Religion for Atheists

by Alain De Botton

  1.

  Once we are grown up, we are seldom encouraged officially to be nice to one another. A key assumption of modern Western political thinking is that we should be left alone to live as we like without being nagged, without fear of moral judgement and without being subject to the whims of authority. Freedom has become our supreme political virtue. It is not thought to be the state’s task to promote a vision of how we should act towards one another or to send us to hear lectures about chivalry and politeness. Modern politics, on both left and right, is dominated by what we can call a libertarian ideology.

  In his On Liberty of 1859, John Stuart Mill, one of the earliest and most articulate advocates of this hands-off approach, explained: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.’

  In this scheme, the state should harbour no aspirations to tinker with the inner well-being or outward manners of its members. The foibles of citizens are placed beyond comment or criticism — for fear of turning government into that most reviled and unpalatable kind of authority in libertarian eyes, the nanny state.

  2.

  Religions, on the other hand, have always had far more directive ambitions, advancing far-reaching ideas about how members of a community should behave towards one another.

  Consider Judaism, for example. Certain passages in the Jewish legal code, the Mishnah, have close parallels in modern law. There are familiar-sounding statutes about not stealing, breaking contracts or exacting disproportionate revenge on enemies during war.

  However, a great many other decrees extend their reach dramatically far beyond what a libertarian political ideology would judge to be appropriate bounds. The code is obsessed with the details of how we should behave with our families, our colleagues, strangers and even animals. It dictates that we must never sit down to eat a meal before we have fed our goats and our camels, that we should ask our parents for permission when agreeing to go on a journey of more than one night’s duration, that we should invite any widows in our communities for dinner every spring-time and that we should beat our olive trees only once during the harvest so as to leave any remaining fruit to the fatherless and to the poor. Such recommendations are capped by injunctions on how often to have sex, with men told of their duty before God to make love to their wives regularly, according to a timetable that aligns frequency with the scale of their professional commitments: ‘For men of independent means, every day. For labourers, twice a week. For donkey drivers, once a week. For camel drivers, once in thirty days. For sailors, once every six months’ (Mishnah, Ketubot, 5:6).

  The Jewish legal code advises not only that stealing is wrong but also that a donkey driver ought to have sex with his wife once a week. Moses receives the Tablets of the Law. From a French Bible, c. 834. (illustration credit 3.1)

  3.

  Libertarian theorists would concede that it is no doubt admirable to try to satisfy a spouse’s sexual needs, to be generous with olives and to keep one’s elders abreast of one’s travel plans. However, they would also condemn as peculiar and plain sinister any paternalistic attempt to convert these aspirations into statutes. When to feed the dog and ask widows over for supper are, according to a libertarian worldview, questions for the conscience of the individual rather than the judgement of the community.

  In secular society, by the libertarian’s reckoning, a firm line should divide conduct that is subject to law from conduct that is subject to personal morality. It should fall to parliaments, police forces, courts and prisons to prevent harm to a citizen’s life or property — but more ambiguous varieties of mischief should remain within the exclusive province of conscience. Thus the stealing of an ox is a matter to be investigated by a police officer, whereas the oppression of someone’s spirit through two decades of indifference in the bedroom is not.

  This reluctance to get involved in private matters is rooted less in indifference than in scepticism, and more specifically in a pervasive doubt that anyone could ever be in a position to know exactly what virtue is, let alone how it might be safely and judiciously instilled in others. Aware of the inherent complexity of ethical choices, libertarians cannot fail to notice how few issues fall cleanly into unassailable categories of right and wrong. What may seem like obvious truths to one party can be seen by another as culturally biased prejudices. Looking back upon centuries of religious self-assurance, libertarians stand transfixed by the dangers of conviction. An abhorrence of crude moralism has banished talk of morality from the public sphere. The impulse to question the behaviour of others trembles before the likely answer: who are you to tell me what to do?

  4.

  However, there is one arena in which we spontaneously favour moralistic intervention over neutrality, an arena which for many of us dominates our practical lives and dwarfs all other concerns in terms of its value: the business of raising our children.

  To be a parent is inevitably to mediate forcefully in the lives of one’s offspring in the hope that they will some day grow up to be not only law-abiding but also nice — that is, thoughtful with their partners, generous-spirited towards the fatherless, self-conscious about their motives and uninclined to wallow in sloth or self-pity. In their length and intensity, parents’ admonishments rival those laid out in the Jewish Mishnah.

  Faced with the same two questions which so trouble libertarian theorists in the political sphere — ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’ and ‘How do you know what is right?’ — parents have little difficulty in arriving at workable answers. Even as they frustrate their children’s immediate wishes (often to the sound of ear-splitting screams), they tend to feel sure that they are guiding them to act in accordance with norms which they would willingly respect if only they were capable of fully developed reason and self-control.

  The fact that such parents favour paternalism in their own homes does not mean that they have cast all their ethical doubts aside. They would argue that it is eminently reasonable to be unsure about certain large issues — whether foetuses should ever be aborted beyond twenty-four weeks, for example — while remaining supremely confident about many smaller ones, such as whether it is right to hit one’s younger brother in the face or to squirt apple juice across the bedroom ceiling.

  To lend concrete form to their pronouncements, parents are often moved to draw up star charts, complex domestic political settlements (usually to be found fastened to the sides of fridges or the doors of larders) which set forth in exhaustive detail the specific behaviours they expect from, and will reward in, their children.

  Noting the considerable behavioural improvements these charts tend to produce (along with the paradoxical satisfaction that children appear to derive from having their more disorderly impulses monitored and curtailed), libertarian adults may be tempted to suggest, with a modest laugh at such a palpably absurd idea, that they themselves might benefit from having a star chart pinned to the wall to keep track of their own eccentricities.

  5.

  If the idea of an adult star chart seems odd but not wholly without merit, it is because we are aware, in our more mature moments, of the scale of our imperfections and the depths of our childishness. There is so much that we would like to do but never end up doing and so many ways of behaving that we subscribe to in our hearts but ignore in our day-to-day lives. However, in a world obsessed with freedom, there are few voices left that ever dare to exhort us to act well.

  Even the most theoretically libertarian of parents tend to acknowledge the point of star charts when dealing with four-year-olds. (illustration credit 3.2)

  The exhortations we would need are typically not very complex: forgive others, be slow to anger, dare to imagine things from another’s point of view, set your dramas in perspective … We are holding to an unhelpfully sophisticated view of ourselves if we think that we are always above hearing well-placed, blunt and
simply structured reminders about kindness. There is greater wisdom in accepting that we are in most situations rather simple entities in want of much the same kind, firm, basic guidance as is naturally offered to children and domestic animals.

  The true risks to our chances of flourishing are different from those conceived of by libertarians. A lack of freedom is no longer, in most developed societies, the problem. Our downfall lies in our inability to make the most of the freedom that our ancestors painfully secured for us over three centuries. We have grown sick from being left to do as we please without sufficient wisdom to exploit our liberty. It is not primarily the case that we find ourselves at the mercy of paternalistic authorities whose claims we resent and want to be free of. The danger runs in an opposite direction: we face temptations which we revile in those interludes when we can attain a sufficient distance from them, but which we lack any encouragement to resist, much to our eventual self-disgust and disappointment. The mature sides of us watch in despair as the infantile aspects of us trample upon our more elevated principles and ignore what we most fervently revere. Our deepest wish may be that someone would come along and save us from ourselves.

  An occasional paternalistic reminder to behave well does not have to constitute an infringement of our ‘liberty’ as this term should properly be understood. Real freedom does not mean being left wholly to one’s own devices; it should be compatible with being harnessed and guided.

  Modern marriages are a test case of the problems created by an absence of a moral atmosphere. We start off with the best of intentions and a maximal degree of communal support. All eyes are upon us: family, friends and employees of the state appear to be fully invested in our mutual happiness and good behaviour. But soon enough we find ourselves alone with our wedding gifts and our conflicted natures, and because we are weak-willed creatures, the compact we so lately but so sincerely entered into begins to erode. Heady romantic longings are fragile materials with which to construct a relationship. We grow thoughtless and mendacious towards each other. We surprise ourselves with our rudeness. We become deceitful and vindictive.

  We may try to persuade the friends who visit us on the weekend to stay a little longer because their regard and their affection remind us of the high expectations the world once had of us. But in our souls, we know we are suffering because there is no one there to nudge us to reform our ways and make an effort. Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and thereafter they entrust a vigilant role to their deities. However sinister the idea of such surveillance may at first seem, it can in truth be reassuring to live as though someone else were continually watching and hoping for the best from us. It is gratifying to feel that our conduct is not simply our own business; it makes the momentous effort of acting nicely seem a little easier.

  6.

  Libertarians may concede that we would theoretically benefit from guidance, but they still complain that it would be impossible to deliver it, for the simple reason that at heart no one any longer knows what is good and bad. And we don’t know, as it is often pointed out in a seductive and dramatic aphorism, because God is dead.

  Much of modern moral thought has been transfixed by the idea that a collapse in belief must have irreparably damaged our capacity to build a convincing ethical framework for ourselves. But this argument, while apparently atheistic in nature, owes a strange, unwarranted debt to a religious mindset — for only if we truly believed at some level that God had once existed, and that the foundations of morality were therefore in their essence supernatural, would the recognition of his present non-existence have any power to shake our moral principles.

  However, if we assume from the start that we of course made God up, then the argument rapidly breaks down into a tautology — for why would we bother to feel burdened by ethical doubt if we knew that the many rules ascribed to supernatural beings were actually only the work of our all-too-human ancestors?

  It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms. Injunctions to be sympathetic or patient stemmed from an awareness that these were the qualities which could draw societies back from fragmentation and self-destruction. So vital were these rules to our survival that for thousands of years we did not dare to admit that we ourselves had formulated them, lest this expose them to critical scrutiny and irreverent handling. We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own prevarications and frailties.

  But if we can now own up to spiritualizing our ethical laws, we have no cause to do away with the laws themselves. We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves — that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) — who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.

  7.

  Of course, our readiness to accept guidance rather depends on the tone in which it is offered. Among religions’ more unpalatable features is the tendency of their clergies to speak to people as if they, and they alone, were in possession of maturity and moral authority. And yet Christianity never sounds more beguiling than when it denies this child — adult dichotomy and acknowledges that we are all in the end rather infantile, incomplete, unfinished, easily tempted and sinful. We are readier to absorb lessons about virtues and vices if they are delivered by characters who already seem fully acquainted with both categories. Hence the ongoing charm and utility of the idea of Original Sin.

  We had to invent ways to frighten ourselves into doing what, deep down, we already knew was right: The Torments of Hell, French illuminated manuscript, c. 1454. (illustration credit 3.3)

  The Judaeo-Christian tradition has intermittently appreciated that what can stop us from reforming ourselves is a lonely, guilty sense of how unusually bad and beyond saving we already are. These religions have therefore proclaimed with considerable sangfroid that all of us, without exception, are appallingly flawed creations. ‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me,’ thunders the Old Testament (Psalm 51), a message echoed in the New: ‘As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned’ (Romans 5:12).

  However, the recognition of this darkness is not the end point which modern pessimism so often assumes it must be. That we are tempted to deceive, steal, insult, egotistically ignore others and be unfaithful is accepted without surprise. The question is not whether we experience shocking temptations but whether we are able once in a while to rise above them.

  The doctrine of Original Sin encourages us to inch towards moral improvement by understanding that the faults we despise in ourselves are inevitable features of the species. We can therefore admit to them candidly and attempt to rectify them in the light of day. The doctrine knows that shame is not a helpful emotion for us to be weighed down with as we work towards having a little less to be ashamed about. Enlightenment thinkers believed that they were doing us a favour by declaring man to be originally and naturally good. However, being repeatedly informed of our native decency can cause us to become paralysed with remorse over our failure to measure up to impossible standards of integrity. Confessions of universal sinfulness turn out to be a better starting point from which
to take our first modest steps towards virtue.

  An emphasis on Original Sin further serves to answer any doubts as to who can have the right to dispense moral advice in a democratic age. To the incensed query, ‘And who are you to tell me how to live?’, a believer need only push back with the disarming response, ‘A fellow sinner’. We are all descended from a single ancestor, the fallen Adam, and are therefore beset by identical anxieties, temptations towards iniquity, cravings for love and occasional aspirations to purity.

  8.

  We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together. However, a lack of absolute agreement on the good life should not in itself be enough to disqualify us from investigating and promoting the theoretical notion of such a life.

  The priority of moral instruction must be general, even if the list of virtues and vices to guide any one of us has to be specific, given that we all incline in astonishingly personal ways to idiocy and spite.

  The one generalization we might venture to draw from the Judaeo-Christian approach to good behaviour is that we would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small-scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. Pride, a superficially unobtrusive attitude of mind, was deemed worthy of notice by Christianity, just as Judaism saw nothing frivolous in making recommendations about how often married couples should have sex.

  Consider, by contrast, how belatedly and how bluntly the modern state enters into our lives with its injunctions. It intervenes when it is already far too late, after we have picked up the gun, stolen the money, lied to the children or pushed our spouse out of the window. It does not study the debt that large crimes owe to subtle abuses. The achievement of Judaeo-Christian ethics was to encompass more than just the great and obvious vices of mankind. Its recommendations addressed a range of faint cruelties and ill-treatments of the sort which disfigure daily life and form the crucible for cataclysmic crimes. It knew that rudeness and emotional humiliation may be just as corrosive to a well-functioning society as robbery and murder.