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

by Watson, Peter

  In August 2000, the Archbishop of Canterbury remarked: “Christ the Saviour is becoming Christ the Counsellor.” It was no more than the truth, up to a point, but still a remarkable statement from such a source. However, as perhaps befits the holder of a traditional church position, the archbishop was somewhat out of date when he made his remark. In fact, by the turn of the twenty-first century the counterculture, the “better living through chemistry” culture, the therapy culture, as it also came to be called, had already come under sustained attack.

  None was more acerbic than Christopher Lasch’s. Lasch (1932–94) came from a highly political family; he was the son of a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist of St. Louis, Missouri. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, he became a professor at the University of Rochester. Always skeptical of liberalism, in the 1970s he developed a form of cultural criticism that was an amalgam of conservatism, Marxism and Freud-influenced critical theory. In Haven in a Heartless World (1977), The Minimal Self (1984) and, most famously, The Culture of Narcissism (1979), he tore into the forces to which he attributed a decline in the quality of life in America and, by implication, throughout the West, in particular our moral and spiritual life. These forces were consumerism, proletarianization and the therapeutic sensibility. It was his assault on the latter that made Lasch famous.15

  As he presented it, the world of the counterculture effectively embodied a change in sensibility from a way of life that was dying—the culture of competitive individualism and the “pursuit of happiness”—to “the dead end of narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” “To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity.” Our eyes, he said, are fixed on our own “private performances,” we cultivate a “transcendental self-attention.” The contemporary climate “is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation . . . but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health and psychic security. Even the radicalism of the sixties served, for many of those who embraced it for personal rather than political reasons, not as a substitute religion but as a form of therapy. Radical politics filled empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and purpose.” This was secular salvation, defined as establishing an identity rather than submerging oneself in a larger cause.16

  Because of this inner emptiness, said Lasch, the psychological man of the twentieth century sought neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence, but peace of mind, though conditions have increasingly militated against it. “Therapists, not priests or popular preachers of self-help or models of success like the captains of industry, become his principal allies in the struggle for composure; he turns to them in the hope of achieving the modern equivalent of salvation, ‘mental health.’” This, he thought, made therapy an anti-religion, because “love” as self-sacrifice, or as “submission” to a higher loyalty, is regarded as intolerably oppressive. Mental health means—or has come to mean—the overthrow of inhibitions and the immediate gratification of every impulse.17

  He reminded us that Freud had said that all psychoanalysis could hope to do was to substitute “everyday unhappiness” for debilitating neurosis, making the sacrifices exacted by civilized life easier to bear. “But psychoanalysis held out no cure for injustice or unhappiness; nor could it satisfy the growing demand, in a world without religion, for meaning, faith and emotional security.” But, he went on, it was exactly belief and personal power that Americans hoped to find in therapy. These ideas had begun in Europe, in particular with the work of Adler and Jung. Adler’s notion of the inferiority complex, reinterpreting the “will to power” in a therapeutic context, had appealed to Americans even more than had Freud’s ideas. Jung addressed himself to a disease no less pervasive in modern society than the sense of personal inadequacy—the impoverishment of the spiritual imagination. He sought to restore the illusion of faith, if not its reality, by enabling the patient to construct a private religion made up of the decomposing remnants of former religions, all of them equally valid in Jung’s eyes and therefore “equally serviceable in the modern crisis of unbelief.”

  And so both systems—Adler’s and Jung’s—replaced self-insight with ethical teaching, thereby transforming therapy into, as Freud foresaw, a “new ethico-religious system.” One result of this, Lasch said, is narcissism, in which an ethic of pleasure replaces an ethic of achievement.

  Narcissists divide society into two groups: the rich, great and famous on the one hand and the common herd on the other, and they themselves are afraid of being “mediocre.” The narcissist also creates an ironic distance from everyday life, and is forever outside himself, watching himself, and in that sense never has an authentic experience. Both sexes cultivate a protective shallowness but at the same time demand from personal relationships the richness and intensity of a religious experience.18 “In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody—in the guise of ‘personal growth’ and ‘awareness’—the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment.” But they do not involve themselves in making a better society; they have no vision of a new society, a decent society. “The old order took matters more seriously than the narcissists do, who take them for granted.”19

  Modern (late 1970s) man, Lasch said, had become imprisoned in his self-awareness; he “longs for the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling. Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance.” The consequences of this were profound, as we shall see.20

  Another light is shed on the 1960s and ’70s by Louis Malle’s 1981 film, My Dinner with André. Two old friends meet up at a restaurant in New York after many years, and defend the choices they have made in their lives. André has traveled across the world in search of “spiritual enlightenment,” while Wally stayed put in New York “grubbing” for work as a writer/actor, sharing what he admits has been a fairly humdrum existence with the same girlfriend throughout. What to Wally are everyday comforts and conveniences are for André (with his exotic-sounding foreign name) merely attributes of a mindless material culture. Wally’s approach has been to content himself with “small pleasures” and “small, attainable goals”; André has sought spiritual transcendence, “higher states of consciousness.” He has tried Eastern religions, mind-altering spiritual exercises, communal retreats. Returning to New York after a long absence, he finds what is for him little short of a concentration camp, but one populated by “robots and lobotomized individuals.” He and his wife, he tells Wally, feel like the Jews in Germany in the late 1930s, and they want to escape.

  Malle is not in a hurry to take sides. Both strategies are means of survival, different but perhaps equivalent responses to an uncertain world of impermanence. If anything, Malle makes Wally look like “a model of common sense and democratic decency.” In his loyalty to familiar surroundings, he retains some of what Hannah Arendt called “a love of the world—the world of human associations and human works, which give solidity and continuity to our lives.” At the same time, it has to be admitted that Wally has lowered his sights, he takes one day at a time, and pays a price for the radical restriction of perspective that he has embraced, which precludes intelligent political activity, a larger role in life—a larger life, in fact—that many would find fulfilling. “It allows him to remain human—no small accomplishment in these times. But it prevents him from exercising any influence over the course of public events.”21

  In the end, neither André nor Wally has confidence in the possibility of cooperative political action, which for Hannah Arendt, Christopher Lasch and, perhaps, Louis Malle, is the real purpose of life, the only way out that truly enlarges us.

  A LEGITIMATE PALLIATIVE?

  Just as the therapy culture came under fire from Lasch and others, so too was the drug culture attacked by all sorts of people. G. T. Roche begins his exami
nation of the effects of the drug experience on knowledge: “If any intoxicating substances induce experiences that are similar to religious ecstasies, suggests Bertrand Russell, so much for religious ecstasies: we ‘can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.’ Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions.” Given the widely reported relationship between abnormal states and religious ecstasy, this objection is not easily dismissed. Conversely and controversially, Theodore Schick claims that the need to alter consciousness “is just as basic as the need to eat and sleep.”

  While conceding that it is possible that a “handful of philosophers” have been imaginatively inspired by drugs (William James thought that inhalation of nitrous oxide gave him a new appreciation of Hegel), and although other philosophers and scientists have used meditation to enhance their thinking (William Harvey would meditate in a coal mine), Roche remains deeply skeptical of claims such as Timothy Leary’s that he could directly experience DNA under the influence of LSD, or the assertion of Rick Strassman, a Los Angeles psychiatrist specializing in psychopharmacology, that another hallucinogenic, DMT (dimethyltryptamine), “allows one to see dark matter.” Roche also points out that reports of experiencing “cosmic oneness” or a “real loss of ego” are problematic, as there is always still an ego—an experiencing subject—that observes the event. And he questions claims of “moral or existential enlightenment,” partly because others (such as Huxley and Leary) maintain that drugs actually seem to suspend the moral sense. This undermines any “straightforward case” for drug-inspired moral wisdom.22

  We are therefore left in a paradoxical situation: the extravagant claims for the drug experience—that it produces a “multidimensional super-consciousness, new categories of knowledge, a better guide to reality”—are challenged, Roche says, by evidence of the “well-researched capacity of the psychedelic drugs to impair cognition, perception and concentration.” He concludes that the drugs’ “revelatory powers are clearly exaggerated” and so the real question becomes: “[W]hat knowledge is only acceptable to the individual through chemically degrading one’s capacity for rational thought? . . . Watts, Leary and Huxley all write of the insight acquired through the psychedelic experience as a direct apprehension of some deep truth, rather than through intellectual insight. Without an argument as to how such a direct, drug-induced experience can warrant such certainty, Watts, Leary and Huxley are essentially appealing to their own authority [italics in original].”

  There remains the issue of “psychedelic spirituality.” But psychedelic experience hardly fits with the religious view that God is unknowable and therefore cannot be perceived or even sensed. The God of the Torah never appears to humans directly, so, says Roche, what are we to make of claims by schizophrenics, epileptics and people on drugs that they have had direct encounters with God or seen angels face-to-face? Then there is the simple argument that no omniscient or omnipotent being, by definition, could be summoned by whatever worldly means against his or her will.23

  Furthermore, unpleasant psychedelic experiences are by no means unknown, as are experiences where faith is reduced. And some cult leaders have used drugs as a means of control over their members (such as Shoko Asahara, responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway).

  Maybe the proof of this particular pudding is in the eating. LSD use dropped off markedly in the late 1970s. There was a return to it in the ’90s and the early 2000s, but to nowhere near the levels of the ’60s and early ’70s. On the other hand, the use of marijuana, whose history goes back several thousand years, continues strong (according to the World Health Organization, in 2010 more than 147 million people worldwide consumed marijuana regularly). Its effects are much milder than LSD’s, and no great metaphysical claims are made for it in regard to “visions” it might induce, though its effects vary with strength. Rather, as Mark Thorsby says, it offers a temporary alleviation of the strains of living in the world, “a momentary escape from the desert of alienation.” Insofar as marijuana increases our capability to enrich our lives, and makes us more creative, as some artists and musicians assert, and so long as its use makes our lives feel more fulfilling, is there any harm in that? As Professor Brian Clack puts it, following on from Freud’s claims about palliatives, “Existence might just require this sort of augmentation.”24

  SOLACE BY DIAGNOSIS

  Criticisms of the drug aspect of the counterculture are real enough, and they sit neatly with the fact that drug use, though it has by no means disappeared, has declined as a means of accessing what we might call an alternative spiritual realm. There are still advocates of marijuana use as a “spiritual facilitator” and as a palliative, but the use of LSD, as just noted, has greatly declined.I

  The same cannot be said about therapy. In a wide-ranging critique of what he calls the “therapy culture,” Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent in the UK, has argued that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the legacy of the therapeutic revolution is that “society is in the process of drawing up a radically new definition of what constitutes the human condition.”25 He has found that therapy, happiness and fulfillment can be damagingly intertwined.

  The core element in this new condition, he says, is that many experiences which have hitherto been interpreted as a normal part of everyday life have been redefined as injurious to people’s emotions. He quotes a wealth of figures to substantiate this, including the fact that children are far unhappier these days than ever before, that children as young as four are “legitimate targets for therapeutic intervention,” that there has been a “massive increase” in depression “due to the difficulty that people have in dealing with disappointment and failure.”26

  The number of mental health counselors has snowballed, in both the UK and the USA. In Furedi’s critique, 53 percent of British students had “anxiety at pathological levels,” and a host of new “illnesses” have been conceived, or created, by new professions who “invent the needs they claim to satisfy.”27 He explores many aspects of this “medicalization,” or “psychologicalization” or “pathologicalization,” of life, arguing that there has been a “promiscuity” in therapeutic diagnosis: counseling for job loss, for people who are “exercise addicts” or “sex addicts,” for the recently divorced, for women who have just given birth or who are depressed by having to do housework, for athletes who retire from competition and face “the onset of post-sporting depression.” He describes self-help books to help people survive their twenties, claims that office politics has been redefined as “bullying,” caution as “inhibition” and diffidence as “withholding.” In a survey carried out in the same place in 1985 and again in 1996, he reports, there was found to have been an increase of 155 percent among sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds who considered themselves disabled.

  His point is that, from birth to education to marriage and parenting, all the way through to bereavement, “people’s experience is interpreted through the medium of the therapeutic ethos.” Among all this, religion has been subordinated to therapy.28 “This subordination of religious doctrine to concern with people’s existential quest reflects a wider shift towards an orientation towards a preoccupation with the self. A study of ‘seeker churches’ in the United States argues that their ability to attract new recruits is based on their ability to tap into the therapeutic understanding of Americans.”29

  Furedi believes, as Christopher Lasch does, that there has been a powerful shift away from the more traditional affirmation of communal purpose toward encouraging people to find “meaning through their individual selves.” And this is where the fundamental problem lies. It is a problem because it exaggerates people’s vulnerability. Some accounts of therapeutic culture associate it with the “selfish or at least self-centered” quest for fulfillment, but, he argues, in fact therapy culture promotes self-limitation. “It posits the self in
distinctly fragile and feeble form and insists that the management of life requires the continuous intervention of therapeutic expertise.”30 He finds that in therapy culture, many emotions are depicted negatively “precisely because they disorient the individual from the search for self-fulfillment.”

  Even love, though portrayed as the supreme source of self-fulfillment, is depicted as potentially harmful “because it threatens to subordinate the self to another.” In books such as Anne Wilson Schaef’s Escape from Intimacy and Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood, “Intense love towards another is regularly criticized for distracting individuals from fulfilling their own needs and from pursuing self-interest.” In a similar vein, “It has been suggested that people who have too much faith may be suffering from religious addiction.” Father Leo Booth in his When God Becomes a Drug warns of becoming “addicted to the certainty, sureness or sense of security that our faith provides.”31

  The rise of confessional novels and television programs, what Joyce Carol Oates has described as “pathography,” has eroded the sphere of private life, with the result that no shame now attaches to negative events and “mere survival is presented as a triumph,” as we sacralize self-absorption. From this it follows that we have redefined the meaning of responsibility: “This redefinition of responsibility as responsibility to oneself helps provide emotionalism with moral meaning.”32