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

by Watson, Peter

  In looking forward, Shaw was drawn to the superman idea, but his enthusiasm was tempered by two practical concerns: experience showed that if salvation was to be achieved in this world and not the next (which is what he believed, despite his religious feelings), it would have to be available for everyone, not just the Nietzschean few. He also eschewed the Nietzschean apocalyptic view of salvation: Darwin had taught that human progress toward whatever salvation is would come in “infinitesimal increments.” Here, Shaw’s philosophy and his politics came together: in his socialism and his Fabianism he was a gradualist, an evolutionist rather than a revolutionary.

  But he wasn’t entirely in thrall to Darwin. He accepted that human beings can have no life “except a share in the life of the community”; but he thought natural selection wasteful and indirect and that politics represented a more direct form of adaptation to our circumstances, nothing less—in his words—than the mechanism we have devised for fulfilling what he saw, in a Hegelian sense, as the will of the world.30 A whole raft of characters in his plays—Lady Cicely Waynflete, Undershaft, Caesar, Saint Joan, to name a few—identify with some “essential vitality and will outside themselves.” For Shaw the giving of oneself was the central act of faith in life, not as an act of self-abnegation or self-sacrifice, as Christianity would have it, but as a creative duty. The will was central, too, because “The progress of knowledge and civilization does not mend matters; it simply brings with it new needs and, with them, new sufferings and new forms of selfishness. Therefore, the will is still needed.”31

  And, as he said elsewhere, “The world is waiting for Man to redeem it from the lame and cramped government of the gods.”32 But Shaw frankly acknowledged that “the precise formula for the Superman . . . has not yet been discovered. Until it is, every birth is an experiment in the Great Research which is being conducted by the Life Force to discover that formula.” But he insisted that there is an “irresistible urge” to achieve an ever higher stage, a desire toward perfectibility: “In the heaven I seek [there is] no other joy than the work of helping Life in its struggle upward.”33 In Don Juan he wrote, “I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. . . . I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure . . . I have never known happiness.” Or, as Shaw wrote to Tolstoy in 1910: “To me God does not yet exist. . . . The current theory that God already exists in perfection involves the belief that God deliberately created something lower than Himself. . . . To my mind, unless we conceive God as engaged in a continual struggle to surpass himself . . . we are conceiving nothing better than an omnipotent snob.” And in the Postscript he added to Back to Methuselah as late as 1944: “God . . . is therefore not a Person but an incorporeal Purpose, unable to do anything directly.”34

  Again, this view informed his politics as much as his plays and ideas. “The ethic and religion of socialism seek not the ideal society through the ideal individual, but conversely, the ideal individual through the ideal society.” Through politics, society would achieve an ever-widening communal identity by means of an evolutionary process “in which each new level of development incorporated what was most necessary or ‘true’ from the half-truths of earlier stages.” The “good” is a process of endless improvement “that need never stop and is never complete.”35

  These ideas were incorporated into his plays, where the essential form is one of movement that usually carries beyond despair to a synthesis in the shape of a new and firmer grasp on reality, by way of an evolution leading to a more complete self-awareness through a dialectic of action and reaction. In Candida, the clergyman’s wife, Candida, asked to choose between her “weak” husband and her would-be lover, realizes she has learned to live without happiness: “life is nobler than [happiness].” As in his other plays, Shaw presents the choice as being between the truer and the less true, not between absolutes.36

  Shaw’s plays focus on superhuman, perceptive models (Don Juan, Caesar, Saint Joan, Undershaft, Henry Higgins, the early long-livers in Back to Methuselah), whose function, whether in a “world historical sense” (à la Hegel) or on a private, mundane, domestic level, is to encourage ordinary individuals (Cleopatra, Barbara Undershaft, Liza Doolittle, Ellie Dunn) into a larger participation in their own destiny.37

  Shaw took hope seriously—it is for him, as Robert Whitman has pointed out, a form of moral responsibility. “To be in hell is to drift (a denial of purpose); heaven is to steer. . . . Life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself . . . into higher and higher individuals.” Shaw’s superman, in contrast to Nietzsche’s, is not a goal, an end product; rather, it is a process, a stage of development: “Heaven is not a place but a direction.”38 In Major Barbara (1905), Undershaft, a wealthy armaments manufacturer, admits that he would rather be a thief than a pauper, a murderer rather than a slave, because in doing so he would be taking action, and would retain his self-respect. When Cussins, engaged to Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, asks him innocently what power it is that drives his munitions plant, Undershaft replies enigmatically: “A will of which I am part,” adding, “I am a millionaire. That is my religion.”

  This conformed to Shaw’s desire to see an end to the notion that we live for reason instead of for the fulfillment of our will to live. But what emerges from the play is that power and a sense of purpose need each other. If people want a better world, he is saying, they have to create it themselves, not sit back and wait for God to achieve it. “The end of human existence is not to be ‘good’ and be rewarded in heaven, but to create Heaven on earth.” As he wrote to Lady Gregory: “My doctrine is that God proceeds by the method of ‘trial and error.’ . . . To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God.”39

  In Androcles and the Lion, Shaw pits religion against no religion, airing his view that the major form of sin is the status quo, because, as he asserts in the Preface (Shaw was a great one for writing explicatory and often didactic prefaces to his plays), “the fundamental condition of evolution . . . is, that life, including human life, is continually evolving and must therefore be continually ashamed of itself and its present and past.”40 Christianity, he believes, is but a stage in moral evolution. And this evolution can happen only via the passionate impulses of life—curiosity, daring, resistance, the “effort of seeking something better,” to be contrasted with what he considered “the impulses of death,” the desire for comfort and happiness, cynical self-serving and “dreams of ease.”41

  For Shaw, vitality, a realistic vision and “the will to steer” are the trinity we need so as to achieve ever higher organization and “completer self-consciousness.” The fact that the life force was evolving longer life spans meant we could achieve even more. “It is enough that there is a beyond,” says Lilith in Methuselah.42 But Shaw is very quotable. “The future is to those who prefer surprise and wonder to security.” “Wrestle with life as it comes. And it never comes as we expect it to come.” “A faith in life rather than men, in the effort rather than the result, in the process rather than in a utopian vision of The Good.”43

  In almost all of Shaw’s plays the change that comes over the main characters is threefold, and in the direction of “more.” In one sense “more” means broader, richer, more complete, more adjusted to reality (more “adapted” in a Darwinian sense). The second sense is that the characters become more aware that their fulfillment, their salvation, lies outward rather than inside themselves. Third, and allied to this, is the development of reciprocal enlightenment, in which each character discovers him- or herself in his opposite.44 Shaw, like many modernists, saw that, if God was dead, if there was no afterlife of bliss, the only alternative was to live this life more intensely. His plays were more didactic than most, more so than Ibsen’s, certainly. From the best motives, he wanted to help his public enrich
the quality of their lives by nudging them—step by stumbling step—onto an evolutionary road upward and toward a wider consciousness and a more intense life.

  DO NOT LOOK INTO THE DISTANCE

  At first sight, there may not seem much of an overlap between Shaw and his Russian contemporary, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). Chekhov’s plays and short stories, his themes, are “quieter” than Shaw’s. But this is deceptive—the Russian was thoroughly immersed in Russian culture and history but his concerns were not at all dissimilar.

  Unlike many Russian writers of his generation, Chekhov was not an aristocrat and, in his case, that was important. His father had a small grocery shop in the provincial town of Taganrog. Of his early years Chekhov said: “In my childhood, I had no childhood.” He was made to work hour upon hour in the grocery shop and was often beaten by his excessively religious father. The young Chekhov particularly objected to being forced to serve as a chorister. Things got worse before they got better. In 1875 the family business virtually went under, his father moved with most of the family to Moscow, and Chekhov—barely fifteen—was left in charge in Taganrog. Yet soon he came to relish the increased freedom (and the lack of beatings and choir work). He found he enjoyed the responsibilities that had been thrust upon him, and the changed circumstances became altogether emancipating.45

  Not that the experience was the education he craved. There was a large Greek community in Taganrog, and at the school he attended all subjects were taught in Greek. But this did at least have the effect of making him a conscientious autodidact. Eventually he moved on to medical school in Moscow, a choice that he saw as a means of satisfying his humanitarian feelings and that also offered a sense of personal dignity.46

  Scientific literature always occupied him as much as imaginative writing, but it was from the likes of Tolstoy, Zola, Flaubert and Maupassant that he learned the primacy of a moral dimension in life, his loathing of the philistine world and in particular his view of the colorlessness of everyday life. It was this, as much as anything else, that gave him his notorious pessimism.

  Only when he moved to St. Petersburg in 1885 and met a number of famous writers, who all glimpsed the talent beneath the hack work that was all he had until then allowed himself, did he begin to assert his qualities. His real name appeared for the first time under a short story called “The Requiem” (1886). Gradually his views coalesced, and “Ward 6” (1892) marks something of a turning point. He came to accept that art—life in general—was without a unifying core idea, without purpose, was in that sense ultimately trivial; but he also believed that facing the objective truth, describing it in his work, was the first step toward inspiring in the reader or the audience the hope of a better life. In fulfilling this task, hard work, he maintained, was as necessary as talent.47 For him, the artist was no more than a highly skilled craftsman, not a prophet or a high priest. He was frequently attacked for his failure to depict heroic characters, to which he retorted that he would gladly depict them “if they existed in reality.”

  In some ways Chekhov’s style and oeuvre are to be understood as a reply to Dostoevsky’s apocalyptic view of life without God. We are not in an “abyss,” according to Chekhov; rather, we, or at least the provincial Russians, face a world of poshlost—mediocrity, colorlessness and philistinism—and for the most part a lack of ambition and heroism. Tolstoy’s form of Christianity, Chekhov thought, avoided the issues facing his fellow Russians, specifically the human misery of many in the evolving industrial sphere. This is made clear throughout his work, for example in “A Boring Story” (1889), “Ward 6,” “My Life” (1896) and “A Doctor’s Visit” (1898). Chekhov was in particular conscious of “how far life falls short of ideal life,” that philistinism destroyed the hope that it was the purpose of art to create, and that “no one is very obviously to blame for what is happening, except that they are all to blame for being so weak.” These are the culminating themes in his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.48

  Chekhov’s turning away from Dostoevsky’s “high temperature” vision, the “dull prose” of his plays that “had the precise intention of reproducing the dull prose of everyday life,” his apparent obsession with the futility of life, the criticism that “everything ends up seeming the same” and that his plays are unfocused—all this underlined his view that grand all-encompassing solutions to life are not to be found, but that instead we should look for “rather small-scale and, above all, practical answers.” It was people’s needs that counted, and those needs could not be fulfilled by great abstract ideas. For him, in marked contrast to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the absence of God did not lead to moral decline or a moral vacuum: individuals must find the answer for themselves, evolving their morality as they go along.

  In fact, Chekhov helped initiate the great change that took place after Nietzsche, which would echo down the twentieth century: namely, he was less interested in philosophical (to include religious) or sociological questions than in the interplay between morality and (individual) psychology.49

  Being an autodidact, he was naturally interested in self-improvement and education, and had along the way acquired the view that little could be accomplished without hard work. None of this, however, gave him direction. That happened as a result of his visit to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin in the North Pacific. To him, the penal colony was not just an isolated eyesore, but typified the shortcomings and corruption of the whole Russian Empire. In a seeming instant, his sense of purposelessness evaporated, and throughout the rest of his life his writings were devoted to the eradication of the terrible conditions he had seen there. In the early 1890s he extended his activities, forming the view that practical innovations, not just art, and however small-scale, were the only way to change Russian society. He sent more than two thousand books to Sakhalin, while directing his critical barbs at his fellow intellectuals who, despite their campaigning words, did little that was practical to improve matters.50

  He abhorred the religious revival that took place in Russia at the turn of the century, again because he was convinced that “there were no great solutions to be had” and because, like capitalism, religion produced a senseless waste of human potential. Like the characters in his plays, people under the sway of religion and/or capitalism “are too weak and afraid to improve their lot.” “In his last four plays the only happy characters are those who are smug, self-satisfied or complacent, while the more intelligent, such as Uncle Vanya and Sonya or the three sisters, remain without fulfillment.” Korney Chukovsky, the Russian journalist and poet, summed up Chekhov’s belief thus: “Compassion for the concrete individual was his cult.”

  But Joe Andrew, professor of Russian literature at Keele University, adds that this “cult” went further than compassion, “for Chekhov believed especially in the individual’s potential for heroic action within his own life, which would in turn serve as an example.” He was all too well aware that few among his countrymen would share his views, or aspire to such heights. But he insisted that a start could be made, that there was much that the “concrete individual” could achieve in his own life. “First was the absolute necessity to abandon illusion, to realize the truth of one’s life and only then could one even think of worthwhile achievements.” As Andrew points out, “for all the gloominess of the endings of Uncle Vanya and The Three Sisters the characters left on stage—Vanya and Sonya and the three sisters—have at least made this crucial first step. . . . For Chekhov a very genuine form of heroism was to see the world as it is and still love it”—very similar to what Santayana was saying. Then the task is to transform one’s life, either by striving for inner freedom or by practical work for one’s fellow men. Giving in or giving up is not an option.51

  For Chekhov, there was no transcendental meaning to life. All one can do is give its arbitrary pattern a coherence by means of one’s work and example in the cause of humanity. “One must seek, seek on one’s own, all alone with one’
s conscience”—this was the only faith on offer. He thought the very concept of “salvation” to be misguided and wrong, distracting us from improving our material conditions, which he found especially backward in Russia. Dostoevskian apocalyptics were for him beside the point. For him, we should not look into the distance, the distant future or the afterlife, but instead concern ourselves with taking that first step out and away from our mediocrity. That way heroism lay—the small efforts involved in improving everyday life, for oneself and others; these actions were to be well understood as heroisms. At the same time, once that first step had been taken, who knows where else it might lead? His own life was testimony to that. But that first step had to be taken first. This is the beginning of heroism.

  5

  Visions of Eden: The Worship of Color, Metal, Speed and the Moment

  P

  ablo Picasso, the archetypal modern artist, was born in 1881. The first twenty-five years of his life witnessed the most astounding array of technological innovations the world had ever seen, innovations that shaped war and peace alike: the recoiling machine gun in 1882; the first synthetic fiber, 1883; the steam turbine, 1884; coated photographic paper, 1885; the electric motor, the Kodak box camera and the Dunlop pneumatic tire, 1888; cordite, 1889; the Diesel engine, 1892; the Ford car, 1893; the cinematograph and the gramophone record, 1894. The following year, Röntgen discovered X-rays, Marconi invented radiotelegraphy, the Lumière brothers introduced the movie camera, Freud published the first of his theories on hysteria and the unconscious. And so it went on—the discovery of radium, of the electron, the magnetic recording of sound, the first voice radio transmissions, the first powered flight, the special theory of relativity and the photon theory of light, the discovery of the gene. Together, they amounted to the greatest alteration in man’s view of the universe since Isaac Newton. As the French writer Charles Péguy put it in 1913: “The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.”1