Without God

by Louis Betty

  The next morning, after loading my car, I returned to the now-deserted chapel. The Virgin waited in the shadows, calm and imperishable. She possessed dominion, she possessed power, but little by little I felt I was losing contact, that she was drifting away, disappearing into the centuries, while I slumped in my pew [ . . . ]. At the end of fifteen minutes I got up, permanently abandoned by the Spirit, reduced to my run-down, perishable body, and I sadly descended the steps in the direction of the parking lot. (2015a, 170, my translation)

  Houellebecq’s novels suggest that once religion becomes definable as religion—that is, once its symbols no longer address themselves to society at large as representative of discipline and moral authority, but rather address only the individual as motivators of religious “moods and motivations”—it is already doomed. Religion must do more than provide a space for the individual to enter, à la Geertz, into the “religious perspective.” This is simply not enough for modern people; the symbols therein are too weak, too uncoupled from ordinary existence to give serious motivation. Religion must set a disciplinary canopy over the head of humankind, must order its acts and its moral commitments, must furnish ultimate explanations capable of determining the remainder of social life; otherwise, religion loses itself in the morass of competing perspectives (scientific, commonsense, political, etc.). This is precisely what has happened in the West and what Houellebecq attempts to rebuild under the guise of Elohimism.

  Elohimism, Islam, and the Question of Religious Discipline

  The disciplinary aspect of Elohimism only becomes apparent in the life stories of Daniel24 and Daniel25, copies of the original Daniel who live in isolation on remote, heavily guarded compounds following the apocalyptic collapse of global civilization. The clones form a loose confederation united by a Supreme Sister located in the mythical Central City. Physical contact between neohumans is prohibited; instead, they are expected to pass their lives in study of their forebears’ life stories, and contact with other neohumans is limited to electronic communication.

  The clones insist on a radical heterogeneity between themselves and the “human savages” who roam in small bands across the countryside. Daniel24 confesses, “For them I feel no pity, nor any sense of common belonging; I simply consider them to be slightly more intelligent monkeys, and, for this reason, more dangerous. There are times when I unlock the fence to rescue a rabbit, or a stray dog; but never to bring help to a human” (18). Having made a study of the lives of the “originals” (e.g., Daniel1), the neohumans have established a cult of strict asceticism intended to distance them from the destructive passions of their forebears, as well as to prepare them for the coming of the Future Ones (the Elohim). In order to endure lives of isolation, the clones have modified their genome to “decrease [ . . . ] the suffering linked to absence of contact” (115); even such fundamental elements of human nature as sexuality strike them as “genuine stumbling blocks” (226), as if they were children confused by a first course in sex education. The Supreme Sister, in echo (and perhaps parody) of Schopenhauer, outlines the ascetic program that each clone is expected to follow: “Jealousy, desire, and the appetite for procreation share the same origin, which is the suffering of being. It is the suffering of being which makes us seek out the other, as a palliative; we must go beyond this stage to reach the state where the simple fact of being constitutes in itself a permanent occasion for joy [ . . . ]. We must, in a word, reach the freedom of indifference, the condition for the possibility of perfect serenity” (260). As it is practiced by the neohumans, Elohimism is disciplinary insofar as its reach over individual existence appears to be total. The dyad of Supreme Sister and Central City governs every dimension of existence, from the social to the merely corporeal (recall the clones’ altered genome), while departure from one’s compound is an apostasy that results in the termination of one’s genetic line (334).

  The term “disciplinary” is, however, somewhat deceiving, or at the very least fraught with problematic assumptions about the role of religion in civilization. Elohimism is certainly not disciplinary in the sense that it is oppressing or colonizing its adherents for the sake of some material gain or for power for its own sake. Rather, the Supreme Sister’s rigorous discipline is intended to separate this new humanity, physically and psychically, from the utter barbarism of the outside world, both as Daniel24 and 25 find that world in the fifth millennium and, more important, in its incipient form as Daniel1 conveys it in his life story. Daniel25 describes the process of cultural decay and finally collapse that has spanned the period between Daniel1’s lifetime and the beginning of the fifth millennium: “Research has shown the resurgence, over this troubled period [the third millennium], of beliefs and behaviors from the most ancient folkloric past of Western mankind, such as astrology, divining magic, and fidelity to hierarchies of a dynastic type [ . . . ]. A violent, savage future was what awaited men, many were aware of it even before the unleashing of the first troubles” (310). Over the centuries, this renewal of barbarism has resulted in the disappearance of language and thus the loss of any form of “mental, intellectual, or artistic activity” (314). Reduced to animals, the remaining tribes display behaviors one might imagine to be typical of primordial humanity: “The tribe was organized along a strict hierarchical system [ . . . ]. The chief was a male of about forty, with graying hair; he was assisted by two young males who had rather broad chests, by far the biggest and most robust individuals in the group; copulation with the females was reserved for them: when the females encountered one of the three dominant males, they crouched down on all fours and presented their vulva” (318). Here, it is also helpful to recall the previously cited passage in which Daniel25, while wandering the Spanish countryside, encounters a fight to the death between the two oldest members of a tribe. The weaker of the two men is killed by the other, after which the men and women who have been watching the duel begin eating the still-writhing body and drinking the blood that has spilled onto the ground. Daniel25 observes, without irony, “all of this seemed to conform to what I had been taught about mankind” (321).

  What Daniel25 has in mind, of course, is the already morally decayed civilization of Daniel1’s time, when the elderly were left to die alone in ill-equipped nursing homes, and, once Elohimism took global hold, men and women as young as fifty began committing suicide in the hope of reincarnation in a younger body. The barbarism Daniel25 observes in the fifth millennium was, in other words, already well established at the outset of the third millennium, with the utter bestiality witnessed in the “savages” presented as the logical result of the materialist worldview that has progressively replaced Christianity in the modern period. No doubt it is unpopular today to view religion as a “civilizing force” that lifts humanity out of barbarism; rather, the prevailing tendency is to attribute to it somewhat the opposite function. Nevertheless, in Possibility Houellebecq presents Elohimism as the only institution capable of maintaining a semblance of civilization amid absolute disorder; indeed, it plays the “same role as the monasteries during the Middle Ages,” maintaining history, science, and, most essentially, language (310). Upon finishing Possibility, the reader will perhaps wonder if we in the West have become so civilized that we have forgotten the terrible brutishness into which truly uneducated and uncultured man can descend. Houellebecq indicates that religion plays a critical role—disciplinary, authoritarian, or whatever one wishes to call it—in sparing us the worst of ourselves; the suggestion is not entirely unconvincing.

  The ascendancy of Elohimism may also be an expression of increasingly explicit anxieties among Europeans about the spread of Islam in Europe, or what burgeoning far-right European political parties, such as France’s National Front, often refer to as the “Islamicization” of the West. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, for instance, reported in 2011 that by 2030 Muslims will make up 8 percent of the European population, up from approximately 6 percent in 2010, while in France the projection for 2030 is 10.2 percent, with Muslim
s in 2010 accounting for about 7.5 percent of the population. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 and the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East, one can reasonably expect fears among many Europeans of an Islamic demographic and political conquest to increase. Houellebecq (2015b) has moderated his tone on Islam, granting that jihadists are “bad Muslims” and that a literal reading of the Quran does not necessarily lead to holy war. Throughout most of his career, however, he has been guilty of what many in the West refer to as “Islamophobia”—that is, of making statements both publicly and in his fiction that paint Islam in a less than flattering light.6 It is worth spending a few moments reviewing them.

  Houellebecq’s most offending comments about Islam have been the object of significant legal and media controversy in France. Houellebecq has intellectual reasons for claiming Islam is the “stupidest religion”; his references on this point are such luminaries as Spinoza and Lévi-Strauss (see Houellebecq and Lévy 2011, 193). Monotheism is, for Houellebecq, “the act of a moron” (2001, n.p., my translation), a product of the desert and its one-dimensionality, invented by “filthy Bedouin[s]” who had nothing better to do than “bugger their camels” (2002, 179). Consequently, because Islam promotes the most strenuous form of monotheism, linked as it is to an intransigent legalism, it is the most deplorable of the monotheisms. What is, however, perhaps most interesting in Houellebecq’s observations about Islam are not the tirades that readers find in Platform, but rather the few moments in his texts and public comments where he explicitly contrasts Islam to the culture of the contemporary West. For instance, in his 2001 Lire interview, Houellebecq opines, “Islam is a dangerous religion, and has been since its appearance. Fortunately, it is doomed. On the one hand, because God does not exist [ . . . ]. On the other hand, Islam is undermined from the inside by capitalism [ . . . ]. Materialism is a lesser evil. Its values are contemptible, but still less destructive, less cruel than those of Islam” (n.p., my translation).

  Houellebecq has fashioned this hope for the rapid collapse of Islam into a talking point for a number of the Muslim characters in his novels. Unable to condemn Islam on his own without risk of causing a legal stir, Houellebecq allows fictional Muslims to do it for him. In Platform, Michel, having returned to Thailand after his lover Valérie’s death at the hands of Muslim terrorists, listens to the following rant by a Jordanian banker:

  The problem with Muslims [ . . . ] was that the paradise promised by the Prophet already existed here on earth. There were places on earth where young, available, lascivious women danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred yards of our hotel [ . . . ]. All you had to do was pay a couple of dollars [ . . . ]. For him, there was no doubt, the Muslim way was doomed: capitalism would triumph [ . . . ]. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, [young Arab men] wanted to be part of the American system. The violence of some of them was no more than a sign of impotent jealousy, and thankfully, more and more of them were turning their backs on Islam. (2002, 250–51)

  Here we are in the domain of prognostication and thus, in some sense, of anxiety; the collapse of Islam is historically inevitable, and as more and more Muslims become acquainted with the Western way of life, they are bound to abandon their “fearful” native religion for the freedoms of modernity.

  In Possibility, this evolution is explicitly envisioned, with Islam only holding sway in Europe in the interim between the disappearance of Christianity and the rise of Elohimism. Having become “stronger in the Western countries at practically the same rate as Elohimism,” Islam is able to convert indigenous Europeans en masse owing “uniquely to machismo” (246). “There were more and more people,” Houellebecq writes, “especially women, who dreamed of a return to a system where women were modest and submissive, and their virginity was preserved” (246). While Elohimism also attracts converts from “the last residues from the fall of Christianity” (246) and then sets its sights on Asia, Islam in Europe “managed to assume [ . . . ] the role that had been Catholicism’s in its heyday,” “an ‘official’ religion, organizer of the calendar and of mini-ceremonies marking out the passage of time, with dogmas that were sufficiently primitive to be grasped by the greatest number while preserving sufficient ambiguity to seduce the most agile minds” (247). Islam’s hegemony in the West is, however, brief. As “underground Internet connections” disseminate images throughout Muslim countries of a “way of life based on mass consumption, sexual freedom, and leisure, the enthusiasm of their populations was as intense and eager as it had been, half a century earlier, in the Communist countries” (248). Palestinian women in particular, who show a “sudden refusal [ . . . ] to limit their existence to the repeated procreation of future jihadists,” initiate a broader revolt of Muslim youth that spreads to “all the Arab countries [ . . . ] in the face of which they obviously could do nothing” (248). “It then became perfectly clear, in the eyes of the Western populations, that all the countries of Dar-el-Islam had only been kept in their primitive faith by ignorance and constraint; deprived of their bases in the rear, the Western Islamist movements collapsed at a stroke” (248). No doubt these are bold predictions, and Islam’s precipitous collapse in Possibility must surely be a source of pleasure (and relief) for readers unnerved by the contemporary proliferation of global jihad. Certainly one cannot prove that Houellebecq’s treatment of Islam’s demise issues from his anxieties; even without Elohimism’s fortuitous appearance as an alternative to a defunct Christianity, Islam is the obvious favorite to become the next “official” religion of Europe—namely, a disciplinary institution that organizes social life in its most intimate aspects (i.e., sexual practices and the organization of time). Possibility reveals an assumption about the West’s religious future in which Islam, without opposition from a new religious movement such as Elohimism, is the inevitable victor in the rush to fill Europe’s religious vacuum. This assumption becomes all the more prescient in Submission: in this novel there are no Elohimites to vie for the heart, mind, and soul of the West.

  To be sure, the reigning presuppositions are that secular humanism will continue as the West’s metaphysical regime and that, with increasing globalization, one can reasonably expect it to spread. It is, however, always worth asking whether such a conjecture is warranted, and Houellebecq’s novels are uniquely suited to engage readers in a salubrious reappraisal of the fundamental values embedded in post-Christian Western liberal discourse. Increasing freedom always and everywhere signifies increasing happiness, the joys of liberation are not undermined by the anxieties it produces, humanity is happier without God than with him—these are the deeply secular, deeply liberal assumptions that Houellebecq’s novels take to task. Transgressiveness as a literary trope is usually attributed to writers and texts that bend and distort the limits of freedom in the direction of even greater liberation. In Houellebecq’s case, transgressiveness moves in the opposite direction, scandalously daring us to wonder if the discourse of human dignity and rights that the West has fashioned in the wake of God’s death can remain the guarantor of human happiness, or whether, as the Comtean understanding of history holds, it is no more than a wobbly metaphysical placeholder awaiting the shattering day of God’s return.

  3

  Religion and Utopia

  Deep down, I am with the utopians, people who think that the movement of History must conclude in an absence of movement. An end to History seems desirable to me.

  —Quoted in Varsava 2005

  Houellebecq’s concern with the spiritual future of the West is foreign to much of mainstream twentieth-century intellectualism. At least in France, the middle decades of that century saw an intellectual milieu preoccupied with Marxism, Maoism, and the ideals of 1968 and devoted to some form of secular socialism. Sartre’s claim at the end of Existentialism Is a Humanism that “[e]xistentialism is merely an attempt to draw all of the conclusions inferred by
a consistently atheistic point of view” (2007, 53) would seem a proper summary of the period’s intellectual commitments: God removed from the human scene and with him the possibility of founding any notion of rights or essence—with the additional consequence that humanity is now free to fashion itself according to its own will, without regard for Providence. Freedom from divine will is as old as modernity, but in the case of philosophers such as Sartre (and certainly the Marxists of the subsequent generation of intellectuals, among whom were Althusser, Bourdieu, and Foucault), freedom came with the added requirement of radical self-determination. Claims to essence were the product of dominant bourgeois institutions and the so-called sites of power they concealed. The task of the intellectual was to unmask and render intelligible those mechanisms of power in the interest of liberating the human being from bourgeois slave drivers. Such was basically the work of Foucault and, in a different era, Marx.