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

by Watson, Peter

  In turn, unity has come under scrutiny—not just the lack of unity of the individual but of the universe, the cosmos—for what effect its breakdown has had on our thinking, in terms of metaphysics, transcendence and the very image of what God might be.

  The one form of unity that holds fast is narrative, the narrative of a life, made up of discrete episodes. Alasdair MacIntyre argues that action—behavior—becomes intelligible only within a narrative. As Gordon Graham puts it, “The key to living a life as opposed to merely existing . . . lies in an acquired, and increasingly sophisticated, ability to see and act in accordance with the requirements of narrative intelligibility.” He adds: “We learn to do this in part by imitation, but we are also enabled to forge such connections by the opportunities for understanding that fiction provides.” Life, by this account, is “a constant hermeneutic movement” guided by the “anticipation of the [narrative] whole.” Bruce Robbins, professor in the humanities at Columbia, says that secularism is itself a narrative of progress; and, in that, an improvement over religious belief.

  This brings us back to there being no overbearing idea. One of the achievements, perhaps, of the twentieth century was the retreat from the idea of “wholeness,” “oneness,” the search for one all-encompassing meaning; the idea that meaning is a big thing, a security blanket, as Auden intimated. Which returns us to Wittgenstein, who believed that there are certain aspects of experience/the world that cannot be put into words, or be painted; that language gives us a feeling of the world as a whole, but a limited whole; and it is this sense of limits, and that there is something “beyond” those limits, that constitutes the mystical, the idea that there is something missing. There is an overlap here with Paul Valéry’s idea that the poet approaches the world “asymptotically,” that we get closer and closer to meaning without ever quite reaching it. There may be no boundary to language, George Steiner says, but—again—let us not expect more than there is. The Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn catches something of the same sense when he writes, “There always seem to be better words, if only we could find them, just over the horizon.” And goes on to echo Alasdair MacIntyre, “I believe the process of understanding the problems [of life] is itself a good.”5

  Secularization, then, goes well beyond unbelief toward a new, and more or less coherent, way of approaching life. It teaches us how to look out upon the world, appreciating it detail by detail. We can’t all be artists, but we can all use the artistic approach; as Santayana said, art shows us “finite perfection” without a deity. Or, as summed up by Wallace Stevens: “We never arrive intellectually. But emotionally we arrive constantly (as in poetry, happiness, high mountains, vistas).” There is in the world a superabundance of meaning, not just one security blanket.

  • • •

  There remains one major issue to consider. The approach followed here has identified a strong secondary side to secularization. In Stefan George’s opinion, science has not improved the world, but impoverished it. Eugene O’Neill believed science had been co-opted by capitalism, and so was diverted from more charitable aims. Virginia Woolf, though interested in psychology, thought that the other sciences had no part to play in our moral or aesthetic lives. For D. H. Lawrence, science, in eschewing contact with the irrational, was distancing itself from “life.” For George Steiner, science was and is contaminated because, as Heidegger said before him, it aims at mastery. Gordon Graham has said “science does not produce the sort of truths that one can live by. What it can do, and manifestly has done, is generate techniques for desire-satisfaction.” For Thomas Nagel, in his latest book, the reductive evolutionary narrative is “almost certainly” false.

  Some of these arguments cannot be sustained. Their interest lies in their being evidence for the fact that the great rival “magisterium” to religion, as Stephen Jay Gould described the scientific worldview, has not found quite the universal acceptance that many of its adherents would wish. As we have seen, there is no shortage of people who do find science a perfectly adequate alternative to religion, who clearly do see in the details and processes of nature enough awe, beauty, enchantment and elevation to last a lifetime. And they are also finding science a help in understanding our moral lives, how we can live together for the greatest benefit of all.

  And yet, there is no denying, either, that many other people do not share their view quite so enthusiastically. It is important to say that these other individuals are not necessarily “anti-science,” and they are often well-informed. But they are not moved by science as, for instance, Dawkins, Dennett and Levine so clearly are. For those others, science is not enough. Freud had a word for this—“intellection.” Early on, he believed that once his patients had “proper information” about their condition they would be cured; later he realized that they had to “work through” it and come to terms with the “affective” elements.

  Is something similar at work in the general response to science?II

  “A WANT OF LIVING GLOW”

  There are at least two possibilities. One is that the whole approach of science—its aim being not just ever more accurate descriptions of nature, but ever more abstract theories about nature, explaining more and more with fewer and fewer formulae—is too far removed from everyday life. It is too abstract, even too constricting. Abstraction, though exciting for many, may be just too dry, too uninvolving as an experience if you are not a direct participant. (Scientists are constantly telling us that more children should be persuaded to study science, that it offers an exciting, rewarding life. The fact that they keep doing it seems to suggest that their exhortations rarely work.)

  Walt Whitman said evolution betrayed “a want of living glow, fondness, warmth.” Could this be why the phenomenological approach to life has been so successful in the time since Nietzsche had his say? Is it more than coincidence that Edmund Husserl set down his views at more or less the time Nietzsche did? The phenomenological approach, understanding life as an inexhaustible number of individual experiences, appreciating the individuality, concreteness and voluptuousness of objects, events and experiences, has remained strong and constant. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “lyrical phenomenology” catches it—singing about the sheer multiplicity of experience as the joy of being alive.

  Dennett, Dawkins, Levine and the other evolutionary biologists would object to this way of seeing things and, to an extent, they would be right. Darwin himself was a great observer of detail; evolutionary theory depends on adaptation and variation, which are specific ways of showing how detail has profoundly affected our long-term history. As Dawkins has said, we now have two ways of appreciating rainbows, poetically and scientifically.

  Consider Mallarmé’s desire to name flowers “absent from all bouquets,” or these lines describing Stefan George:

  The pain from some old cruelty

  Etched in his cheeks

  These lines may be saying no more than that poetry is different from science, though they may help explain why poetry appeals in a different way. Engagement with poetry is more immediate than engagement with science; the sharing that a poet offers is different from the sharing a scientist offers. Reading a poem, we enter more into the life of the poet than, when reading a scientific report, into the life of a scientist. We can follow Darwin on the Beagle, and the reasoning that led him to imagine natural selection, which we easily concede is an awesome achievement. Biologists say it moves them. (And Dawkins said Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.) We can also agree that when Niels Bohr realized that the outer orbits of the electrons in the atom explained chemical reactions—thereby linking physics and chemistry—something inside him and us clicked shut and broke open, as Seamus Heaney wrote of good poetry.

  With poetry, verification becomes a pleasure for the reader, there is no need for a third party; and this is a crucial difference—the poet leaves something for readers to discover for themselves, about themselves. Phenomenology offer
s a way of being in the world, at home in the world, as Heidegger said, that science, for all its successes, does not.

  The second reason why science has not had quite the impact some of its adherents anticipated is that, although the fundamental process of evolution and natural selection has to do with sexual reproduction, evolutionary biology is rather dry—bloodless, one might say—when it comes to the subject of desire. Eugene O’Neill wrote a lot about desire—the desire to avenge a wrong, the desire for social recognition, the greed for a piece of property, for power, the lust for another’s body. But desire for most people refers to this last: sexual desire, the most interesting, forceful and—well—desirable form of desire there is. Anna Clark’s book Desire is subtitled A History of European Sexuality. Henry James, the Utopians, Sherwood Anderson in Beyond Desire, Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire, all considered desire to be the greatest source of satisfaction and therefore the most disruptive element in life. So, too, did Stefan George, James Joyce and Philip Roth. Henry James thought that desire is at the root of all evil. Christopher Hitchens reminds us that the divorce of sex from fear and from religious tyranny was one of the great events of the twentieth century. Wilhelm Reich was convinced that “the ecstatic attitude is preferable to the analytic.”6

  Valentine de Saint-Point had her “Manifesto of Lust” in 1913; Léger spoke of “the binding energy of desire transformed into rhythms of shape.” Milan Kundera wrote about the “tyranny” of desire, Michel Foucault about power and desire. Jacques Lacan said, accurately enough, that “desire repeats itself until it is recognized,” Jean-François Lyotard that “western man wants to conquer, not love” and that men feel “undone” when they love. The novel, as one critic put it, is “the repetitious discovery of sexual motive.” All religions have at their heart the control of desire, which, as often as not, the churches see as the pre-eminent basis of sin.

  But Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman had it right, as the writers of another genre we might have included—utopian fiction—had it right when, to a man (Wells, Zamyatin, Hauptmann, Huxley), they saw desire as above all a disruption in life, the source of unruliness and subversion (Zuckerman abandons himself to uncensored desire). This is because, as John Gray—the Nietzsche of our day for his pithy and aphoristic style—says, “Sexual passion enables the species to reproduce; it cares nothing for individual well-being or personal autonomy.”7 Desire is without question the most important irrational aspect of life; as Eugene Goodheart states in Desire and Its Discontents, desire is a destabilizing force, disintegrating; it leads to extravagance and excesses of the will. All desires have a right to be fulfilled, but to experience desire, says Jonathan Lear, denotes a kind of lack in life. Ideals, he adds, give shape to desire, though at the same time “The pleasure principle is at loggerheads with the whole world.”8 Desire, too, of course, links to intimacy, mentioned earlier.

  And here again we see a temporal coincidence, except that perhaps again it wasn’t really a coincidence. As religion declined, as Nietzsche announced the death of God, so arrived more or less on cue the theories and practices of Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalysis was based largely on a recognition of the disruptive fires of desire in the form of the libido, a sexual force of great power, infinitely malleable but ineradicable. Freud’s influence was second to none in the twentieth century.

  To what extent are these temporal coincidences, if such they are, related, and to what extent do they account for the fact that science, despite its undoubted successes both intellectual and moral, has not engaged the imaginations of as many people as might have been expected? In fact, the impact of detail and desire go together—they both speak to an immediacy that the abstractions of science do not. Relevant here is Habermas’s theory that the idea of the cosmos brings with it the concept of unity, which has proved so influential in religion, metaphysics and other forms of philosophy. But if we accept David Deutsch’s idea that there are in fact a number of cosmoses, parallel universes, in a multiverse (a concept easier to accept than Tipler’s omega point), then the idea of cosmic unity goes out the window too. We may still view the totality of the multiverse as a single entity, perhaps, but that is a much less overbearing idea than that of one single cosmos. In the modern world, in modern science, the idea of unity as a basic concept is under threat, as much as is the idea of one overbearing truth. The theory of everything, so sought after by physicists, which aims/hopes to find a common thread between the four main forces of the physical world—electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity—will not, even if discovered, affect the idea of parallel universes. The very fact that unity is proving so hard to demonstrate is itself important—it may never regain the overriding force it once had.

  So we are thrown back again onto a phenomenological approach, to find solace and meaning away from the “grandeur” of the universe(s) and stick to what we know intimately and immediately. As Ortega y Gasset said, we cannot put off living until the scientists say we are ready.

  This matter of size—of grandeur or its opposite—may be all-important. To what extent has religion, especially the great monotheisms, given us a false sense of the size of life? The very concepts of salvation, redemption, transcendence, eternity and infinity, in which monotheisms routinely deal, invite us—like science, in this respect—to contemplate the grandeur of abstract notions, into which fits quite seamlessly what Cynthia Ozick calls our “haunted desire for human completion”—desire again.9 Is the very idea of completion, wholeness, perfectibility, oneness, misleading or even diverting? Does the longing for completion imply a completion that isn’t in fact available? Is this our predicament?

  This in turn leads us to ask whether, just as the religious idea of the “whole” has been punctured, other religious notions have been similarly mistaken. For example, has life really become less enchanting because Max Weber said so? Could it be that Weber was seriously wrong in telling us that the post-religious world is disenchanted?

  Let us look at the timing of his statement. Weber made his remarks in 1918, when the ravages of the First World War were fresh in the mind, before the blood of millions of dead had congealed, when the world was anything but enchanting. And this was a war, moreover, that in many people’s eyes owed a lot to the nihilistic writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. But in May 1919, Arthur Eddington confirmed the existence of relativity, an experimental observation soon followed by others that led on to quantum mechanics and such extraordinary ideas as the wave-particle duality and the exclusion principle. Other discoveries, such as dendrochronology, carbon valency, the Big Bang theory and the evolutionary synthesis, followed.

  To say that such notions are not enchanting is to bend the meaning of enchantment. To many people they were certainly weird (“quantum weirdness,” in particular), equivalent to the magic on which religions relied in an earlier age. But the new enchantment was and is explicable—an advance, surely. Weber died in June 1920, soon after his pronouncement. Had he lived on through the 1920s, he would surely have changed his mind. Had he fully engaged with Darwinian variation, becoming ever clearer in the early years of the century due to burgeoning research in the new field of genetics, and had he come fully to terms with the clinical nature of psychoanalysis, in which interpretation was always made on an individual basis; had he encountered Niels Bohr’s linking of physics and chemistry in the structure of the atom, or Linus Pauling’s explanation as to why some substances are yellow liquids and others black solids—he would surely have concluded that the world was now more engrossingly enchanting than ever. Similarly, had he lived to witness the rise of film, with silent movies giving way to sound, he would surely have seen this as an even more accessible source of enchantment—for most people, no doubt, much more so than quantum weirdness.

  As Bruce Robbins says, the disenchantment narrative ignores a great deal about the premodern world that was far from enchanting (brought home recently in the German film White Ribbon). It needs re
peating that the world is vastly more enchanted now than it was before the death of God.

  By the same token, is redemption any longer a useful concept? Richard Rorty didn’t think so because, as he put it, we are not degraded. Roger Scruton, though religious, half agrees when he argues that modern art is a “redemption of the commonplace” (this we might characterize as a “small” form of redemption). Transcendence has been dismissed time and again by modern philosophers (Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Jürgen Habermas) as a non-phenomenon. For Rorty, again, neither the word nor the concept of the “sacred” is any longer of use, because “everything is up for grabs.” And as already mentioned, if we accept Olivier Roy’s account of the globalization, deculturation and deterritorialization of religion, it is faith that is changing its contours, becoming “thinner,” not the secular life. Terry Eagleton said mischievously that he thought happiness was a “holiday-camp” sort of word. And as for happiness (or self-actualization), there seems to be general agreement that one can’t go looking for it, that it is the by-product of other, more worthwhile activities, and this may be why it is most often encountered in recollection.

  The two big ideas that everyone seems to agree about, as regards our subject, are hope and the need for a more inclusive community—this is where we are to find meaning. George Santayana, Scott Fitzgerald, E. O. Wilson, Richard Rorty, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Taylor and Pope Benedict XVI all introduce the matter of hope into their writings. (Nietzsche, of course, regarded hope as a trick played on mankind, causing us to be more optimistic about progress than it really merited, especially since the “false dawn” of the Enlightenment.)

  “THE METANARRATIVE OF EMANCIPATION”

  For many people, too, hope is engendered by the expansion of the moral community that, despite all, is happening, if fitfully. Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty insist that “no experience of truth can exist without some participation in a community.” Minority ethnic groups, women, homosexuals, the disabled, religious sects and many others are now being accorded greater equality and respect; we are becoming less tolerant of such matters as “collateral damage” in wars, while at the same time more tolerant in any number of ways—this is the process known as “social hope” (something John Gray has dismissed as “shallow”). Being more tolerant may not feel like meaning, but it is to those who are the recipients of the new tolerance, allowing them to live fuller lives.