Religion for Atheists

by Alain De Botton

  Many would no doubt argue that modern society must already have all the institutions it needs. In practice, however, those who are drawn to what Catholicism has termed cura animarum, ‘the care of souls’, but who feel unable to effect this care in religious ways, are all too likely to end up compromised for want of a coherent network of colleagues, a tolerable income and a stable and dignified professional structure within which to operate. It is a measure of how deeply ingrained the problem is that we would even now struggle to give Nietzsche a professional home.

  Only religions have been able to turn the needs of the soul into large quantities of money. (illustration credit 10.3)

  3.

  Another useful feature of institutions is their ability to coalesce the efforts of their members through a shared visual vocabulary. Here again, the strategies of religions and commercial corporations overlap. While the sight of a cross emblazoned on the side of an ecclesiastical building or a lamb embroidered on an altar cloth has frequently prompted the observation that Christianity was an early and adept practitioner of the same kind of ‘branding’ that our modern corporations specialize in, the truth is, of course, the reverse: it is the corporations that have faithfully adopted the lessons in identity pioneered by religions.

  The most important function of a brand is to promote consistency. Institutions trust that the appearance of their logo, whether on a remote mountainside or on top of a skyscraper, on a bedsheet or on a cloak, will instantly communicate the reliable presence of a particular set of values and act as a promise of uniformity and quality.

  The enemy of branding is local variation. Here too we sense a certain tension between Romantic and institutional values, for whereas Romanticism appreciates the charms of the particular and the regional, the home-made and the spontaneous, institutions cannot forget the hazards of provincial initiatives. Instead of touching improvements on the rules of the centre, they see only depressing deviations from minimal standards. They are reminded of corruption, laziness, degeneracy and the abandonment of initial ambitions. To stamp out eccentricities, the training manual for new staff of the McDonald’s Corporation runs to 300 pages, providing instructions for every imaginable action and transaction: there are rules about where the employee’s name badge must be placed, what sort of smile each customer must be treated to and precisely how much mayonnaise should be added to the underside of every top bun. The hamburger company has little faith in what the members of its workforce will do if left to their own devices.

  (illustration credit 10.4)

  In this, at least, McDonald’s has much in common with the Catholic Church, which has similarly spent a good deal of its history struggling to ensure a regularity of service across a vast and scattered labour force. Taken collectively, its edicts — specifying details down to what sort of wine should be used at Holy Communion and what colour priests’ shoes ought to be — indicate extreme concern about the standards of its peripheral branches. Following the Fourth Council of the Lateran, convoked by Pope Innocent III in 1213, the Church decreed (with evident irritation over the frequency with which even such basic rules were being broken) that ‘clerics shall not attend the performance of mimes, entertainers or actors. They shall not visit taverns except in case of necessity, namely when on a journey. They are forbidden to play dice or games of chance or be present at them.’ And lest some be tempted to show flair in their hairstyles, it was added that ‘they must always have a shaved crown and tonsure’.

  Heavy-handed though such decrees may have been, they helped to establish and enforce the consistent standards of ritual and performance that the faithful came to expect from the Church, and that all of us have in turn come to expect from corporations.

  The advantages of an institutional delivery of soul-related needs: Father Chris Vipers listens to a confession at St Lawrence’s Church, Feltham, England, 2010. (illustration credit 10.5)

  It is a singularly regrettable feature of the modern world that while some of the most trivial of our requirements (for shampoo and moisturizers, for example, as well as pasta sauce and sunglasses) are met by superlatively managed brands, our essential needs are left in the disorganized and unpredictable care of lone actors. For a telling illustration of the practical effects of branding and the quality control it is typically accompanied by, we need only compare the fragmented, highly variable field of psychotherapy with the elegantly discharged ritual of confession within the Catholic faith. Confession, well regimented in its every particular since the latter part of the fourteenth century, thanks to a stream of papal edicts and Vatican-issued manuals, is an epitome of the sort of reliable global service industry that would become the norm for consumer goods only in the mid-twentieth century. Everything from the positioning of the confessional box to the tone of voice used by the priest is governed by explicit rules, designed to assure all Catholics from Melbourne to Anchorage that their expectations for a redemptive examination of their soul will be met. No such provisions apply to our closest secular equivalent. Psychotherapy as currently practised lacks any consistency of setting or even any benchmarks for such apparently small yet critical details as the wording of the message on the therapist’s answering machine, his or her dress code and the appearance of the consulting room. Patients are left to endure a run of local quirks, from encounters with their therapists’ pets or children to gurgling pipework and bric-a-brac furnishings.

  An imaginary branded chain of psychotherapists. Why should only phones and shampoos benefit from coherent retail identities? (illustration credit 10.6)

  4.

  After successfully defining their identity, many corporations have gone on to engage in what business writers refer to as ‘brand extension’, the process whereby a company revered for its approach in one commercial sector carries over its values into another. Companies that began by making suits, for example, have realized that their values could just as effectively be applied to the design of belts and sunglasses, from which point it was only a short leap to imagine translation into furniture, then restaurants, apartments and eventually whole holiday resorts. These companies have wisely recognized that their customers’ allegiance is to an ethos rather than to a single product, and that the beauty and goodness that were first distinguished in a tie could be no less present in a chair leg, an entrée or a sun lounger.

  Inertia or unnecessary modesty has to date, however, prevented the most vigorous of modern companies from extending their brands across the full range of human requirements and, most cogently for the purposes of the present discussion, from applying their expertise to the apex of Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs. Corporations have instead chosen to set up shop along the base of this pyramid, making minor improvements to services and products designed to help us to sleep, eat, be safe or move while leaving unaddressed our desire to self-actualize, learn, love and inwardly grow. It is a failing of historic proportions, for instance, that BMW’s concern for rigour and precision has ended so conclusively at the bumpers of its cars rather than stretching to the founding of a school or of a political party, or that Giorgio Armani’s eponymous corporation has determinedly skirted the possibility of running a therapy unit or a liberal arts college.

  Intellectual movements have likewise, and just as regrettably, shunned attempts at brand extension. They have failed to imagine that their ideas could generate complementary, analogous services and products in the material realm, and become more vivid to us for having physical equivalents.

  What makes religions so distinctive is that they have dared to assert coherent brand identities across a diverse range of areas, from the strictly intellectual and theological to the aesthetic, sartorial and culinary. Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have all succeeded in relating larger ideas about the salvation of mankind to such subordinate material activities as managing weekend retreats, radio stations, restaurants, museums, lecture halls and clothing lines.

  Because we are embodied creatures — sensory animals as well as rational beings
— we stand to be lastingly influenced by concepts only when they come at us through a variety of channels. As religions seem alone in properly understanding, we cannot be adequately marked by ideas unless, in addition to being delivered through books, lectures and newspapers, they are also echoed in what we wear, eat, sing, decorate our houses with and bathe in.

  Brand extension: Mr Giorgio Armani and Mr Mohamed Alabbar, Chairman of Emaar Properties, at the opening of the Armani Hotel Dubai, March 2010. (illustration credit 10.7)

  5.

  One way of describing the activities of companies and religions is as forms of commodification — the process whereby haphazardly available, ill-defined goods are transformed into named, recognizable, well-stocked and well-presented entities.

  We are familiar enough with this process as it is carried out by corporations trading in material things: time and again, companies have scoured the globe in search of previously scarce consumer items and brought regularity to the supply of tea and paprika, kiwis and papaya, sparkling water and jojoba oil. Religions have demonstrated comparable abilities in the spiritual realm, managing, through the use of ritual, to rescue moments and feelings that under other circumstances might have been overlooked or forgotten, but which have instead — thanks to a religious version of commodification — acquired ennobling names and fixed dates in calendars.

  We have almost all had the experience of gazing at the night sky in September, when the alignment of the planets makes the full moon look especially bright and close by. We may briefly have pondered its majesty and the challenge it poses to our normal, earth-centric perspective. But those of us who are neither astronomers nor astronauts are unlikely to have formalized our lunar observation in any way, or indeed to have given it much further thought beyond a few minutes of contemplation.

  For Zen Buddhists in Japan, however, the ritual known as tsukimi has thoroughly commodified the business of moon-watching. Every year, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, followers gather at nightfall around specially constructed cone-shaped viewing platforms, where for several hours prayers are read aloud which use the moon as a springboard for reflections on Zen ideas of impermanence. Candles are lit and white rice dumplings called tsukimi dango are prepared and shared out among strangers in an atmosphere at once companionable and serene. A feeling is thereby supported by a ceremony, by architecture, by good company and by food — and so lent a secure place in every Japanese Zen Buddhist’s life.

  Fixing appointments to appreciate the moon: a viewing platform used for tsukimi celebrations, Katsura Imperial Villa, Kyoto. (illustration credit 10.8)

  Religions bring scale, consistency and outer-directed force to what might otherwise always remain small, random, private moments. They give substance to our inner dimensions — precisely those parts of us which Romanticism prefers to leave unregulated, for fear of hampering our chances of authenticity. They don’t solely relegate our feelings to volumes of poetry or essays, knowing that books are in the end hushed objects in a noisy world. When it is springtime, Judaism takes hold of us with a force that Wordsworth or Keats never employed: at the first blossoming of trees, the faithful are told to gather outdoors with a rabbi and together recite the birkat ilanot, a ritual prayer from the Talmud honouring the hand that made the blossom:

  ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe,

  Who did not leave a single thing lacking in His world,

  Filling it with the finest creatures and trees,

  So as to give pleasure to all of mankind.’

  (Talmud, Berakhot, 33:2)

  Though the modern world encourages us to feel things spontaneously and at our own pace, religions are wiser in putting dates in our diaries: here, the Jewish festival of Birkat Ilanot. (illustration credit 10.9)

  We need institutions to foster and protect those emotions to which we are sincerely inclined but which, without a supporting structure and a system of active reminders, we will be too distracted and undisciplined to make time for.

  The secular, Romantic world sees in commodification only loss, of diversity, quality and spontaneity. But at its finest the process enables fragile, rare but important aspects of existence to be more easily identified and more dependably shared. Those of us who hold no religious or supernatural beliefs still require regular, ritualized encounters with concepts such as friendship, community, gratitude and transcendence. We cannot rely on being able to make our way to them on our own. We need institutions that can remind us that we need them and present them to us in appealing wrappings — thus ensuring the nourishment of the most forgetful and un-self-aware sides of our souls.

  6.

  Plato’s hope that philosophers might be kings, and kings philosophers, was to be partially realized many hundreds of years after he expressed it in the Republic, when in AD 313, thanks to the efforts of Emperor Constantine, Jesus took up his position at the head of a gigantic state-sponsored Christian Church and thereby became the first quasi-philosophical ruler to succeed in propagating his beliefs with institutional support. A similar combination of power and thought can be found in all the major religions, alliances which we can admire and learn from without necessarily subscribing to any of their ideologies. The question we face now is how to ally the very many good ideas which currently slumber in the recesses of intellectual life with those organizational tools, many of them religious in origin, which stand the best chance of giving them due impact in the world.

  ii: Auguste Comte

  1.

  This book is not the first to attempt to reconcile an antipathy towards the supernatural side of religion with an admiration for certain of its ideas and practices; nor is it the first to be interested in a practical rather than a merely theoretical effect. Out of the many efforts in this line, the most determined was undertaken in the nineteenth century by the visionary, eccentric and only intermittently sane French sociologist Auguste Comte.

  Comte’s ideas proceeded from a characteristically blunt observation that in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, children and those suffering the final stages of incurable diseases. At the same time, Comte recognized, as many of his contemporaries did not, that a secular society devoted solely to the accumulation of wealth, scientific discovery, popular entertainment and romantic love — a society lacking in any sources of ethical instruction, consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity — would fall prey to untenable social maladies.

  Comte’s solution was neither to cling blindly to sacred traditions nor to cast them collectively and belligerently aside, but rather to identify their more relevant and rational aspects and put them to use. The resulting programme, the outcome of decades’ worth of thought and the summit of Comte’s intellectual achievement, was a new religion, a religion for atheists or, as Comte termed it, a Religion of Humanity, an original creed expressly tailored to the specific emotional and intellectual demands of modern man, rather than to the needs of the inhabitants of Judaea at the dawn of the Christian era or of northern India four centuries before that.

  Comte presented his new religion in two volumes, the Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion and the Theory of the Future of Man. He was convinced that humanity was still at the beginning of its history and that all kinds of innovation — however bold and far-fetched they might initially sound — were possible in the religious field, just as in the scientific one. There was no need to stay loyal to beliefs dating from a time when humans had barely learned how to fashion a wheel, let alone build a steam engine. As Comte pointed out, no one intent on starting a new religion from scratch in the modern era would dream of proposing anything as hoary and improbable as the rituals and precepts bequeathed to us by our ancestors. The age he lived in, he asserted, afforded him a historic opportunity to edit out the absurdities of the past and to create a new
version of religion which could be embraced because it was appealing and useful, rather than be clung to because it induced fear and represented itself as the only passport to a better life.

  Comte was a keen historian of the faiths and his new religion turned out to be made up largely from some of the best bits of the old ones. He drew most heavily from Catholicism, which he judged to be abhorrent in the majority of its beliefs yet nonetheless well stocked with valuable insights about morality, art and ritual — and also essayed occasional forays into the theology of Judaism, Buddhism and Islam.

  Rather than complain about the shortcomings of existing religions, it may sometimes be better just to invent a new one: Auguste Comte, 1798–1857. (illustration credit 10.10)

  Comte sought above all else to correct the dangers to which he felt modern atheists were exposed. He believed that capitalism had aggravated people’s competitive, individualistic impulses and distanced them from their communities, their traditions and their sympathies with nature. He criticized the nascent mass media for coarsening sensibilities and closing off chances for self-reflection, seclusion and original thought. In the same breath, he blamed the cult of Romanticism for putting too much strain on the conventional family and for promoting a falsely egoistic understanding of love. He lamented the arbitrary way in which, as soon as people felt they could no longer credit Jesus’s status as a divine being, they also had to forgo all the wisdom promulgated by Christianity. Comte at first hoped that secular schools and universities could become the new educators of the soul, imparting ethical lessons rather than mere information to their students, but he came to realize that capitalism would in the end always favour a skilled, obedient and unintrospective workforce over an inquisitive and emotionally balanced one.