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

by Watson, Peter

  For him, belief in God has been replaced—is to be replaced—by the belief that shared fictions are more than just a form of lying: they are a way of living together, of living with and containing desire, and therefore both a shared flaw, a tacit acknowledgment that we are all fallen, and a consolation.

  THE COLLECTIVE MIND AND THE GENERAL PURPOSE

  There was an “as if” element in H. G. Wells’s thinking, as we shall see. At the same time, he thought that lying was “the blackest crime.” There was not much common ground between Wells and Henry James (indeed, they had had an acrimonious debate), and although he shared some of the views of Shaw, Valéry and Wallace Stevens, Wells found it hard to accept beauty and art as self-justifying, as ends in themselves. He thought artists had “abundant but uneducated brains,” that their activities were essentially arbitrary and uncoordinated. In his view, aesthetics was pointless if it had no use, and “art for art’s sake” would eventually lead to the neglect of its original inspiration. His books, including his novels, were purely functional, as he put it, designed specifically to produce social and ethical reform.22

  Wells decided to become a writer after breaking his leg in 1874, when he was forced to spend some weeks in bed. His father, a part-time professional cricketer (for Kent), brought him a succession of books that fired his enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that survived an early unhappy spell as an apprentice draper, then as a teacher.

  Wells’s real calling, however, was science. He attended Midhurst Grammar School for a while as a boy, where he was taught science by T. H. Huxley, famously known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his robust espousal of the theory of evolution. Wells was inspired specifically by Huxley and by evolution but also by science generally. He concluded that, given the way science operated, revealing new possibilities as it solved old problems, we should always remain skeptical that a “final reality” would ever become known. He thought that ideas of Right and God were only “attempts to simplify and so bring into the compass of human reactions what is otherwise humanly inexpressible.” Writing at the time that he did, and having the background that he did, Wells recognized around him a process of cultural, intellectual and political evolution of which science and socialism were both parts and that would lead, he thought, to the emergence of what he called a “Synthetic Collective Mind,” “arising out of and using and passing on beyond our individual minds.” In 1900 there was a widespread feeling that capitalism had run its course, and many people, especially in the Western democracies, assumed that some form of socialism would triumph and spread across the world in the new century.23

  These ideas were developed in, among other publications, A Modern Utopia (1905), New World for Old (1908) and Mankind in the Making (1903), in which he argued that a more scientific and socialistic society would be brought about through the creation and institutionalization of a caste of philosopher-kings, called Samurai, a “voluntary nobility.” All political power was to be in their hands; they would be the sole administrators, lawyers, doctors, public officials, and also the only voters. The privileges were considerable but the positions were to be open to all. By means of this caste, Wells felt, society could look forward to an orderly and efficient administration. The Samurai would be international and cosmopolitan in outlook, intellectually open and, crucially, would base their activities and innovations on scientific research. The best science, he maintained, offered the only form of “universalism” that overcomes—indeed at times abolishes—the difference between is and ought.24

  Taking the name Samurai from the upper-class Japanese military caste was an eye-catching tactic, and by it he implied that this caste would, above all, be educated in science and would therefore know how to learn from experience, keep society developing and changing—in effect, this is how the collective mind would operate in reality. As one reviewer in the science journal Nature put it, speaking of A Modern Utopia, “He aims rather at laying down this principle of an order which shall be capable of progressively growing toward perfection; and so it may well be that in his ideal society men will be less reluctant than now to learn from experience.”

  Wells thought that Christianity and the other major religions had failed “to subordinate the individual,” that they had in fact “usually offered rewards” for individuality, punishing only the really deviant and “vile” exceptions and even then offering absolution. However, “The essential fact in man’s history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of community with his kind, of the possibilities of cooperation leading to scarce dreamt-of collective powers, of a synthesis of the species, of the development of a common general idea, a common general purpose out of a present confusion.” Wells argued that man is perfectible “within the great instinctual drives of life,” and “it is to that goal that we should strive, incidentally improving the race, and cutting down on the distortions and the prismatic views which most humans accept so easily.”25

  He conceived of “perfectibility” not in a theological way, therefore, but as a three-pronged process—perfectibility of the individual but within the greater structure of the state and of the race.

  “The continuation of the species, and the acceptance of the duties that go with it, must rank as the highest of all goals; and if they are not so ranked, it is the fault of others in the state who downgraded them for their own purposes. . . . We live in the world as it is and not as it should be. . . . The normal modern married woman has to make the best of a bad position, to do her best under the old conditions, to live as though [as if] she were under the new conditions, to make good citizens, to give her spare energies as far as she can to bringing about a better state of affairs. Like the private property owner and the official in a privately conducted business, her best method of conduct is to consider herself [as if she were] an unrecognized public official, irregularly commanded and improperly paid. There is no good in flagrant rebellion. She has to study her particular circumstances and make what good she can out of them, keeping her face towards the coming time. . . . We have to be wise as well as loyal; discretion itself is loyalty to the coming state. . . . We live for experience and the race; the individual interludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in which we lovers met and refreshed was but a halt on the journey. When we have loved to the intensest point we have done our best with each other. To keep to that image of the inn, we must not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire. We must go on to new experiences and new adventures [italics added].”26

  Wells had a mystical side, which we shall come to, but religion “does not work” for him, he said, a cathedral being no more “real” for him than a Swiss chalet. Instead, he believed that perfection for society, for the race (which for him came before perfection for the individual), lay in the marriage of science and socialism. “The fundamental idea upon which socialism rests is the same fundamental idea as that upon which all real scientific work is carried on. It is the denial that chance impulse and individual will and happening constitute the only possible methods by which things may be done in the world. It is an assertion that things are, in their nature, orderly; that things may be computed, may be calculated upon and foreseen. In the spirit of this belief, science aims at systematic knowledge of material things . . . the socialist has just that same faith in the order, the knowableness of things, and the power of men in cooperation to overcome chance.” Science, he liked to say, is the mind of the race.27

  Wells agreed with Huxley that the process of evolution was basically amoral and “could not be expected in itself either to produce a more moral species than Homo sapiens, or to provide the principles for an ethically conscious society. Thus, there being no inherent virtue in nature, man must strive to correct and control his own evolution, including the evolution of society, and not merely accept or blindly follow the Darwinian process.” He really did think, as many socialists with him, that science and technology would bring an end to toil and shortage. He thought eugenics could help perfect mankind, and
that proved controversial too.

  Within this general context of science and socialism, Wells thought that fulfillment (of society first, then the individual within it) depended on “five principles of liberty . . . without which civilization is impossible.”28 These were the principles of privacy, of free movement and of unlimited knowledge, the view that lying is “the blackest crime,” and free discussion and criticism. And underlying all was a sixth principle, that of scientific research. Research produced rational results, their very rationality and impartiality giving them an authority beyond all other claims to knowledge.

  In a chapter in Anticipations of the Results of Mechanical and Scientific Progress (1901) dealing with “faith, morals and public policy in the twentieth century,” he foresees the spread of a vaguely pantheistic humanism as the religion “of all sane and educated men.” They will have no definite idea of God, being well aware of the “self-contradictory absurdities of an obstinately anthropomorphic theology.” This might leave them with a vague, non-anthropomorphic idea, a God who “comprehends and cannot be comprehended,” but for Wells such a God is useless because he plays no part, offers no guidance, as regards the efficient running of society, and therefore has no role, that Wells can see, in the development of the race.29 For such a God, “perfection” is an anomaly.

  The one element of mysticism to which he confessed was his belief in a “sense of community,” one embracing all of mankind. “The essential fact in man’s history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of community with his kind . . . between us and the rest of mankind there is something, something real, something that rises through us and is neither you nor me, that comprehends us, and that is thinking and using me and you to play against each other.” He repeated these sentiments in the preface to the 1914 edition of Anticipations, again in a discussion of the “Collective Mind”: “I saw then [during his period in the Fabian Society] what hitherto I had merely felt—that there was in the affairs of mankind something unorganized which is greater than any organization. This unorganized power is the ultimate Sovereign in the world. . . . It is something transcending persons. . . . This Collective Mind is essentially an extension of the spirit of science to all human affairs, its method is to seek and speak and serve the truth and to subordinate oneself to one’s conception of a general purpose. . . . We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves. . . . I believe in the great and growing being of the species, from which I rise, to which I return, and which, it may be, will ultimately even transcend the limitation of the species and grow into the conscious Being of all things . . . what the scheme as a whole is I do not clearly know; with my limited mind I cannot know. There I become a mystic.”30

  Some of these later ideas do not sit comfortably with his earlier position. But he argues in both his non-fiction and his novels that individuals, nations and ethnic groups are aspects of what he terms the “continuing stream of the race.” At one stage he had a plan to write a history of the world which “should be as free as possible of any national bias, and hence acceptable everywhere as a common textbook.” This unrealized project reflected his view that “We are all experiments in the growing consciousness of the race”—a “great opening out of life,” as one of the characters says in The World Set Free (1914). It is in this novel, too, that the main character, Marcus Karenin, who after two operations is near death, still has the energy to cry out defiantly: “And you, old Sun . . . beware of me . . . I shall launch myself at you and I shall reach you and I shall put my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by your fiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leap at you . . . Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common purpose.”31

  In The Food of the Gods (1904), Wells also talks about a mystic “ongoing force,” the narrative being a parable of growth, when an experiment in developing a growth-encouraging substance gets out of hand and generates races of giants (giant humans, giant chickens, giant vermin, giant mosquitoes) all over the countryside. At the close of the novel, the civil engineer Cossar addresses the giant children who have been raised as an experiment by the protagonists: “Tomorrow, whether we live or die, the growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit for evermore. To grow according to the Will of God! . . . Greater . . . greater, my Brothers! . . . growing . . . Till the earth is no more than a footstool.”32

  Wells was himself criticized for not having “a metaphysical dimension,” a complaint also directed against his fictional characters. “His figures do not have the inner life so typical of nineteenth-century novels.” But that is to ignore the fact that these same characters are nonetheless exhaustively analyzed into other components, and as often as not, as with Wells himself, a social conscience was replacing religion as the arbiter of their morality.

  The fundamental idea behind Wells’s approach was that science, and especially scientific research, would produce new knowledge that would replace ought with is. When that happened, morality would be rational, not religious. Some of his ideas were uncannily echoed by physicists of the late twentieth century (see chapter 24).

  MEMORY AND DESIRE

  The title À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust’s life’s work, contains a word that means “search” or “research,” if not necessarily scientific. At the same time the book has religious overtones throughout, right from the start, where the famous episode of the madeleine echoes parts of the Catholic mass. Here the narrator, savoring the mixture of cake and tea, experiences a rush of “all-powerful joy” that is transcendental: “I sensed that [this joy] was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended these savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature.”

  The very name petite madeleine derives from Mary Magdelene, and echoes of Catholic theology continue throughout the book, leading several critics to suggest that Proust’s “religion of art” is to an extent modeled on the Christian theological tradition of confessional writing.

  Pericles Lewis has a different and more original notion. He argues that Proust drew heavily on the ideas of the early French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, which appeared in 1912, just a year before Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes that comprise À la recherche.33 Durkheim, who based a lot of his theories on the study of “primitive” religions among the aborigines of Australia, argued that totemism was/is the basic form of religion, containing all the essences of later religious forms. Totemism refers to the worship by a clan or tribe of a specific animal or plant, which is sacred, and acknowledges an anonymous and impersonal force that is immanent in the natural world. In totemism, a primitive clan or tribe worships itself as a “power” that exerts a moral force on fellow members, keeping the community intact and confirming and sacralizing its communal identity.

  By this account, Proust’s novel is itself a kind of sociology, regarding the clan as the source of all values—Madame Verdurin’s salon, for example, is referred to as a petit clan. Proust’s story alights throughout on objects that are regarded—by one character or another—as sacred, totemic, in a secular way; or they have “magical” properties to transport us to another place and time (the way shamans do, in primitive clans). The episode with the madeleine is only the best known of these: “such sacred objects restore to the narrator the kind of communion he can no longer, even in his most intimate relations, achieve.”34

  The profound influence of Durkheim on Proust has been more or less overlooked, Lewis argues, but some links are plain. For example, at the École Normale Supérieure, Durkheim was a classmate of Henri Bergson, who married Proust’s cousin. At the ENS, Durkheim studied philosophy, and then received his doctorate from the Sorbonne. Proust also studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where his professors included two who examined Bergson for his PhD. One of these men,
Émile Boutroux, who wrote an influential work on William James and also wrote on spiritualism, was described by Proust as one of his heroes, and he made specific reference to Boutroux’s work in À la recherche. There is no evidence that Durkheim and Proust ever met or, for that matter, that Proust ever read Durkheim’s great book. But their social and intellectual lives undoubtedly overlapped, says Lewis, adding that Proust’s high-school teacher, Alphonse Darlu, founded a journal in which Durkheim’s introduction to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life first appeared.35

  Furthermore, both Proust and Durkheim came from Alsatian Jewish families, at a time when Judaism was supposed to be a private matter with no political or social dimension. But that stability didn’t last: as in the novel, conflict between church and state erupted in France itself—with the Dreyfus affair, a scandal following the wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army officer. Both Proust and Durkheim took active roles in supporting Dreyfus’s case; it became a highly public matter, secularists pitted against believers in traditional religion. The sociologist in Durkheim saw that, with the enormous forces of modernity coming together—urbanization, industrialization, materialism, massification and the growth of technology—it was more necessary than ever to view the individual as sacred: the individual is “the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred. . . . It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods.”36 The individual life thus becomes the focus of social forces.

  And this, of course, aptly describes the aims of Proust’s massive work, in which the narrator is searching for a “genuine community” such as was available in the early church (and in his early childhood) but “which today is available in neither institutional religion nor in the social groups that present themselves as alternative religions. Proust also understands the technological and social forces controlling modern life on a religious analogy, not with an omniscient God, but with the variety of powers, spirits, fairies, and gods [with a small g] that populate primitive and folk religions.”37 Proust laces his work with anthropological metaphors and references—totemism, animism, paganism, magic. Even the form of the narration can be seen as a post-monotheistic phenomenon, a search for sacred, magical, transcendental moments. The narrator moves through the book, attaching himself to various clans, observing the myths and stories they tell themselves—their shared fictions, as Henry James would say—in order to keep their clans together. He is constantly disappointed, but finds salvation in what Proust called les moments bienheureux—“blissful” moments brought about by involuntary memories which, he shows, are the royal road to the past, and to our unconscious.