by Ben Jeffery
Alain Badiou has said that the most straightforward definition of religion is as a means for maintaining the link between truth and meaning. ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ amounts to the thought that, although we may not know how all the (potentially terrible) things that happen to us fit into a plan, we can rest assured that they do fit a plan, somehow. Materialism denies any such guarantee. In Houellebecq’s novels death and decline are unavoidable facts of existence, but they don’t really signify anything. They are senseless truths, corresponding to no intention or design. As you will have gathered, the paradoxical (or, if you like, hypocritical) aspects of Houellebecq’s fiction are generally a direct result of his materialist philosophy, since materialism breeds distrust for stories. One good example of this, taken from political theory, is the classic materialist critique of ideology – viz that in order to disguise or placate material inequalities certain social fictions are invented, which restore equality on an imaginary plane. In the Marxist version of this argument, economic injustice is soothed because in other, ‘more important’ respects everybody is convinced that they as well-off as everybody else, e.g. equal before God, or as citizens of the State. Without the underlying material imbalance, however, there would be no need for these equalising myths. When Marx described religion as ‘the opium of the people’ he meant it in the sense of a painkiller rather than a source of pleasure. Not something wicked per se; a relief (of sorts) from discomfort – but ultimately a solace that prolongs the very suffering it eases, because it obscures the true causes of pain. Even if you don’t think this is an exhaustive explanation of how religion comes to be, the coping mechanism it identifies is powerful and real. Needless to say, the fictions that disguise inequality don’t present themselves as fictions, which would defeat the point. So a present-day equivalent – now that people are typically less religious and more politically disengaged – would be like the idea that anyone can be happy if only they have the right attitude, or successful if they work hard enough; in general, the kind of propositions which make subjective well-being a matter of individual responsibility, rather than something largely at the mercy of impersonal forces. One of the great pains of materialism, which is no less painful even if it can sound a little trite, is that it turns us into objects – fixed and limited things – and thereby exposes all the mental-contortions we go through to cover up the fact that we aren’t the smartest, or strongest, or youngest, or most beautiful, or successful, or admired person there is; on top of which we are ceaselessly and helplessly growing older, and will one day die. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Houellebecq’s founding act as a writer was the application of this kind of materialist critique to romance, so that romantic or erotic happiness are deemed to have nothing essentially mysterious about them, but depend only on objectively identifiable criteria about someone’s body and circumstances. Having the right attitude (the right brain) is sheer luck, an accident of birth like everything else.
But there’s a limit to the idea that you can strip away all the consoling lies people tell themselves to find the real material truth underneath, and to his credit Houellebecq is aware of it. During one scene in Whatever, the luckless Tisserand confides his reasons for not visiting prostitutes: ‘Maybe I’ll end up doing it’, he says. ‘But I know that some men can get the same thing for free, and with love to boot. I prefer trying; for the moment I still prefer trying.’ The status of this remark is ambiguous. On the one hand, it is made clear that Tisserand is not in control of the forces at work: he is physically repulsive and not much of a personality either. His longing is wildly out of line with anything he can realistically expect. But, on the other, it is also clear that renouncing his desire would be devastating for him, and – as the narrator of Whatever acknowledges – the refusal to give up on love is basically admirable. It gives Tisserand hope, however much it hurts.
The nobility of Tisserand’s resolve reminds us of a more fundamental truth besides: we all need our stories. As Slavoj Žižek remarks, in an essay about the election of President Obama, cynicism is its own type of foolishness in this regard:
The position of the cynic is that he alone holds some piece of terrible, unvarnished wisdom. The paradigmatic cynic tells you privately, in a confidential low-key voice: ‘But don’t you get it that it is all really about (money/power/sex), that all high principles and values are just empty phrases which count for nothing?’ What the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom that ignores the power of illusions.
Undoubtedly we all employ ego-preserving fictions in order to compensate for our limitations and inequalities. Does it follow that these are nothing more than fictions? Žižek’s answer is an emphatic ‘No’. Pure cynicism is inconsistent and impossible because it suggests that you could step outside narrative and find reality. But reality is partially structured by the stories we tell ourselves. There is a sense in which, for instance, the ideal of justice is a ‘lie’, given that in practice the law habitually favours the privileged and discriminates against the powerless. But, Žižek argues, this fiction also creates the real possibility of emancipation, because it allows the disenfranchised to confront the powers that be with their hypocrisy. The lie can transform reality. Likewise, Tisserand’s irrational belief in love is the only way he stands a chance of finding it. So it ends up being perversely rational after all. For him, ‘realism’ would be a tomb. This is why, although Tisserand dies before he finds any solace, the narrator of Whatever is not wrong to salute his memory: ‘At least, I said to myself on learning of his death, he’ll have battled to the end… in his heart there was still the struggle, the desire and the will to struggle.’
It’s a truism of self-help that a person’s quality of life is (at least partially) determined by their self-image; that is, the stories they tell about themselves. If someone can be made to perceive their character in a new light, then it allows them to behave differently – reality changes. In a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, David Foster Wallace also stressed the idea that controlling perspective is something intrinsic to self-respect, although as he conceived it self-respect has more to do with forgetting, rather than asserting, yourself:
The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
On the face of it, this might seem like no more than a smooth argument for something insipid,10 e.g. the kind of power-within-you positive thinking Barbara Ehrenreich tore to shreds in Smile or Die (2010), her memoir of breast cancer and the relentlessly upbeat support-networks it brought her into contact with – a ‘tyranny of positive thinking’ claiming the po
wer of life-or-death. As Ehrenreich recalls:
there was, I learned, an urgent medical reason to embrace cancer with a smile: a ‘positive attitude’ is supposedly essential to recovery. During the months when I was undergoing chemotherapy, I encountered this assertion over and over – on websites, in books, from oncology nurses and fellow sufferers. Eight years later, it remains almost axiomatic, within the breast cancer culture, that survival hinges on ‘attitude’. One study found 60% of women who had been treated for the disease attributing their continued survival to a ‘positive attitude’.
Contrary to this, the research Ehrenreich examined indicated not only that subjective feelings make no difference to patients’ chances of survival, but ‘one 2004 study even found, in complete contradiction to the tenets of positive thinking, that women who perceive more benefits from their cancer “tend to face a poorer quality of life – including worse mental functioning – compared with women who do not perceive benefits from their diagnoses.”’ Putting a winsome face on cancer is punishing work. As much as anything, it demands the repression of entirely justified feelings of anger and fear. ‘This is a great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer fake cheer to complaining,’ noted Ehrenreich, ‘but it is not so easy on the afflicted.’ It would be easy to see Ehrenreich’s story as just more evidence, if we needed it, of how ultimately helpless we are over life-determining contingencies, and the speciousness of asserting that ‘you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it’, come what may. But Wallace is saying more than that. His point is not that you can learn to accept anything, if only you believe in the right way. It’s that there’s no opting-out of belief. You have to worship something. The cynic is never a true cynic, because in practice he can’t help but follow some idea about what’s meaningful, even if he never admits it to himself.
The claim Wallace makes that in ‘the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism’ isn’t really an accusation of hypocrisy (i.e. that you’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe in God), but it does touch upon a genuine shortcoming in contemporary secular thinking. The immediate difficulty in atheism is not that it precludes some comforting illusions, or introduces a catastrophic dose of meaninglessness into our lives (absurd on the face of it – we go on living don’t we?), but that we’re obliged to face up to the groundlessness of certain beliefs that persist whether we give them a religious expression or not, e.g. the unfathomable quality of ‘humanity’ as substituted for the unfathomable quality of ‘soul’. It’s as though the world-weary dismissal of religion – the one saying it would be nice to believe in these comforting fairly tales, but unfortunately it’s impossible – could be turned on its head: it would be nice not to believe in absurd, unjustifiable things, but unfortunately we do. I’ve said that the truth as depressive realism sees it is so grim it’s hard to understand why it’s worth telling, and in fact depressive realism can’t tell us why – it simply assumes that it is. In trying to dispose of all untrustworthy ideals, the pessimist ends up demonstrating how indispensable (some kind of) faith is, even if it’s only a faith in your own hard-eyed veracity. Joseph Ratzinger put it well in his Introduction to Christianity (1969), and one needn’t be religious to take the point:
Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident.
If what Wallace and Ratzinger say is right, the upshot is that we are each effectively in a position of being forced to adopt some belief about what makes life meaningful. But even if we’re able to exercise some choice about what this is, there’s no way of validating our decision. Belief is never certain. The act of belief – the forced choice – comes before any theoretical justification, which is why in the last analysis belief always appears unaccountable or contingent. According to Kierkegaard, faith and doubt are concurrent: humans are never sure, ultimately we only ‘believe that we believe’, and are unable to escape the fear of being deluded. This is just to generalise Sontag’s remark about justifying art: our beliefs about what matters can never be proven, they can only be made more or less plausible. Houellebecq’s fiction is built from the idea that the most plausible thing of all to believe is the materialist hypothesis that we are each born alone, live alone, and die alone – and this is depressing. It trivialises art, because it undermines communion; it sabotages love in the same way. After everything else, you are alone, which is not good. It’s no accident that the forms of worship Wallace claimed would ‘eat you alive’ are all essentially forms of self-worship. Selfishness (irony of ironies) is self-defeating, since it’s impossible to sustain. No matter how much you consume, you never have enough; on top of which there’s no outrunning ageing or death. So we get the result that what seems truest of all – our deep, immediate self-centredness – is also a hateful curse we would be fortunate to dispel. How? Infuriatingly, the problem of selfishness creates a vicious logical circle: if I make a decision to act less selfishly, isn’t it only because, in the end, I think I’ll be better off in some way? – i.e. isn’t it still a selfish decision, and therefore provides no escape from selfishness? This deadlock is why some philosophers, such as Weil, claimed you would need the help of an ‘impossible’, supernatural force (God’s grace) to realise selflessness at all. But it’s worth pointing out that, if only in a very small way, the basic uncertainty of belief transforms into something of an asset when we’re trying to think outside ourselves. As the joke goes, every man would dearly like to be an egotist, but none of them can quite manage it: even what appears to us as our most powerful and logically compelling motivation – self-interest – is doubtful, and it’s impossible to be finally convinced that selfishness is what behaviour reduces to, even if we think it would be better to have no altruistic illusions.
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One of the oldest problems in moral philosophy is how to articulate the idea that submitting your life to some ‘greater good’ is really a supreme form of self-interest. Which it is, in a sense, because it offers one way (perhaps the only way) of reconciling yourself with death: the knowledge that something more important than your life will survive. From this perspective, what needs to be fought is the monstrously powerful instinct to believe that there is really nothing worse than death, and conversely nothing more important than survival, and therefore – because survival is, in the end, impossible – no real way of accepting life.
The philosopher Leszek Kołakowski expressed this very forcefully at the end of his essay ‘The Revenge of the Sacred on Secular Culture’:
Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith. One can, of course, disperse one’s life over the contingencies of every day, but even then it is only a ceaseless and desperate desire to live, and finally a regret that one has not lived. One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is a sense beyond that which is inherent in human history – if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred. A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognises itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself. It would leave only the choice proposed by Baudelaire, between lovers of prostitutes and lovers of clouds: those who know only the satisfactions of the moment and are therefore contemptible, and those who lose themselves in otiose imaginings, and are therefore contemptible. Everything is then contemptible, and there is nothing more to be said. The conscience liberated from the sacred knows this, even if it conceals it from itself.