The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God
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What has happened, says Furedi, following Ernest Gellner, is that in our risky modern society the spiritual struggle of former times has been replaced by a personal struggle for “attention and acceptance.” The decline of tradition helps situate the demand for new ways of making sense of the world. The weakening of shared values fragments this quest for meaning, privatizes it and lends it an individual character. “Therapeutics promises to provide answers to the individual’s quest for the meaning of life.” But this gives rise, he says, to a therapeutic ethos in which there are no values higher than the self. Therapy attempts to avoid the problem of how people can be bound to a shared view of the world (as with religions) by offering individuated solace.33
Furedi argues that the invasion of the therapeutic ethos into life has reached such proportions that “[b]eing ill can now constitute a defining feature of an individual’s identity” (not a million miles from Esther Benbassa’s notion of suffering as identity—see pp. 378–80). Self-esteem has become paramount in our psychological lives: almost any action or policy can be justified by its effect on our self-esteem, almost any behavioral wrong or dereliction can be put down to lack of self-esteem. He scoffs at the absurdities it can lead to, such as the case of Jennifer Hoes, a Dutch artist who was so much in love with herself, she said, that she decided to marry herself. “Self-esteem has acquired a free-floating character that can attach itself to any issue.”34
For the psychiatrist Patrick Bracken, the continuous search for a diagnosis “represents an attempt to find meaning in confusion.” The sociologist Peter Berger thinks that our “cultural fixation with trauma,” with pathologizing so many experiences once regarded as unexceptional, can be linked to a “dread brought on by a struggle with meaning.” This has led us to the “age of values,” he says, values in the sense of “truths that have been deprived of their commanding character” and which are oriented toward the individual self. And when so much is directed toward the self, in a confusing and risky world, this leads to a need for recognition. It is this which accounts for the rise of identity politics, he says, for the obsession with fame, with the idea of the “equality of esteem,” in which all sectors of society must be esteemed.
But Furedi’s overriding point is that therapeutic culture holds people back. He can find no evidence that, despite decades of therapeutic culture, self-knowledge is on the increase. Therapy has not “realized” personal growth to any appreciable degree—on the contrary, it has been “much more an instrument of survival than a means through which enlightenment can be gained.” People undergoing therapies are told they “will never be completely cured.” Furthermore, therapeutics have transformed “the experience of estrangement from a problem into an object of veneration.” Therapeutic culture, as Kenneth Gergen, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, has noted, offers “invitations to infirmity” in which suffering is a “social virtue” and people’s identities depend on professionals and institutions.35
Furedi’s conclusion directly addresses our subject: “Contemporary society lacks certainty about its beliefs. It finds it difficult to transmit a clear vision of a just world. In particular, there seems to be great hesitancy about offering people a clear system of meaning. It is this confusion about providing people with meaning that provides the therapeutic world-view with considerable opportunity to spread its influence. Today’s cultural elite may lack confidence in telling people what to believe but it feels quite comfortable about instructing people how and what to feel.”36
Another important “achievement” of therapeutics has been to distract people from engaging with wider social issues in favor of this inward turn to the self. “[Therapy culture] seeks to exercise control not through a system of punishments, but through cultivating a sense of vulnerability, powerlessness and dependence. Through normalizing the sick role and help-seeking, therapeutic culture promotes the virtue of dependence on professional authority. At the same time it discourages dependence on intimate and informal relations—an act which weakens the sense of belonging in the individual . . . most important of all it indicates that a regime of self-limitation has become institutionalized . . . the passive sense of self projected today does not so much take risks, as is at risk. In this scenario, the experimenting and transformative role of the individual is all but extinguished. . . . This static conservative view of the self represents a rejection of previous more ambitious calls for ‘changing yourself,’ ‘improving yourself’ or for ‘transcending yourself.’ The call for self-acceptance represents a roundabout way of avoiding change.”37
Is this an indictment of mere happiness?
If Furedi and the other authors are right—and between them they have amassed copious supporting evidence—then the therapeutic movement has come full circle, to stand for the opposite of what it began as. Instead of offering an expansion of experience, instead of helping people create a fuller life, a larger life, a richer life—as Theodore Roszak envisaged—it has become, in the perhaps laudable interest of a more “sensitive” society, a holding action and one which, moreover, helps diminish life rather than enhancing it, by viewing many people, to begin with, as less than full, as vulnerable victims, whose only opportunity is to recover some of their “lost” abilities, as if they are half-empty vessels whose best hope is to be slightly less empty. And, since they can never be “cured” completely, they can never move on, to explore new ways of enlargement.
It is easy to go along with Furedi and the others, and decry what therapy has become, to lament its diminishing of life. Or is this no more than realistic? Maybe it is partly what writers like Philip Roth are getting at. It may be a terrible thing to say, but perhaps consolation by diagnosis is a reminder that that is what—for many people, in a fast-changing and risky world—a fuller life is.
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I. In the U.S. general election of 2012, two states voted to legalize marijuana. It is too soon to say where this will lead.
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Faith in Detail
O
ne evening in Belfast in 1972, the poet Seamus Heaney had arranged to meet his friend the singer David Hammond. They were to rendezvous in a BBC studio to put together a tape of songs and poems for a mutual friend in Michigan. The idea of the tape was to commemorate an earlier celebration, when the American had been in Belfast and an “expansive” evening had been enjoyed by all. In the event, the tape was never made. On their way to the studio “a number of explosions occurred in the city and the air was full of the sirens of ambulances and fire engines. There was news of casualties.” Both men felt that “to sing at that moment when others were beginning to suffer seemed like an offense against their suffering.” Hammond packed up his guitar, and “we both drove off into the destroyed evening.”
Heaney tells this story at the beginning of his book of essays on poetry, The Government of the Tongue (1988), and he began in this way, he said, because the episode dramatized a tension that underlay the poetry—and perhaps all the art—of the twentieth century. This tension, which the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz also observed, began for Heaney with the horrors of the First World War. “[I]t is from this moment in our century that radiant and unperturbed certitudes about the consonance between the true and the beautiful become suspect.”1 Heaney fastened on Wilfred Owen: “Owen so stood by what he wrote that he seemed almost to obliterate the line between art and life. . . . His poems have the potency of human testimony, of martyr’s relics, so that any intrusion of the aesthetic can feel like impropriety . . . the First World War was a wonderful example of a moment when poets functioned as effective and heroic figures in the life of their times.”
Owen and the others like him in the trenches of Flanders, Heaney argues, were among the first of “a type of poet who increasingly appears in the annals of twentieth-century literature, and who looms as a kind of shadowy judging figure . . . the shorthand name we have evolved for this figure is ‘The poet as witness.’”2
First, much of the poetry of the twentieth century, again in Miłosz’s words, “comes from a blank spot on the map.” He is referring here to his native Poland and also to the Lithuanian poet Adam Mickiewicz, who “is virtually unknown in the West.” This is his point—that the political and self-inflicted humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century created many intellectual and artistic “blank” spots on the map: in Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia and in ex-colonial territories in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Given this, should it come as a surprise that some of the great poets of modern times have emerged from the blank spots? Poets such as Witold Gombrowicz, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Anna Swir, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, whose work Heaney also explores in his book, adding for good measure Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott.
RECOGNIZING OUR TRUE DESIRES
We see, then, that poets have indeed been witness to the omnipresent gloom of the twentieth century. “How did it happen,” Miłosz asks, “that to be a poet of the twentieth century means to receive training in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt?” This gloom, he says, answering his own question, owed something to “the victorious scientific Weltanschauung” and to the nihilism resulting from religion having been “hollowed out from inside,” the idea being that art would replace it as “the only dwelling place of the sacred.”4
Elsewhere in his book, Miłosz draws on the sentiments of a distant relative, Oscar Miłosz (1877–1939), who defined poetry as “a companion of man since his beginnings,” “[a] passionate pursuit of the Real . . . bound more rigorously than any other mode of expression to the spiritual and physical Movement of which it is the generator and a guide . . . fully aware of its terrible responsibilities, the mysterious movements of the great soul of the people . . . the incessant transformations of religious, political and social thought.”5
Czesław Miłosz makes a rather different second point: that modern poetry, as well as serving as a witness (and therefore as a warning), builds on that fact—partly by means of its continued existence—to offer what the pragmatists also argue is the greatest virtue we can display in these troubled times: hope. That beauty continues to be made is a form of hope, Miłosz says. He surveys briefly the more negative aspects of modern culture, from Dostoevsky forward, to the dystopian science fiction of H. G. Wells, the totalitarian dystopias of Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley, the decadence of the various bohemias, existentialism, above all perhaps the cruelties of the First World War.
And he does this in order to make a point not often made: “It should be remembered,” he writes, that after the disasters of the Great War “the next war was envisioned as a poison-gas war, and the Yperite, or mustard gas, employed at the end of World War I at Ypres, became a symbol like the atomic bomb later on. Here . . . the prophecies proved not quite correct. When the next world war broke out, its horrors were of a sort unforeseen by anyone, and neither side made use of gas on the battlefield.”
Introducing this idea of failed prophecies leads him to what he sees as an even bigger failure, that of democracy itself, which he characterizes as “a model taken by Rousseau from the assemblies of the entire population of a small Swiss canton.” His real point is that democracy “has shown little ability to expand beyond its area of origin” (he was writing in 1983). No less important, more often than not its rulers “appear as an incarnation of a general will that, if left to itself, would not know its own true desires.” And this, it would appear, is Miłosz’s overriding point: that the more reliable witness of poetry offers the best hope for recognizing our true desires.
Here he is on his friend the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who died in 1969. Amid all the misery of the twentieth century, Gombrowicz declared himself to be like the baritone in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, who says: “Friends, enough of this song. Let more joyous melodies be heard.” He plays down alienation: “Alienation? No, let us try to admit that this alienation is not so bad, that we have it in our fingers, as pianists say . . . [to] give the workers almost as many free and marvellous holidays a year as work days.” Then the other nightmares of the modern condition: “Emptiness? The absurdity of existence? Nothingness? Don’t let’s exaggerate. A god or ideals are not necessary to discover supreme values. We only have to go for three days without eating anything for a crumb to become our supreme god: it is needs that are at the basis of our values, of the sense and order of our lives.” And “Atomic bombs? Some centuries ago, we died before we were thirty—plagues, poverty, witches, Hell, Purgatory, tortures. . . . Haven’t your conquests gone to your head? Have you forgotten what we were yesterday?”
Yesterday is important to Miłosz. For him, the poet was and is set apart in that poets presuppose the existence of an ideal reader, “and the poetic act both anticipates the future and speeds its coming.” In that future, he thought, we would see a return to history as a source of identity and transcendence, using that word in a specific sense. “Daring to make a prediction, I expect, perhaps quite soon, in the twenty-first century, a radical turning away from the Weltanschauung marked principally by biology, and this will result from a newly acquired historical consciousness. Instead of presenting man through those traits that link him to higher forms of the evolutionary chain, other of his aspects will be stressed: the exceptionality, strangeness, and loneliness of that creature mysterious to itself, a being incessantly transcending its own limits. Humanity will be increasingly turning back to itself, increasingly contemplating its entire past, searching for a key to its own enigma. . . . A one-dimensional man wants to acquire new dimensions by putting on the masks and dress, the manners of feeling and thinking of other epochs.”6
At pains to show that poetry is at the forefront (another reason for hope, another form of hope), he asserts that what is new is that our future will not be determined by jets as the means of transport, or by a decrease in infant mortality, important as those things may be. “It is determined by humanity’s emergence as a new elemental force; until now humanity had been divided into castes distinguished by dress, mentality, and mores.” This transformation is causing the disappearance of certain mythic notions, “widespread in the last century, about the specific and presumably eternal features of the peasant, worker and intellectual. Humanity as an elemental force, the result of technology and mass education, means that man is opening up to science and art on an unprecedented scale.”7 Is the disappearance of religion in our lives any different from the disappearance of some of those other nineteenth-century myths, embodied in imperialism, racial superiority and colonialism? he asks. No one mourns their passing and no one foresees their return.
OUR ACHIEVEMENTS AND OUR LIMITS
Miłosz is saying that the best way to understand humanity is historically, that the way man has historically transcended his limitations is the only form of transcendence available, and that we should not ignore the many ways in which, throughout history, life has gotten better—more fulfilling and, yes, more meaningful—for countless ordinary people, in more or less ordinary ways. Only by understanding humanity’s historical achievements and limits can we hope to extend—transcend—those limits in our lifetime by our own achievements. And it is in the nature of things, he insists, that “reflection by a well-stocked mind” offers the best hope of recording and describing those lim
its and achievements—“the poetic act both anticipates the future and speeds its coming.”
We are fortunate in having at least two sets of reflections by well-stocked minds that address our subject. These are Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and George Steiner’s Real Presences (1989) and Grammars of Creation (2001).
Murdoch trained as a philosopher, and as a novelist she was particularly “exercised” by art. These two she brought together in Metaphysics, arguing that “moral philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept”—the concept of transcendence. She was convinced that transcendence, “in some form or other,” belongs with morality, adding that we need to retain “a metaphysical position but no metaphysical form.” Above all, “the Good is certainly transcendent.”
Looking around her, she felt compelled to say that “there is more than this,” and went on to plead that philosophers “try to invent a terminology which shows our natural psychology can be altered by conceptions which lie beyond its range . . . the Platonic metaphor of the Good provides a suitable picture here.” “God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive him does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured. That is, it is real as an idea, and also incarnate in knowledge and work and love.” We can all receive moral help “by focusing our attention on things which are valuable: virtuous people, great art . . . the idea of Good itself.” Moreover, “Beauty is the visible and accessible aspect of the Good. The Good is not itself visible.”
She is convinced that the Good finds “empirically discoverable” incarnation in great works of art. This contemplation, she says, is “an entry into (and not just an analogy of) the good life,” since it involves “the checking of selfishness in the interests of the real.” When we read Shakespeare or Tolstoy, two of her perennial favorites, “we learn something of the real quality of human nature . . . with a clarity which does not belong to the self-centered rush of ordinary life.” Murdoch says that art cannot be altered or possessed by us, and that in itself is liberating. And it is important because “[e]thics means the annihilation of self before the irreducibility of other people.” It is the serious and successful novel that can “deliver us from the tyranny of ourselves,” and this informs her criticism, too. T. S. Eliot, she says, doesn’t want us “to attend to other people”—he wishes us to attend to God.8 In successful art, we contemplate in quietness something whose authority makes us unaware of ourselves. An artist is someone who lets others be through him.