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

by Watson, Peter

  He argued that the “privations required by our culture’s orthodox consciousness” constituted a “psychic wasteland” that we carry within us as we make our way through the real world of the “artificial environment”; people had begun to feel “restive” with the “diminished self we have become.” But there was a minority, what he referred to as a “eupsychian network” of “human potential movements,” yogic, Taoist and Tantric sources which sought to propagate “a variety of techniques for expanding personality.” He thought there was great potential for these movements, but until that point there had been a “haunting ambiguity” about their intentions. For many, he said, the therapy offered was “like mysticism with all the metaphysical commitments drained off; it can end in a kind of splendid psychosensory athleticism, with all the emotional knots untied and the kinks carefully smoothed away. One meets people like this in the movement. They tune their psyches with marvelous self-indulgence until there is not an inhibition, not a frustration left to ruffle their calm. They are much like the body-builders who fastidiously train every last little muscle and tendon to perfection.”37

  Roszak was not embarrassed to mention mysticism: “The mystic quest very likely begins no further off than just the other side of the commonplace, daily repressions.” The artificial environment of science had closed the mystical doors, all alternative ways of seeing the world. Science has become our religion because most of us cannot “see around” it. He quoted with approval José Ortega y Gasset: “Life cannot wait until the sciences have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready.”

  Roszak thought there were six basic ways in which society had changed in the modern era—invariably for the worse. In the first instance, “the big sciences” had brought about the undoing of the human scale. What humans have done to the earth had brought about the undoing of progress. Technocracy had helped to destroy the open society, while the new ways in which people could be categorized—as consumers, customers, tourists—had caused the undoing of the political community. Overall, the reductionist assault—the achievement of the hard sciences, again—had resulted in the dissolution of the mysteries; and the exploration of esotericism, not least with the aid of mind-altering drugs, had caused the undoing of shared culture.38

  In many ways, Roszak thought the change was more than an unraveling, or undoing, a subtraction story, as Charles Taylor would say. He felt that as the baffling subtleties of contemporary science drift farther from the understanding of the lay citizen, “the resulting spiritual strain will be much greater than most people can live with gracefully . . . one cannot go on indefinitely in this way without being eaten alive by self-loathing. . . . An intellectual enterprise grounded in depersonalized specialization and aimed at the boundless proliferation of knowledge for its own sake is inherently non-participative. It deserves its place in the world, but its place is not at the top. It cannot sustain a democratic culture; it cannot generate a shared reality—other than the alienated existence of the artificial environment.”39

  One of the effects of this sixfold dissolution, Roszak said, was the loss of the richness of “transcendent symbols.”40 He thought that the basic task of human culture “is the elaboration of root meanings in the form of ritual or art, philosophy or myth, science or technology—and especially in the form of language generally, by way of progressively more attenuated metaphors drawn from the original symbol. . . . They cannot be explained but are what we use to give meaning to lesser levels of experience.”41 Symbols for us, he said, have been densified and lose their subtlety. They harden into purely secular things. For him, “Mother Earth” is not a superstitious mistake but a brilliant and beneficial insight. Ours is a culture alienated in fact and on principle.

  Salvation, he insisted, was to be found nowhere but in the collective, historical process—“in making, doing and improving.”42 He praised the fact that the counterculture had spawned what he called a “visionary commonwealth,” a thousand fragile experiments of communes, organic homesteading, extended families, free schools, free clinics, Gandhian ashrams, neighborhood rap centers, labor gift exchanges. Only in these ways, he thought, could the peaceful personal intimacy be created which alone allows for spiritual growth. He called for an awakening from the “single vision and Newton’s sleep,” where we have dreamed that only matter and history are real.

  “More and more . . . psychotherapists find that what their patients suffer from is the existential void they feel at the bottom of their lives.” “Is it merely coincidence that, in the midst of so much technological mastery and economic abundance, our art and thought continue to project a nihilistic imagery unparalleled in human history?” “Are not our technological achievements meaningless in the absence of a transcendent correspondence?” “How can we help but to be creatures in search of value and meaning?”

  The answer for Roszak was what he called the “rhapsodic intellect,” in which the chief ingredient was not calculation, or control of the world, but its enjoyment through resonance. By this he meant a search for enhanced meaning “in the feel of words,” which aims to reclaim transcendent symbols—the resonance of root meaning—as a result of which “we are left knowing more than we can say.”43 Roszak does not have the same resonance as, say, Beckett or Roth, or even Charlie Parker. But he should.

  23

  The Luxury and Limits of Happiness

  W

  e might do well to stop for a moment to ask ourselves once more whether happiness and fulfillment and the search for meaning are, in a sense, luxuries. While this book mainly concerns itself with meaning in its broadest sense—the sense in which most educated Westerners think of it, as a metaphysical, religious, post-religious or psychological conundrum—for many the purpose of life is, as noted earlier, far more down-to-earth, bordering on the naked struggle for survival.

  While this must always have been true, the problem of existential security has become much more visible since the Second World War, and especially since the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. The various subsidiary organizations of the UN such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNESCO and UNICEF have drawn attention to the uneven economic picture across the world, and programs designed to offset or alleviate areas of poverty and underdevelopment have become a major activity of these outfits.

  The broad thrust of these programs has been to redefine the problem from one that is, generally speaking, economic to one that encompasses a wider understanding of what it means to be poor—what the cultural and psychological consequences are, including the impact on access to natural resources, to education and to medical facilities, political representation and civil liberties. This has led to a shift in emphasis, from GNP to the UN Human Development Index, introduced in 1990. Partly as a result of this change we now hear more talk of “human well-being” and “human flourishing,” even “happiness,” rather than narrowly economic terms like “wealth” or “productive base.” These concerns are not ignored, but they are subsumed into the wider understanding of what determines the quality of life and a more complex and inclusive concept of personhood.1

  This has given rise to, among other things, a new term to set alongside “Utopia”: “Agathotopia,” meaning “a good-enough society,” the kind that economists and UN officials will settle for as an attainable goal in the foreseeable future, developing out of the present Kakotopia, the imperfect society.

  Professor Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University has said that an adequate supply of commodities and an absence of coercion “are the means by which people can pursue their own conception of the good.”2 The notion of well-being is pluralist “in the sense that well-being isn’t taken to be a single measure (e.g., happiness), but embodies the idea that we face trade-offs between a plurality of goods (e.g., health, happiness, the ability to be and to do).”3 Recall the quote by Robert Musil in chapter 11, to the effect that people may “scoff” at metaphysical pre
occupations but privately we all have such concerns at heart. Well-being, flourishing and happiness are entirely secular ideas. We might say that they are the secular equivalents of what “salvation” is to a religious person, though many would reject that idea. We shall discuss this issue later, but the point here is that concern with well-being and related concepts came to the fore in the last decades of the twentieth century; indeed, a whole area of scholarship arose to consider them.

  As Dasgupta says, the word “happiness” “doesn’t even appear in textbooks on modern welfare economics,” a state of affairs that he finds “repugnant.” Happiness is not the same as well-being, he points out. It is notoriously difficult to measure and varies over time; and in any case many people do not see it as the state’s job to be concerned with their citizens’ happiness. “Rather, they see the business of the state as making sure that basic liberties are enjoyed, so that citizens are able to protect and promote their own projects and purposes.”4 The evidence, such as it is, suggests that what is conducive to happiness is strikingly different between the very poor and the rich. In poor countries, indices of consumption, health and civic and political liberties reveal the main determinants of happiness. In rich countries, health is an important determinant, as are educational attainment and associational life: people who are more engaged in civic activities are happier; unemployment, not surprisingly, contributes significantly to unhappiness.

  For the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, happiness is a “thin” idea, at least compared with fulfillment, or the gift of “wholeness” offered by religion. But it does no harm to make what sense we can of it, the more so as a number of governments (such as the UK’s coalition government) have recently begun to show interest in how, exactly, and if at all, our happiness can be measured, sustained and augmented.

  Happiness is the core concern of another Canadian philosopher, Mark Kingwell (a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto), in that he went in search of it. In his book In Pursuit of Happiness (1998) he begins by acknowledging that in general the inhabitants of rich countries are happier than those of poorer ones. (As the famous Ukraine-born American actress and singer Sophie Tucker [1886–1966] said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor—believe me, honey, rich is better.”) But at the same time, Kingwell argues, consumerism, one of the predominant achievements of capitalist culture, is based on envy; and advertising, the main capitalist means of “selling” consumerism, works by “creating unhappiness.” In such an environment, he says, happiness is treated as a “good” in a consumerist sense, as the attainment of a (static) final state, a possession and an achievement.5

  The attraction of Kingwell’s survey was that he was himself ready to sample various methods of attaining happiness—taking Prozac, for example, and enrolling in the Option Institute and Fellowship, an outfit (www.option.org) that focuses exclusively on “the elusive condition of happiness.” He reviewed courses that promised people they could lose weight and increase their happiness at the same time; others that promised happiness in eight minutes by changing the way we breathe, or that taught people to see themselves “as God sees us.” He reported that the BBC commissioned programs on “how to be happy,” run by a self-described “professor of fun.” (The TV critic of the Scotsman described the show thus: “Tonight’s fascinating documentary follows three misery-guts as they go on an eight-week course in how to be happy, and sees whether they end up feeling ripped-off as well as sad.”)

  Kingwell considered the idea that happy people are those with “normal” levels of serotonin in their brains, and how that level could be manipulated. He surveyed Abraham Maslow’s ideas (see chapter 21), concluding that there was more than a whiff of self-congratulation and elitism about them; he noted that Maslow himself, ironically, became more embittered and disillusioned as he grew older, as well as “increasingly dismissive of those who sold their psychotherapeutic wares by claiming that self-actualization was available to everyone.”6

  THE ART OF DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS

  Kingwell began by considering some authors, such as John Ralston Saul, who suggested we stop using the word “happiness” altogether, since it has lost the ancient philosophical robustness it once had and has come to mean mere material comfort, or simply “pursuit of personal pleasure or an obscure sense of inner contentment.”7 For his part, Kingwell thought that we must understand the modern search for happiness as part of “a story of growing human self-interpretation in the modern world, the creation of a self-consciousness that goes beyond the limits of earlier worlds ruled by ignorance, church authority, or other traditional forces.” It is about more than material comfort: “Of equal, if not greater, significance is the general movement of Western culture in the last two centuries toward ever greater degrees of individuation.”8

  One of his conclusions was that material reality has lost its role “as the fount of all fulfillment” (at least in rich countries), to be replaced by psychological well-being.9 He quoted Bill Bryson, the American writer who, having lived in Britain for a while, concluded that the English are the happiest people on earth “because they have mastered [the] art of cheerfully diminished expectations, the sort of thing embodied in catchphrases like ‘Well, it makes a change,’ ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ ‘You could do worse.’”

  Kingwell noted that there has been an “implicit psychologization of happiness in our culture,” that we have—as Freud intimated—exchanged “a portion of happiness for a portion of security,” that the rhetoric of achievement, so redolent of American culture, reinforces the “machine imperatives” of pleasure, the idea that happiness is “essentially a problem to be solved, a psychological portfolio to be managed.” And we are caught up in an endless round of “buying and selling ourselves”: is there anywhere else to go, he asks, any identity to adopt “that is not already encapsulated by the forces of the market”? Americans in particular have allowed their expectations of leisure and comfort to rise so high that almost anything that falls below utter luxury “begins to seem inadequate.” This is why people feel less happy now, and more deprived (this was in the late 1990s), than in the 1950s, when real incomes were much lower.10

  Kingwell goes on to note the rise, beginning in Paris and Amsterdam in the early 1990s, of philosophical cafés and philosophical therapists, followed by their swift rise in Germany and elsewhere, so that now tens of thousands of people avail themselves of such innovations. For him this suggests that “there is a hunger out there” for philosophical thinking. But he notes that this trend has not spread to North America.11 Americans, he says, get some of their best philosophy about how to live the good life from self-help manuals, which make it feel not like philosophy but plain common sense.

  He explores the old idea that happiness is a state that exists only in recollection when, looking back, we realize that, fleetingly, “for a time” (as O’Neill has Mary Tyrone say in Long Day’s Journey), we were happiest when we lost our sense of self, that “self-forgetting” which, as several philosophers have said, is part of the experience of happiness. In like vein he refers with approval to Bertrand Russell’s view that it has become common in our day to suppose that “those among us who are wise have seen through all the enthusiasms of earlier times and have become aware that there is nothing left to live for. The men who hold this view are genuinely unhappy, but they are proud of their unhappiness, which they attribute to the nature of the universe and consider it to be the only rational attitude for an enlightened man.” Kingwell thinks this attitude is both cheap and paradoxical, in that such people are actually happy in their unhappiness. He quotes the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: “The good life is the life spent seeking the good life.”12

  UPGRADE ANXIETY

  One other aspect of modern capitalism that contributes to unhappiness is the amount of information we are inundated with, which gives many people a feeling of being left behind—what Kingwell calls “upgrade anxiety,” th
e endless feeling that we have to “catch up,” which is energy-sapping. We are simply overwhelmed by cultural content with little chance to make sense of the context. And naturally this interferes with—sabotages—our desire for completeness.

  Then there are the paradoxical elements in our lives themselves. For example, as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr said, “It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. . . . Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.” This echoes what Rilke had to say about Rodin and Picasso (see chapter 11). Kingwell says the evidence for this is overwhelming and calls on Thomas De Quincey for confirmation: “No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.” He identifies Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein as great figures who never married (though we know Nietzsche proposed to Lou Andreas-Salomé but was turned down).13 This reflects evidence that adults without children are happier than those with them, and are more likely to achieve greatness.

  Kingwell reports a variety of definitions of, and comments on, happiness: “Happiness is not about feeling good all the time. It is, rather, about the ability to reflect on one’s life and find it worthwhile. . . . Happiness is not simply a feeling or emotion; it is a connection to the world, a realization of one’s place within it.” He ends with a return to Bertrand Russell: “[G]etting everything you want is not the source of happiness but of unhappiness, for when striving ceases so does life.” “[T]o be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”14

  • • •

  One can see why some sixty of Russell’s books were still in print when he died, age ninety-seven, in 1970. Happiness may be a “thin” idea to Charles Taylor—and Terry Eagleton, the British philosopher, called it a “holiday-camp type of word”—but thin or not, Russell realized that its pursuit and possession are far from straightforward. This became even clearer toward the end of the twentieth century as it emerged that the “psychologization” of life, the replacement of religion with psychology, had thrown up unforeseen problems and paradoxes.