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

by Watson, Peter

  Bergson’s second advance, as he saw it, and as many influential people did in the early years of the twentieth century, was his notion of creative evolution. Given the nineteenth-century obsession with the world as a machine, Bergson thought that he had observed a crucial way in which the world was not a machine, and this was in the existence of evolution, the production of new species, new and different forms of organism. It was unthinkable, he said, that any machine could produce—create—a new type of machine, and so here was a fundamental way in which living organisms were different from machines, and this meant the world was not a machine as many scientists implied. But he didn’t infer a divine interference in this state of affairs. Instead, he argued that there is a vital impulse, the élan vital, which propels evolution and which, over the course of history, has promoted greater and greater mobility in organisms—mobility being, for Bergson, the ultimate expression of freedom. He sought evidence for the élan vital in, for example, the fact that the eye has evolved in parallel in quite separate families of animals—this springs, he said, from the same impulse.

  This particular belief has been overtaken by evolutionary theory, but at the time the reaction to his ideas was considerable. On his visit to America in 1913, far more people turned out to see and hear him than had for Freud in 1909. This had partly to do with his sponsors—the pragmatists—partly to do with his lecturing style, but mainly to do with the fact that his system was seen as anti-science, or anti–scientific determinism, and as offering a non-religious but still mystical explanation for the otherwise fully materialist idea of evolution. It was a little like a replay, albeit in different clothes, of the moment in the eighteenth century when people couldn’t quite shift from Christian belief to atheism in one jump, and so opted for the midway station of deism. Bergson claimed that the élan vital was a scientific concept, but for many it had a mystical element, and that was what counted.

  SPIRITUAL ELITISM

  George Edward Moore has several claims on our attention. In the first place, as an undergraduate he was elected a member of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, more often remembered as the Apostles, whose other members included such figures as Alfred North Whitehead, G. H. Hardy and Rupert Brooke. If a university may be said to be an ideal community, more devoted to truth and learning and the exploration of philosophy than any other institution, the Apostles were an ideal within the ideal, and afforded many of their distinguished members (or, more accurately, members who would become distinguished) a form of spiritual life they rarely found elsewhere.

  In existence for more than seventy years when Moore arrived in Cambridge, the size of the society was limited to twelve at any one time (hence its informal name). Members met every Saturday evening during term time, and at these meetings an essay prepared by one of them would be read and discussed, and then a vote taken (this Saturday club matched the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Bertrand Russell, in his Autobiography, admitted that “the greatest happiness of [his] life at Cambridge” resulted from his association with the society; and Moore himself, looking back in 1942 almost fifty years after joining, recalled the “excitement and admiration” he felt on making the acquaintance of the group of students “whose conversation seemed to me of a brilliance such as I had never hitherto met with or even imagined. . . . Until I went to Cambridge I had no idea of how exciting life could be.”11

  After Cambridge and the Apostles, Moore became, as several Apostles did, a member of the Bloomsbury Group. By the time he joined in 1911 (there was no “election” as such to the group), Bloomsbury was well established, having begun in 1905 when, after the death of their father, Leslie, the Stephen children—Virginia, Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian—moved from Kensington to 46 Gordon Square near the British Museum, in the London district known as Bloomsbury. Here, Thoby introduced his Cambridge friends to his sisters at their weekly “at homes” on Thursday evenings. These “at homes” lasted until 1920.

  Here is Tom Regan’s summary of the group:

  “[T]he Bloomsbury Group was a powerful force in the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of post-Victorian England, pioneering new forms of expression in fiction and biography, forging new theories in economics and aesthetics. They were the harbingers of ‘the new,’ being everywhere—and often contemptuously—against ‘the old,’ not only in art and theory, but also in their day-to-day lives. As a matter of deliberate, conscientious decision they chose to live apart from both the very poor and the very rich. . . . An intellectual aristocracy in the truest sense . . . they made no effort to conceal and offered no apology for their shared sense of superiority, their spiritual elitism.”

  They were uncommon, too, in their loves and loyalties, which were often intermixed: Lytton Strachey lost Duncan Grant to Maynard Keynes; Clive Bell lost Vanessa to Roger Fry; Fry lost Vanessa to Grant; Vanessa shared Grant with David Garnett. No wonder, as one wag had it, in Bloomsbury, “all the couples were triangles.”12

  In his autobiography Beginning Again, Leonard Woolf summed up what Bloomsbury meant and the part in it played by Moore. “The color of our minds and thought had been given to us by the climate of Cambridge and Moore’s philosophy, much as the climate of England gives one color to the face of an Englishman.” Keynes agreed, further pointing out that the influence of Moore’s philosophy “was not only overwhelming . . . it was the extreme opposite of what Strachey used to call funeste, it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a new renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth, we were the fore-runners of a new dispensation, we were not afraid of anything.” Elsewhere Keynes wrote, “we accepted Moore’s religion . . . and discarded his morals.”13

  But what, then, was this new teaching, which Keynes emphasized, this new dispensation of Moore’s, and why was it so overwhelming? This is another case where we have to think ourselves back to a different time, if we are to grasp fully the impact of Moore. Bertrand Russell was aware of this. “It is surprising how great a change in mental climate those ten years [1904–14] had brought.”

  A place to begin lies with Keynes’s choice of the word “religion” to characterize some aspects of Moore’s teaching. Keynes took care to add that “Moore’s disciples” would have been “very angry at the time” with the suggestion that they had a religion. “We regarded all this as entirely rational and scientific in character.” Moore, too, would have been unhappy with any suggestion that he had propounded a religion—in his autobiography he described himself as a complete agnostic, and in fact his ethical precepts “were offered by him as a cognitively and emotionally satisfying substitute for the discarded belief in a supernatural deity—offered, that is, as a religion without god.”14

  Moore’s main work was Principia Ethica, published in 1903, but he set out some of his ideas in Vanity of Vanities (1899). At one point in his intellectual career he was very melancholic. Belief in God required a leap of faith that he was unable to make and this distressed him—one had to live for nothing, he thought. He began a long struggle to construct a system of ethics that he could live by and that would bring him out of his long melancholic night. He started from the view that, despite the death of God, there are some things in the world that are better in themselves than others, that we can know something about what would be better than what actually exists without having to know everything. Much influenced by Wordsworth and his concept of the “happy warrior” who works toward creating in himself a “better” person by actively seeking a more strenuously moral life, Moore first worked his way through art (“art is nothing but a representation of what ought to be”).

  This doctrine underlay much of what the Bloomsbury Group sought. Moore felt that “encounters with beautiful art are indistinguishable from those commonly attributed to (alleged) encounters with the Deity.” For Clive Bell, art “is an expression of and a means to states of mind as holy as any that men are capable of experiencing. . . . It is towards art that the modern mind turns, not only for the mo
st perfect expression of transcendent emotion, but for an inspiration by which to live.” Art was the “queen of endeavors” for Moore. “Its object—beauty—is something one can care about, something one can strive to bring into the world or encourage others to do so, something by means of which the world can be made better in just the sense in which Moore understands the notion of moral goodness: better in itself.”15

  WHAT OUGHT TO EXIST

  And this was Moore’s main concern in Principia Ethica, that ethics must deal with a notion “that belongs to it and it alone.” That notion is the Good (with a capital G), “understood as the property shared by all and only those things that are good in themselves, or that have intrinsic value, or that ought to exist or are worth having for their own sakes.” This was Moore’s central notion, that ethics studies an object that is not studied by any other science, that is logically independent of any other activity. For him, in Tom Regan’s gloss, the “good” is not the object of any empirical or natural science, including psychology; and propositions about which things are intrinsically good “are logically distinct from propositions about any fact that any natural science may discover.”

  This led him to his concept of the “naturalistic fallacy,” the name he gave to any attempt to identify the Good with something other than itself. His view was both that the good is indefinable and that some things are good in themselves, and it was the job of ethics to “fix the nature of this shared property.”16

  For him, the Good was sometimes a notion, sometimes an idea, sometimes an object, sometimes a practice, but that very idea/notion was not identical with anything other than itself. He thought that everyone was “aware” of the good; they had a notion of what a better life would be, for example, and they had an idea of what ought to exist. The Good exists in the sense that numbers exist, as a useful notion, but numbers—like the Good—cannot exist as entities in the world in the way that trees or rocks or buses exist. For Moore the Good was a “non-natural” property, in that it is neither natural nor metaphysical, and it was his replacement of the word “non-natural” for the more traditional “transcendental” that was liberating for so many.

  “Ought” being a main focus of Principia, what we ought to do, Moore held, “is what produces the best results.” We might take the view that the “best result” is equivalent to “what is more evolved,” but this is only one answer. Moore is at pains to point out that, because the Good is indefinable, there can be no one definition of what is Good and therefore no elevated class of “moral experts,” “whether dressed in the gowns of science or the robes of religion,” to impose their views on others—this was clearly very liberating at a time when the sanctimonious Victorian age was coming to an end.17

  What Moore insisted upon was that individuals judge for themselves what things ought to exist, what things are worth having for their own sake. “No natural science can do this. No metaphysical system can do this. Every attempt to take this freedom (and this responsibility) away from the individual rests on the same kind of fallacy—the (so-called) naturalistic fallacy. The raison d’être of ethics is to prove that there are some things—and these are the most important things in human life—that no science can prove.” Since Moore had a classics background, he was temperamentally at home in a polytheistic universe. “There are many goods, not only one.” It follows from this that the individual must make a leap of faith—faith in what he or she believes to be intrinsically good—not once but many times, and must wrest this freedom from science and religion and give it to “its rightful bearer: the individual.”

  “There is only the [intuitive] judgment itself [after due consideration], hanging suspended in the universe, so to speak, without support from anything other than itself.” Moore was determined to ensure that the moral freedom individuals had only recently grasped from the weakened clutches of an all but deceased religious tradition would not be stolen by the eager hands of evangelical scientists.18

  Other things flowed from this. For example, that “no moral law is self-evident”; we can never know with absolute certainty what our duties are (as Kant had said), though if certain rules appear to be useful (to the majority and to common sense), then we should probably follow them; but in this regard we ought to aim at goods affecting oneself and “those in whom one has a strong personal interest” rather than to “attempt a more extended beneficence.” And in general we should seek to secure goods that are “in the present” rather than some more distant future, simply on the grounds of the probability of their realization. Egoism, Moore felt, is “undoubtedly superior to altruism.” And it was important to distinguish between what we morally ought to do and what we have a moral duty to do, the former being wider and more encompassing than the latter.

  To sum up, then, so long as we do not violate those few rules that are necessary for the stability of any society (such as do not murder, do not steal, do not break your promises), he believed, “we act as we morally ought if we act with an eye to increasing our store of what is good in this world and sharing this with those for whom we care most—our family and friends.” There need be no more “extended beneficence.”19 It was this tightly circumscribed argument for no extended beneficence that appealed so much to the Bloomsbury Group, and it was this “faith” that Keynes called their “religion.” Looking back on those years, in a memoir written in 1949, Keynes concluded that “this religion of ours was a very good one to have grown up under.” He felt that virtue lay in the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beauty, but he acknowledged that these things can be maximized only in a stable society.20

  It has to be said that Moore’s doctrine, however well it may have imposed itself among the Bloomsberries, was overtaken by events. What the Bolsheviks and the Nazis thought was “good,” what ought to exist, was scarcely what Moore had in mind. His ideas evolved in a university context—that was their strength and their weakness. Terry Pinkard has noted that, for the most part, British philosophy has been the work of men of the world (Hume, Locke, Mill, Bentham), unlike German philosophy, which was the work of academics (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl). Moore was an exception to this rule, and he took a stable society for granted. The twentieth century went against this premise.

  NEUROSIS AS A PRIVATE RELIGION

  Sigmund Freud needs no introduction. When he died in 1939, W. H. Auden marked his passing with a poem in which he said that the psychoanalyst was “no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion.” Freud was like the weather, Auden went on to say, that “quietly surrounds all our habits of growth.” Freud was to be criticized—criticized bitterly, relentlessly, and from many different directions before he died, and even more since—but no one can dispute that he exerted an influence over twentieth-century ideas that was second to none. In fact, it is Freud above all who is responsible for the dominant shift in thought in modern times, which has seen a theological understanding of humankind replaced by a psychological one.

  One could say that, more broadly speaking, what has actually happened in the modern world is the replacement of a theological understanding of humanity by a biological one. Especially in the later decades of the twentieth century, the biological understanding of human nature—especially in its evolutionary context—has been extended and deepened, and these developments and their implications for our theme will be examined in later chapters. But, while it may be the case that the psychological understanding of humanity is part of the biological understanding, it is still true that psychology, and psychopathology, have invaded most successfully the territory once occupied exclusively by religion. As we shall see, this is true even among the clergy itself.

  Psychoanalysis had been launched, famously, with The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and had had a mixed reception, frowned upon by the orthodox medical profession but securing a small, devoted and gradually expanding circle of followers that widened further when Freud and his disciple Carl Jung visited the Un
ited States in 1909. The dominant idea of Dreams was that, as one observer put it, in sleep the sentry guarding our unconscious is, as it were, off duty; and ideas and emotions that are normally kept buried are let loose, albeit in symbolic and disguised form.

  By 1912, when the International Association of Psychoanalysis had surmounted its early problems and the first defections, the journal Imago came into existence. Founded by Hanns Sachs, a close friend of Freud and an early psychoanalyst, the journal was to be edited jointly by Freud himself and Otto Rank, a young Viennese psychoanalyst much influenced by Ibsen and Nietzsche. The name, Ronald Clark tells us, was taken from the title of a work by Carl Spitteler, a Swiss poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1919, in which the unconscious is shown both as affecting conscious action and stimulating the creative powers. But, significantly, the word “imago” also means the final form of an insect after metamorphosis, and the journal was intended to deal not just with any medical aspects of psychoanalysis but also with its transformation into a discipline that could confront also the non-medical possibilities that had emerged from them.21