Religion for Atheists Read online

  The Ten Commandments were a first attempt at reining in man’s aggression towards his fellow man. In the edicts of the Talmud and medieval Christian rosters of virtues and vices, we witness an involvement with more modest yet equally treacherous and combustible kinds of mistreatment. It is easy enough to declare that killing and stealing are wrong; it arguably entails a greater feat of the moral imagination to warn against the consequences of making a belittling remark or being sexually aloof.

  ii. A Moral Atmosphere

  1.

  Christianity never minded creating a moral atmosphere in which people could point out their flaws to one another and acknowledge that there was room for improvement in their behaviour.

  And, because it saw no particular difference between adults and children, Christianity never balked at offering its followers a range of star-chart equivalents to point them in honourable directions. One of the most accomplished of these is to be found in Padua, under the vaulted brick ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel.

  At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Florentine artist Giotto was commissioned to decorate the walls of the chapel with a series of frescoes: there were to be fourteen niches, each one containing a portrait allegorizing a different vice or virtue. On the right-hand side of the church, nearest the nave, Giotto painted the so-called cardinal virtues, Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and Justice, followed by the Christian virtues of Faith, Charity and Hope. Directly opposite these were arrayed a matching configuration of vices: Folly, Inconstancy, Anger, Injustice, Infidelity, Envy and Despair. To each of these abstract titles, the painter appended vivid specimens to evoke viewers’ admiration and stir their guilt. Thus Anger is shown tearing apart her garments, screaming at the sky in indignant self-pity, while two niches along, Infidelity squints out with deceitful eyes. The members of the congregation were to sit in their pews and think about which of the virtues they had embraced and which of the vices they had fallen prey to, while God watched over them from the celestial sphere, stars in hand.

  Giotto, The Vices and the Virtues, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, c. 1304. (illustration credit 3.4)

  The religious tradition to which Giotto’s star chart belonged felt comfortable in making detailed proposals about how one should behave and in distinguishing what it plainly termed good from its opposite. Depictions of vices and virtues were ubiquitous — in the backs of Bibles, in prayer books, on the walls of churches and public buildings — and their purpose was straightforwardly didactic: they were meant to provide a compass by which the faithful could steer their lives in honourable directions.

  2.

  By contrast with this Christian desire to generate a moral atmosphere, libertarian theorists have argued that public space should be kept neutral. There should be no reminders of kindness on the walls of our buildings or in the pages of our books. Such messages would, after all, constitute dramatic infringements on our much-prized ‘liberty’.

  However, we have already seen why this concern for liberty doesn’t necessarily honour our deepest wishes, given our compulsive and wayward natures. We can also now admit that, in any case, our public spaces are not even remotely neutral. They are — as a quick glance down any high street will reveal — covered with commercial messages. Even in societies theoretically dedicated to leaving us free to make our own choices, our minds are continuously manipulated in directions we hardly consciously recognize. It is sometimes said by advertising agencies, in a prophylactic attempt at false modesty, that advertising does not really work. We are adults, this argument holds, and so do not lose our capacity for reason the instant we set eyes on a beautifully photographed billboard or catalogue. It is granted that children may be less resolute and could therefore need shielding from certain messages on television before eight o’clock in the evening, lest they conceive a maniacal craving for a particular train set or carbonated drink. But adults are apparently sensible and self-controlled enough not to alter their values or consumption patterns simply on account of an unceasing array of artfully created messages which reach them from every side and medium at all times of day and night.

  However, this distinction between child and adult is suspiciously convenient to commercial interests. In truth, we are all fragile in our commitments and suffer from a weakness of will in relation to the siren calls of advertising, an ill-tempered three-year-old entranced by the sight of a farmyard play set with inflatable dog kennel as much as a forty-two-year-old captivated by the possibilities of a barbecue set with added tongs and hotplate.

  3.

  Atheists tend to pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but this is to overlook secular societies’ equally powerful and continuous calls to prayer. A libertarian state truly worthy of the name would try to redress the balance of messages that reach its citizens away from the merely commercial and towards a holistic conception of flourishing. True to the ambitions of Giotto’s frescoes, these new messages would render vivid to us the many noble ways of behaving that we currently admire so much and so blithely ignore.

  We simply will not care for very long about the higher values when all we are given to convince us of their worth is an occasional reminder in a modestly selling, largely ignored book of essays by a so-called philosopher — while, in the city beyond, the superlative talents of the globe’s advertising agencies perform their phantasmagorical alchemy and set our every sensory fibre alight in the name of a new kind of cleaning product or savoury snack.

  We don’t only need reminders of the advantages of savoury snacks. (illustration credit 3.5)

  If we tend to think so often about lemon-scented floor polish or cracked black pepper crisps, but relatively little about endurance or justice, the fault is not merely our own. It is also that these two cardinal virtues are not generally in a position to become clients of Young & Rubicam.

  iii. Role Models

  1.

  While paying attention to the messages in its public spaces, Christianity also wisely recognizes the extent to which our concepts of good and bad are shaped by the people we spend time with. It knows that we are dangerously permeable with regard to our social circle, all too apt to internalize and mimic others’ attitudes and behaviour. Simultaneously, it accepts that the particular company we keep is largely a result of haphazard forces, a peculiar cast of characters drawn from our childhood, schooling, community and work. Among the few hundred people we regularly encounter, not very many are likely to be the sorts of exceptional individuals who exhaust our imagination with their good qualities, who strengthen our soul and whose voices we want consciously to adopt to bolster our best impulses.

  2.

  The paucity of paragons helps to explain why Catholicism sets before its believers some two and a half thousand of the greatest, most virtuous human beings who, it feels, have ever lived. These saints are each in their different ways exemplars of qualities we should hope to nurture in ourselves. St Joseph, for instance, may teach us how to cope calmly with the pressures of a young family and how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and uncomplaining temper. There are moments when we may want to break down and sob in the company of St Jude, patron saint of lost causes, whose gentle manner can grant us comfort without any need to find immediate solutions or even hope. At times of anxiety, we could turn to St Philip Neri, who would never underplay our problems or humiliate us but would know how to tease out our sense of the absurd and make us laugh therapeutically at our condition. We might find it particularly consoling to guess at how the imperturbable St Philip would handle the hazards of a family reunion or the crash of a computer’s hard drive.

  An opportunity to remember friends: the months of November and December, from a sixteenth-century English psalter, tabling the deathdays of, among others, Sts Hugh, Katherine, Theodore, Edmund, Clement, Barbara, Lucy and Osmund. (illustration credit 3.6)

  To further enhance our imaginative connections with the saints, Catholicism provi
des us with calendars that list their deathdays, so that we may have regular occasion to withdraw from our social circle and contemplate the lives of people who gave away all their money and wandered the earth doing good works while wearing a rough tunic to mortify the flesh (St Francis) or who used their faith in God to magically reattach a severed ear to its distressed owner’s head (St Cuthbert).

  3.

  In addition, Catholicism perceives that there is a benefit to being able to see our ideal friends around the house in miniaturized three-dimensional representations. After all, most of us began our lives by having nurturing relationships with bears and other animals, to whom we would talk and be tacitly addressed by in turn. Though immobile, these animals were nevertheless skilful at conveying their consoling and inspiring personalities to us. We would talk to them when we were sad and were comforted when we looked across the bedroom and saw them stoically enduring the night on our behalf. Catholicism sees no reason to abandon the mechanics of such relationships and so invites us to buy wood, stone, resin or plastic versions of the saints and place them on shelves or alcoves in our rooms and hallways. At times of domestic chaos, we can look across at a plastic statuette and inwardly ask what St Francis of Assisi would recommend that we say to our furious wife and hysterical children now. The answer may be inside us all along, but it doesn’t usually emerge or become effective until we go through the exercise of formally asking the question of a saintly figurine.

  What would he do next? St Francis of Assisi for sale in a variety of formats. (illustration credit 3.7)

  4.

  A well-functioning secular society would think with similar care about its role models. It would not only provide us with film stars and singers. An absence of religious belief in no way invalidates a continuing need for ‘patron saints’ of qualities like Courage, Friendship, Fidelity, Patience, Confidence or Scepticism. We can still profit from moments when we give internal space to the voices of people who are more balanced, brave and generous-spirited than we are — Lincoln or Whitman, Churchill or Stendhal, Warren Buffett or Paul Smith — and through whom we may reconnect with our most dignified and serious possibilities.

  5.

  The religious perspective on morality suggests that it is in the end a sign of immaturity to object too strenuously to being treated like a child. The libertarian obsession with freedom ignores how much of our original childhood need for constraint and guidance endures within us, and therefore how much we stand to learn from paternalistic strategies. It is not very kind, nor ultimately even very freeing, to be deemed so grown up that one is left alone to do entirely as one pleases.

  Even the greatest atheists may benefit from role models. Above: Sigmund Freud’s desk in London, covered in Assyrian, Egyptian, Chinese and Roman figurines. Top: Or one might prefer Virginia Woolf. (illustration credit 3.8)

  IV

  Education

  ‘The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings’—John Stuart Mill. (illustration credit 4.1)

  i. What We Get Taught

  1.

  A busy high street in north London. In a neighbourhood studded with Cypriot bakeries, Jamaican hairdressers and Bengali takeaways, stands the campus of one of Britain’s newest universities. It is dominated by a twelve-storey asymmetrical steel tower which houses, along a series of corridors painted a vivid purple and yellow, the lecture theatres and seminar rooms of the Department of the Humanities.

  Across the university, 200,000 undergraduates are enrolled on 400 different degree programmes. This particular department was inaugurated just a few months ago by a minister for education and a cousin of the Queen, in a ceremony now commemorated on an engraved granite block embedded in a wall near the toilets.

  ‘A home for “The best that has been said and thought in the world” ’, reads the plaque, borrowing Matthew Arnold’s famous definition of culture. The quote must have struck a chord with the university, for it reappears in the undergraduate admissions handbook and in a mural by the drinks dispenser in the basement cafeteria.

  There are few things that secular society believes in as fervently as education. Since the Enlightenment, education — from primary level through to university — has been presented as the most effective answer to a range of society’s gravest ills; the conduit to fashioning a civilized, prosperous and rational citizenry.

  A look at the degree courses offered by the new university reveals that over half are intended to equip undergraduates with practical skills, the sort required for successful careers in mercantile, technological societies: courses in chemistry, business, microbiology, law, marketing and public health.

  But the grander claims made on behalf of education, the sort one reads of in prospectuses or hears about in graduation ceremonies, tend to imply that colleges and universities are more than mere factories for turning out technocrats and industrialists. The suggestion is that they have a yet higher task to fulfil: they may turn us into better, wiser and happier people.

  As John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ‘The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.’ Or, to go back to Matthew Arnold, a proper cultural education should inspire in us ‘a love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery’. At its most ambitious, he added, it should engender nothing less than the ‘noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it’.

  2.

  What unites such ambitious and beguiling claims is their passion — and their vagueness. It is seldom clear how education could turn students towards generosity and truth and away from sin and error, though it is typically hard to do anything other than passively lend one’s assent to this inspiring notion, given its familiarity and its sheer beauty.

  Nevertheless, it would be no injustice to examine the high-flown rhetoric in the light of certain realities on the ground, as revealed by an ordinary Monday afternoon in the Faculty of the Humanities in the modern university in north London.

  The choice of department is not coincidental, for the transformative and lyrical claims made on behalf of education have almost always been connected to the humanities rather than endocrinology or biostatistics. It is the study of philosophy, history, art, the classics, languages and literature that has been thought to yield the most complex, subtle and therapeutic dimensions of the educational experience.

  In a corner classroom on the seventh floor, a group of second-year history students are following a lecture about agricultural reform in eighteenth-century France. The argument made by their professor, who has spent twenty years researching the subject, is that the cause of declining crop yields between 1742 and 1798 had less to do with bad harvests than with the relatively low price of agricultural land, which encouraged landlords to invest their money in trade rather than farming.

  On the floor below, in the classics department, fifteen students are comparing the use of natural imagery in the works of the Roman poets Horace and Petronius. The professor is pointing out that while Horace identifies nature with lawlessness and decay, Petronius, in many ways the more pessimistic of the two poets, reveres it for precisely the opposite qualities. Perhaps because the air ventilation system has broken down and the windows have jammed shut, the atmosphere is a little sluggish. Few students seem to be following the argument with the intent the professor might have hoped for when he was awarded his PhD in Oxford twenty years ago (‘Patterns of Meta-narrative in Euripides’ Ion’).

  (illustration credit 4.2)

  The application of the university’s academics to their tasks is intense and moving. And yet it is hard to see how the content of their courses and the direction of their examination questions bear any significant relationship to Arnold’s and Mill’s ideals. Whatever rhetoric may be rehearsed in its prospectuses, the modern university appears t
o have precious little interest in teaching its students any emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it.

  The prerequisites for a BA in philosophy, for example, are limited to a familiarity with the central topics of metaphysics (substance, individuation, universals) and the completion of a thesis on concepts of intentionality in Quine, Frege or Putnam. An equivalent degree in English literature will be awarded to those who can successfully tackle The Waste Land on allegorical and anagogic levels and trace the influence of Seneca’s dramatic theories on the development of Jacobean theatre.

  Graduation speeches stereotypically identify liberal education with the acquisition of wisdom and self-knowledge, but these goals have little bearing on the day-to-day methods of departmental instruction and examination. To judge by what they do rather than what they airily declaim, universities are in the business of turning out a majority of tightly focused professionals (lawyers, physicians, engineers) and a minority of culturally well-informed but ethically confused arts graduates aptly panicked about how they might remuneratively occupy the rest of their lives.