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

by Watson, Peter

  NAMING

  Still sticking with Miłosz: “No science or philosophy can change the fact that a poet stands before reality that is every day new, miraculously complex, inexhaustible, and tries to enclose as much of it as possible in words. That elementary contact, verifiable by the five senses, is more important than any mental construction. The never-fulfilled desire to achieve a mimesis, to be faithful to a detail, makes for the health of poetry and gives it a chance to survive periods unpropitious to it. The very act of naming things presupposes a faith in their existence and thus in a true world, whatever Nietzsche might say.”22

  And how creative naming can be. “Objects, landscapes, events and people give me much pleasure,” says the French poet Francis Ponge, who died in 1988. “They convince me completely. For the simple reason that they don’t have to. Their presence, their concrete evidence, the solidity, their three dimensions, their palpable, not-to-be-doubted look . . . it is beautiful.”23 Zbigniew Herbert agrees when he writes:

  The pebble

  is a perfect creature

  equal to itself

  mindful of its limits

  filled exactly

  with pebbly meaning

  with a scent which does not remind one of anything

  does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire . . .

  Pebbles cannot be tamed

  to the end they will look at us

  with a calm and very clear eye

  But naming means much more than this. It means recognizing phenomena in the world, not only pebbles and landscapes but also feelings, attitudes, emotions, relationships, that we have almost but not quite put into words. In such circumstances, naming enlarges and warms the world and our experience of it. Auden again:

  If equal affection cannot be,

  Let the more loving one be me.

  Here we have a part of life named and, as Heaney said, clicking shut and breaking open at the same time.

  Heaney informs us that Patrick Kavanagh’s work has “a direction rather than any sense of anxiety about the need for a destination”; it is not a response to “some stimulus in the world out there” but, in a happy phrase, “a spurt of abundance from a source within” that “spills over to irrigate the world beyond the self.” Heaney compares the following poem to one of those Chagall paintings in which the characters are airborne in the midst of their own dream:

  But satire is unfruitful prayer.

  Only wild shoots of pity there,

  And you must go inland and be

  Lost in compassion’s ecstasy,

  Where suffering soars in a summer air—

  The millstone has become a star.

  The idea of suffering soaring, and in a summer air, is thoroughly counterintuitive, and yet when we encounter it we experience a sense, as in Plath’s poetry, of surprised arrival.

  We can find in definitions of poetry good and big things that have been said and which make us feel warm. Song and poetry “have added to the volume of good in the world,” poems are “examples of self-conquest” and “self-cleansing,” they are “experimental acts”; poetry is a repository of “stored goodness” or, alternatively, “stored pity.”

  For Philip Larkin it is “unfenced existence.” For Heaney, poetry is more a threshold than a path, “a break with the usual life but not an absconding from it.” For Auden, it is something that makes us “Taller to-day” and can bring a peace which “No bird can contradict.” For Wislawa Szymborska, Miłosz tells us, poetry “is no more than a broken whisper, quickly dying laughter.” For himself, Miłosz says, one purpose of poetry is “to give purer meaning to the words of the tribe,” and in writing poetry, one “bets everything one has.” The French poet Yves Bonnefoy is convinced that “poetry has to do with truth and salvation,” while for Robert Duncan it brings poets “up against the limits of their own consciousness.” “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,” says Elizabeth Sewell. For Wallace Stevens, “The poet is the priest of the invisible.”24

  Poetry is all of these things and more, but let us concentrate here on the activity of poetry, rather than any individual poems, poetry as a way of approaching the world, as a form of knowledge, even as a form of living. By doing so we find four elements that together add up to the activity of poetry and help us understand its meaning. Three of these we have already met. The act of naming the inexhaustible features of the world about us is, as Miłosz puts it, the “eternally insatiable” appetite of poetry, and those three elements—the activity of naming, the inexhaustibility of the features/facts of the world, and the insatiable appetite of poetry (Larkin’s “Enormous Yes”)—together comprise a meaning, to which we need to add one other element: that poetry, like all art, is “disinterested.”

  The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez emphasized the special place of poetry. “Literature is a state of culture,” he wrote, “poetry a state of grace, before and after culture.” He thought that the primacy of the imagination in poetry “forbids the total integration and assimilation of poetic values into any social or cultural order that exists in the modern world.” Gottfried Benn insisted that poetry is “addressed to no one,” and denied that it can have any public function. “Works of art,” he wrote in 1930, “are phenomena, historically ineffective, without practical consequences. That is their greatness.”25 “Works of art endanger no one,” says Seamus Heaney, “they are benign,” and we all “have rights-of-way” in published poems. One of the points of art, says Iris Murdoch, is its independence of us, an independence “that cannot be altered or possessed by us.” Part of the attraction of art, says James Wood, is that it “is not in any racket.”26

  Naming the world means describing it in ever more accurate detail, so that we know more of it today than yesterday and can hope to know more tomorrow, always appreciating that there is no “agenda” to discover, no specific destination to aim for, that pleasure lies in the inexhaustibility of the details of the world, and that very inexhaustibility fuels our appetite for more. On this account, both phenomenology and poetry mean “more.”

  “THERE IS MORE TO THIS LIFE THAN WE HAVE EVER IMAGINED”

  In 1998, in an article called “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” the American philosopher Richard Rorty tried to re-state the argument of Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry”: “At the heart of Romanticism . . . was the claim that reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken. No words, no reasoning. No imagination, no new words. No such words, no moral or intellectual progress.” Rorty contrasted the poet’s ability to give us a richer language with the philosopher’s attempt to acquire non-linguistic access to the “really real.” He described Plato’s dream of such access as itself an act of great poetic achievement but, he said, by Shelley’s time “it was dreamt out.” He went on, “We are now more able than Plato was to acknowledge our finitude—to admit that we shall never be in touch with something greater than ourselves. We hope instead that human life here on earth will become richer as the centuries go by because the language used by our remote descendants will have more resources than ours did. Our vocabulary will stand to theirs as that of our primitive ancestors stands to ours.”

  He was using “poetry,” Rorty said, in “an extended sense.” “I stretched Harold Bloom’s term ‘strong poet’ to cover prose writers who had invented new language games for us to play—people like Plato, Newton, Marx, Darwin and Freud, as well as versifiers like Milton and Blake. These games might involve mathematical equations, or inductive arguments, or dramatic narratives, or (in the case of the versifiers) prosodic innovation. But the distinction between prose and verse was irrelevant to my philosophical purposes.”

  In an earlier essay, “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature,” Rorty presented a polemic against the postmodern approach to literature (see chapter 26), which he felt was transforming the study of great literature into “cultural studies”
—“one more dismal social science” in which context was all and such concepts as “charisma” and “genius” no longer have any place. He quoted with distaste from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: “[The] new order no longer needs prophets and seers of the high modernist and charismatic type, whether among its cultural products or its politicians. Such figures no longer hold any charm or magic . . . woe to the country that needs geniuses, prophets, Great Writers, or demiurges!”

  Rorty flatly disagreed with this view. He believed that there is such a thing as Great Literature and its role is to be “inspirational.” He quoted from an essay by the writer Dorothy Allison, “Believing in Literature,” in which she referred to her “atheist’s religion,” a religion shaped by literature and “her own dream of writing”: “There is a place where we are always alone with our mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold on to—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”27

  And this is what Rorty meant by inspirational literature, that which makes people think there is more to life than they ever imagined. “Inspirational value is typically not produced by the operations of a method, a science, a discipline, or a profession. . . . If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontextualise much of what you previously thought you knew. . . . Just as you cannot be swept off your feet by another human being at the same time that you recognize him or her as a good specimen of a certain type, so you cannot simultaneously be inspired by a work and be knowing about it.” He believed that people have been “saved” by books: “They are people whose motto is Wordsworth’s ‘What we have loved / Others will love, and we will teach them how.’”

  He shared an aspiration, he said, with Matthew Arnold: “the hope for a religion of literature, in which works of the secular imagination replace Scripture as the principal source of inspiration and hope for each new generation. We should cheerfully admit that canons are temporary, and touchstones replaceable. But this should not lead us to discard the idea of greatness. We should see great works of literature as great because they have inspired many readers, not as having inspired many readers because they are great.”28

  Not long after he had completed his essay “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” Rorty received the devastating news that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Not long after that, he was drinking coffee with one of his sons and a visiting cousin. The cousin, a Baptist minister, was prompted to ask him if he had found his thoughts drifting to religious topics. No, said Rorty. “Well, what about philosophy?” his son asked. No, he said. His son persisted: “Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of use?” And then Rorty blurted out that, yes, poetry had been of use. When asked which poems in particular, he quoted two old “chestnuts” that he had “dredged up” from memory and been “oddly cheered by.” One, from Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”:

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no life lives for ever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  and the other, from Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:

  Nature I loved, and next to nature, Art;

  I warmed both hands before the fire of life,

  It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

  Rorty said he found comfort “in those slow meanders and those stuttering embers,” and added, “I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.”

  Rorty confessed that he wished he had spent more of his life with verse. “This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived life more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends. [Remember Oscar Miłosz described poetry as “a companion of man since his beginnings.”] Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verse.”29

  25

  “Our Spiritual Goal Is the Enrichment of the Evolutionary Epic”

  I

  n the Preface to Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998), Richard Dawkins, then Oxford’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, recounted two incidents that in part prompted him to write his new book. One concerned an unnamed foreign publisher who had told him that, after reading his first book The Selfish Gene (1976), he could not sleep for three nights, so troubled was he by its “cold, bleak message.” The other story concerned a teacher “from a distant country” who had written to him reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book “because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends, for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism.”

  Dawkins then went on to quote from his colleague Peter Atkins’s book The Second Law (1984) [i.e., of thermodynamics]: “We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”1

  Dawkins comments: “[S]uch very proper purging of saccharine false purpose; such laudable tough-mindedness in the debunking of cosmic sentimentality must not be confused with the loss of personal hope. Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected.” On the contrary, he wanted to convey the sense of awed wonder that science can give us and which makes it “one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.”2

  The title of Dawkins’s book comes from a poem by Keats, who believed that Isaac Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. Dawkins did not accept this argument. He insisted that scientists and scientifically literate people everywhere who can read Keats as well as Newton have two ways of experiencing and understanding rainbows, not one, and that must be an advance.

  He then set about demonstrating his own wonder at the natural world and the cosmos, ranging from bacteria, insect ears, birdsong, the rings in the trunks of sequoias, cuckoos and their habits with eggs, to snail polymorphism and much else. Along the way he dismissed paranormal activities, astrology, all forms of superstition and gullibility. He peppered his text with poems—some good, some indifferent—in a fulsome attempt to show that an appreciation of science in no way compromises enjoyment of poetry, not least because “[s]cience allows mystery but not magic.”3 That, in fact, an awareness of scientific inaccuracies in literature was and is another form of poetic appreciation.

  At the end, he made a claim for what he calls “poetic scie
nce”: the notion that a Keats and a Newton, listening to each other, “might hear the galaxies sing.” Thanks to language, which separates us from the other animals, “[w]e can get outside the universe . . . in the sense of putting a model of the universe inside our skulls. Not a superstitious, small-minded, parochial model filled with spirits and hobgoblins, astrology and magic, glittering with fake crocks of gold where the rainbow ends. A big model, worthy of the reality that regulates, updates and tempers it; a model of stars and great distances, where Einstein’s noble spacetime curve upstages the curve of Yahweh’s covenantal bow and cuts it down to size. . . . The spotlight passes but, exhilaratingly, before it does so it gives us time to comprehend something of this place in which we fleetingly find ourselves and the reason that we do so. We are alone among the animals in foreseeing our end. We are also alone among animals in being able to say before we die: Yes, this is why it was worth coming to life in the first place.”4

  In the past few decades, both evolutionary biologists like Dawkins and cosmologists—physicists and astronomers—have mounted a spirited attack on the basic dimensions of religion, in particular the main monotheisms, and in doing so have tried hard to reshape what—for the sake of a better phrase—we may call our spiritual predicament.

  The collective achievements of these two sciences have been threefold. First, they have sought to show that religions are themselves entirely natural phenomena; they have evolved, like so much else, and from this it follows that our moral life is also a natural (evolved) phenomenon, not rooted in any divine realm or mind. In this sense, the details of evolution teach us how to live together without any reference to God. Nothing is put in his place, because nothing is needed. Second, science has discovered—or reconfigured—some new aspects of the human condition, which provide us with principles for arranging our affairs for the greater benefit of the greatest number. Again, there is no need of God. Third, evolutionary biology and cosmology have given us some radically new ideas about the organizing principle(s) underpinning the universe. Some have gone so far as to call these new principles divine in themselves, but many others see them as entirely natural features of the world.