are archetypal examples. Again, in chapter 24, we learned of Seamus Heaney’s “shimmer of reality” and “momentary stays against confusion,” of Mandelstam’s “nuggets of harmony,” Lowell’s “bolts of clarification,” experiences of life “clicking shut and breaking open,” of Sylvia Plath’s poems of “surprised arrival,” and Eugenio Montale’s

  I am no more

  than a spark from a beacon

  Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, too, have noted that moments of “being” can only ever be just that—moments. That the most we can hope for are brief experiences of heightened intensity. It is as if there are two realms of existence (as expressed by both Woolf and Musil, but also Rilke and Wittgenstein); to live a full life we must be alive to these two realms but not expect more than is there. There is no supernatural realm, only, as Woolf put it, brief holidays from our “cotton wool days.” George Santayana and Philip Roth shared this view. Santayana thought that well-being occurred in “reflective episodes of consummate joy that gave point to things”; that we need a “holiday life,” a time and place where we can get away from the workaday world and play, that the aim of life should be “spontaneous affirmation” of what is lovely and lovable. Philip Roth’s “Mickey” Sabbath delighted in his “holiday” from rationality. Jonathan Lear, professor of philosophy at Chicago, says that life without the idea of the irrational “is incomplete.”

  What is central to all this is the size of life, the parameters of living, and, as Joyce said, “living down to fact.” It is the very opposite of what we might call “cosmic consciousness,” which fuels so many religious feelings, and it is reinforced by the ideas of such figures as George Moore, Virginia Woolf and David Sloan Wilson, who suggest we “act locally,” intimately, with those closest to us. Moore thought that our most vivid experiences would be with close relations and friends; for Woolf, intimacy was as close to spiritual feeling as we are capable of, while Wilson thinks we are most likely to encounter enchantment in local activities. Here, too, it is the size of life that is being emphasized.

  One reason for the episodic nature of experience is the allied idea that the personality is not fixed, that none of us is just one person. Richard Rorty reminds us that several philosophers have concluded “there is no structure of human existence.” For Santayana there was no core human nature, “which is merely a name for a group
of qualities found by chance in certain tribes of animals, artificially foregrounded by us.” Gide thought he had a new self every day, and Czesław Miłosz wrote about how difficult it was “just to remain one person.” Yeats thought that “personality is a constantly renewed choice,” and Pound and Eliot said much the same. Goronwy Rees wrote, “[A]t no time in my life have I had the enviable sensation of constituting a continuous personality.” While for the British philosopher John Gray, “We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves and yet we know we are not.” (He remarks of Rees’s life that it was not a novel but a series of short stories.)4 Eugene Goodheart of Brandeis University summed up this view: “The coherent person is not a seamless unity, but the representative of the will to self-mastery.”