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

by Watson, Peter

  7.Benbassa, op. cit., p. 103.

  8.Ibid., p. 409.

  9.Steven T. Katz et al. (eds.), Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 639ff.

  10.Benbassa, op. cit., p. 104.

  11.Ibid., p. 108.

  12.Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, London: Verso, 2000, pp. 79ff.

  13.Benbassa, op. cit., p. 114.

  14.Jim Garrison, The Darkness of God: Theology after Hiroshima, London: SCM Press, 1982, p. 159.

  15.Bernard Murchland (ed. and with an Introduction by), The Meaning of the Death of God, New York: Random House, 1967, p. 25.

  16.Murchland, op. cit., p. 30.

  17.Ibid., p. 37.

  18.Ibid., p. 40.

  19.J. A. T. Robinson, Honest to God, London: SCM Press, 1963.

  CHAPTER 21: “QUIT THINKING!”

  1.John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, London: Calder Publications, 2001, p. 41.

  2.Calder, op. cit., p. 79.

  3.Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001, p. 418.

  4.Calder, op. cit., p. 65.

  5.Ibid., p. 70.

  6.Ibid., p. 74.

  7.Ibid., p. 83.

  8.Ibid., p. 92.

  9.Raymond Yasmil, Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place: 1958–2010, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.

  10.Martin Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age: 1945–2004, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 27.

  11.Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998, p. 1.

  12.Belgrad, op. cit., pp. 5–6.

  13.Ibid., p. 10.

  14.Ibid., p. 27.

  15.Ibid., p. 112.

  16.See Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996, p. 23, for her the equivalent: music and the speed of playing as an aspect of acting.

  17.Belgrad, op. cit., p. 108.

  18.Ibid., p. 110.

  19.Geoffrey Rayner, Richard Chamberlain and Annemarie Stapleton, Pop! Design, Culture, Fashion, 1965–1976, Woodbridge: ACC Editions, 2012, p. 119.

  20.Belgrad, op. cit., p. 158.

  21.Ibid., p. 151.

  22.Ibid., p. 162.

  23.Geoffrey Beard, Modern Ceramics, London: Studio Vista, 1969, p. 165.

  24.Belgrad, op. cit., p. 170.

  25.Ibid., p. 31.

  26.See Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, New York: Viking, 2006, pp. 516–17, for John Lennon’s reaction to Ginsberg reading “Howl.” See also James Campbell, This Is the Beat Generation, New York, San Francisco, Paris and London: Secker & Warburg, 1999.

  27.Belgrad, op. cit., p. 205.

  28.James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, London: Jonathan Cape, 1999, p. 217.

  29.Wood, op. cit., p. 222.

  30.Harold Bloom, “His Long Ordeal by Laughter,” New York Times Book Review, May 19, 1985.

  31.Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 35.

  32.Parrish, op. cit., p. 45.

  33.Ibid., p. 150.

  CHAPTER 22: A VISIONARY COMMONWEALTH AND THE SIZE OF LIFE

  1.Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, London: Faber, 1970, p. xxvi.

  2.Roszak, op. cit., p. xxxiv.

  3.Ibid., p. 49.

  4.Ibid., pp. 64–66.

  5.Herbert Marcuse, Counter Revolution and Revolt, London: Allen Lane, 1972, ch. 2, pp. 59ff.

  6.Roszak, op. cit., p. 109.

  7.Ibid., pp. 119–20.

  8.Ibid., p. 14.

  9.See also Alan Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relationship to Materiality, New York: Pantheon, 1970.

  10.Roszak, op. cit., p. 83.

  11.Ibid., p. 149.

  12.Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

  13.Kripal, op. cit., p. 11.

  14.Ibid., p. 139.

  15.Ibid., p. 149.

  16.Ibid., p. 170.

  17.Martin Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 123.

  18.Torgoff, op. cit., pp. 8, 11.

  19.Ibid., p. 44.

  20.Ibid., p. 271.

  21.Robert C. Fuller, Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000, p. 67.

  22.Torgoff, op. cit., p. 85.

  23.Fuller, op. cit., pp. 72–74.

  24.Ibid., p. 85.

  25.Torgoff, op. cit., p. 111.

  26.Ibid., p. 123.

  27.Tony Scherma and David Dalton, Andy Warhol: His Controversial Life, Art and Colorful Times, London: J. R. Books, 2010. See also Victor Bokris, Warhol, London: F. Muller, 1989, p. 193.

  28.Torgoff, op. cit., p. 179.

  29.Ibid., p. 209.

  30.Carl Belz, The Story of Rock, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, does not mention drugs or psychedelic events.

  31.Torgoff, op. cit., pp. 256–57. See also Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, London: Flamingo, 1993, passim.

  32.Roszak, op. cit., p. 410.

  33.Ibid., p. 215.

  34.Ibid., p. 254.

  35.Ibid., p. 236.

  36.Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society, London: Faber and Faber, 1973, p. 71.

  37.Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, p. 101.

  38.Ibid., p. 254.

  39.Ibid., pp. 260–61.

  40.Ibid., p. 346.

  41.Ibid., p. 356.

  42.Ibid., p. 450.

  43.See Joel Parris, Psychotherapy in an Age of Narcissism: Modernity, Science and Society, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 97, for a skeptical discussion on therapeutic language.

  CHAPTER 23: THE LUXURY AND LIMITS OF HAPPINESS

  1.Partha Dasgupta, Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. xxii.

  2.Dasgupta, op. cit., p. 13.

  3.Ibid., p. 31.

  4.Ibid., p. 37.

  5.Mark Kingwell, In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac, New York: Crown, 1998, p. 107.

  6.Kingwell, op. cit., p. 51.

  7.John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 480.

  8.Kingwell, op. cit., p. 35.

  9.Ibid., p. 64.

  10.See Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, New York: Basic Books, 1994, especially ch. 1, pp. 17ff.

  11.Kingwell, op. cit., p. 225.

  12.Ibid., p. 259.

  13.Anthony Storr, The School of Genius, London: Deutsch, 1988, chapters 2 and 4.

  14.Kingwell, op. cit., p. 335.

  15.Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, p. 30.

  16.Lasch, op. cit., p. 35.

  17.Ibid., p. 42.

  18.See Joel Parris, Psychotherapy in an Age of Narcissism: Modernity, Science and Society, Basings
toke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 64, for a discussion on how therapy replaced religion, and p. 74 for Narcissistic Personality Disorders (NPD).

  19.Ibid., p. 397.

  20.Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001, p. 601.

  21.Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, New York: W. W. Norton, 1995, p. 94.

  22.Dale Jacquette (ed.), Cannabis: Philosophy for Everyone, New York and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p. 39.

  23.Jacquette, op. cit., pp. 44–45.

  24.Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History, London: Doubleday, 2003, ch. 24, pp. 292ff.

  25.Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 5.

  26.Furedi, op. cit., p. 7.

  27.Ibid., p. 100.

  28.Ibid., p. 17.

  29.K. M. Sargeant, Seeker Churches: Promoting Religion in a Nontraditional Way, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, p. 45.

  30.Furedi, op. cit., p. 31.

  31.Ibid., p. 33.

  32.Ibid., p. 73.

  33.Ibid., p. 91.

  34.Ibid., p. 155.

  35.Patrick Bracken, Trauma: Culture, Meaning and Philosophy, London: Whurr Publishers, 2002, p. 14.

  36.Kenneth J. Gergen, “Therapeutic Professions and the Diffusion of Deficit,” Journal of Mind and Behavior, vol. 11, nos. 3–4, 1990, p. 356.

  37.Furedi, op. cit., p. 204.

  CHAPTER 24: FAITH IN DETAIL

  1.Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, London: Faber and Faber, 1988, p. xiii.

  2.Heaney, op. cit., p. xvi.

  3.Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 16.

  4.Miłosz, op. cit., p. 19.

  5.Ibid., p. 25.

  6.Ibid., p. 110.

  7.Ibid., p. 108.

  8.Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London: Chatto & Windus, 1992, p. 181.

  9.Eva Hoffmann, review of Steiner’s Real Presences, New York Times, August 9, 1989.

  10.George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? London: Faber and Faber, 1989, p. 17.

  11.Steiner, op. cit., p. 53.

  12.Heaney, op. cit., pp. 93–94.

  13.Ibid., p. 124.

  14.Ibid., p. 168.

  15.Ibid., p. 16.

  16.For Heaney on later Auden see Arthur Kirsch, Auden and Christianity, London: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 170.

  17.Heaney, op. cit., pp. 122–23.

  18.Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tension in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s, Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982, p. 267.

  19.Hamburger, op. cit., p. 215.

  20.Ibid., p. 118.

  21.Michael Hamburger (ed. and with an introduction by), An Unofficial Rilke, London: Anvil Poetry Press, 1981, p. 16.

  22.Miłosz, op. cit., pp. 56–57.

  23.Hamburger, Truth of Poetry, p. 39.

  24.Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose, New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1997, p. 104.

  25.Hamburger, Truth of Poetry, p. 131.

  26.James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, London: Jonathan Cape, 1999, p. 225.

  27.Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 132.

  28.Rorty, op. cit., p. 136.

  29.Ibid.

  CHAPTER 25: “OUR SPIRITUAL GOAL IS THE ENRICHMENT OF THE EVOLUTIONARY EPIC”

  1.Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. x.

  2.Dawkins, op. cit., p. xi.

  3.Ibid., p. 29.

  4.Ibid., pp. 312–13.

  5.Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 6.

  6.Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, London: Black Swan, 2006, appendix.

  7.Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, London: Allen Lane, 2006, p. 14.

  8.Dennett, op. cit., p. 14.

  9.Ibid., p. 101.

  10.Ibid., p. 232.

  11.For a possible explanation, see Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, trans. Roy Schwartz, London: Hurst, 2010, passim.

  12.Dennett, op. cit., p. 303.

  13.Ibid., p. 268.

  14.David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

  15.Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, London: Bantam, 2010, p. 32.

  16.Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue, London: Viking, p. 264.

  17.Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, New York: Viking, 2011. See also Steven Pinker, “Saturday Essay, Violence Vanquished,” Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2011.

  18.George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 44.

  19.E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 6.

  20.Wilson, op. cit., p. 171.

  21.Ibid., p. 201.

  22.Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis, Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993, p. 21.

  23.Kellert and Wilson, op. cit., p. 454.

  24.Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, New York: Knopf, 1998, p. 12.

  25.Wilson, Consilience, p. 232.

  26.Ibid., p. 248.

  27.Ibid., p. 265.

  28.Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society, London: Faber and Faber, 1973, p. 63.

  29.Ibid., pp. 159, 162.

  30.Ibid., p. 159.

  31.Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, London: Methuen, 1985, p. 13.

  32.Midgley, op. cit., p. 63.

  33.Ibid., p. 140.

  34.Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 124.

  35.Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene, Durham, UK: Acumen, 2010, p. 92.

  36.Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning, London: Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 153.

  37.Davies, op. cit., pp. 204, 209, 214.

  38.David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, London: Penguin Books, 1997, pp. 352ff.

  39.Deutsch, op. cit., p. 358. See also Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, London: Macmillan, 1995.

  CHAPTER 26: “THE GOOD LIFE IS THE LIFE SPENT SEEKING THE GOOD LIFE”

  1.T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, London: Faber and Faber, 1948, p. 19.

  2.Eliot, op. cit., p. 88.

  3.Ibid., p. 105.

  4.David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, p. 53.

  5.Steven Connor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernity, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 171.

  6.Connor, op. cit., p. 172.

  7.Michael Cole et al., What Is New Age? London: Hodder, 1990, p. 10.

  8.MacIntyre’s publications include After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1985), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) and Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999), all published by Duckworth, London. The discussion here relates mainly
to After Virtue and Dependent Rational Animals, passim.

  9.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, passim.

  10.Robert J. Dostall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 149. See also Hans Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. and with an introduction by Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986; and Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming, London: Sheed & Ward, 1975.

  11.Dostall, op. cit., p. 163.

  12.Ibid.

  13.A. C. Grayling, The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the Twenty-first Century, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, p. 25.

  14.Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, passim.

  15.Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 8–11.

  16.Nagel, op. cit., p. 108.

  17.Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 7.

  18.Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 50.

  19.Ibid., p. 115.

  20.Nagel, View from Nowhere, p. 223.

  21.Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, New York and London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. xxv.

  22.Rorty, op. cit., p. 150.

  23.Ibid., p. 158.

  24.Ibid., p. 86.

  25.Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 108.

  26.Robert Nozick, Invariances, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 280.

  27.Nozick, op. cit., p. 300.

  28.Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989, p. 12.

  29.Nozick, Examined Life, p. 264.

  30.Ibid., p. 302.

  31.Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 13.

  32.Dworkin, op. cit., pp. 197–98.

  33.Ibid., p. 206.

  34.Ibid., p. 217.

  35.Ronald Dworkin, “Religion without God,” New York Review of Books, April 4, 2013. See also Dworkin’s three Einstein lectures delivered at the University of Bern, Switzerland, on December 12–14, 2011, at http://www.law.nyu.edu/news.Ronald Dworkin.