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176 pages, Hardcover
First published April 26, 2018
Atheists who think of religions as erroneous theories mistake faith—trust in an unknown power—for belief. But if there is a problem with belief, it is not confined to religion. Much of what passes as scientific knowledge is as open to doubt as the miraculous events that feature in traditional faiths. Wander among the shelves of the social sciences stacks in university libraries, and you find yourself in a mausoleum of dead theories. These theories have not passed into the intellectual netherworld by being falsified. Most are not even false; they are too nebulous to allow empirical testing. Systems of ideas, such as Positivism and Marxism, that forecast the decline of religion have been confounded time and time again. Yet these cod-scientific speculations linger on in a dim afterlife in the minds of many who have never heard of the ideas from which they sprang.Just as Gray attributes disavowed religious impetus to secular creeds, so he locates a pragmatic godlessness in a mixed company of mystics and materialists, including ostensible theists like Spinoza or Meister Eckhardt.
The project of a scientific ethics is an inheritance from Comte, who believed that once ethics had become a science liberal values would be obsolete. In a rational society, value-judgements would be left to scientific experts. Atheist illiberalism of this kind is one of the strongest currents in modern thought. The more hostile secular thinking is to Jewish and Christian religion, the less likely it is to be liberal.This is almost word-for-word the argument of today's philosophical lockdowners, like Benjamin Bratton. Pursuant to this critique of naive liberals and those who "believe in science," Gray moves on in his second chapter to secular humanists—John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell are his chief exhibits. Their belief in the progress of humanity he regards as deriving from Christian eschatology, with its linear progress from the Fall of Man toward the Second Coming, the Final Conflict, and the Kingdom of Heaven.
The name of the Nazi regime, the 'Third Reich', comes from medieval apocalyptic myth. The twelfth-century Christian theologian Joachim of Flora divided history into three ages, ending with a perfect society. Taken up by the Anabaptists during the Reformation, the idea of a Third Reich surfaced again in the work of the inter-war 'revolutionary conservative' Moeller van den Bruck, who looked to the establishment of a millennium-long new German order in his book The Third Empire (1932), which sold millions of copies.Gray again displays his prescience, writing years before the U.S.'s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, when he mocks the liberal-imperialist pretension of the post-9/11 American foreign policy:
Possessed by chimerical visions of universal human rights, western governments have toppled despotic regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in order to promote a liberal way of life in societies that have never known it. In doing so they destroyed the states through which the despots ruled, and left nothing durable in their place. The result has been anarchy, followed by the rise of new and often worse kinds of tyranny.He turns his attention, in the fifth chapter, to misotheists, or "God-haters." Dostoevsky's anguished Ivan Karamazov, who "turns back his ticket" to God when contemplating the pain of even a single child, is one example; the Marquis de Sade is another. Gray diagnoses Sade's elaborate cosmology of nature-worship-through-sexual-torture as an inverted Christian theology:
Sade was mistaken when he imagined he had left monotheism behind. Instead he changed one unforgivable deity for another. If he raged against the God of Christianity for creating a world abounding in evil, he railed with equal violence at the malevolent goddess of Nature that he had invented. Only someone reared in Christian monotheism, and unable to shake it off, could have adopted such a stance.This is also my judgment, in general, of the Sade-Bataille axis of French extremity; as I wrote in my essay on Bataille's classic pornographic novel, The Story of the Eye, "Mechanically reversing the traditional pieties of the west like flipping a series of switches, the devotees of extremity have created a pious tradition of their own, carried on to a stultifying extent in the institutions of culture, particularly the art world and some wings of academe."
Empson's genius was in recognizing the irreducible plurality of meaning and value in language and art. He saw this plurality in the contradictory expressions of the Buddha. He was too close to Christianity to see it there too.Here Gray offers respect to religions themselves—even progressive, teleological Christianity—that he doesn't pay to their ersatz descendants among modern secular ideologies. Rather than posing as rational systems cleansed of metaphysics, traditional religions admit the irrational and answer the seemingly incorrigible human need to place our sorrows and pleasures in some greater cosmic context.
Conrad did not mourn the passing of a God through which human personality was projected throughout the universe. It was the impersonality of the sea—'the perfect wisdom of its grace', as he put it in what must surely have been an ironical theological allusion—that gave human beings their freedom. The godless ocean gave Conrad's seamen all they needed, and Conrad everything he wanted.As in Straw Dogs, Gray again proffers the tonic of Schopenhauer's pessimism and even suggests that the philosopher's personal faults are almost admirable when juxtaposed with progressive moralism: "For anyone weary of self-admiring world-improvers, there is something refreshing in Schopenhauer's nastiness." Neglecting the political, he doesn't here share the anecdote, detailed in Straw Dogs, about Schopenhauer offering his lorgnette as a gun sight for government soldiers shooting at the revolutionaries in 1848—a militarized aestheticism one imagines today's meme-happy social-media reactionaries admiring.
Again and again in [Spinoza's] works, which were written in Latin, he enjoins the reader: Non ridere, non lugere, neque destestari, sed intelligere (Laugh not, weep not, be not angry, but understand). But it is not clear why anyone should immolate themselves on an altar built from metaphysical speculation. Why renounce our humanity for the sake of an indifferent Deity?—before hailing Lev Shestov, a writer I've never read, influential on modernists like Bataille and Lawrence and now enjoying a comeback, for his conviction that religion "demands the impossible."
The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life. As an object of worship, this fractious species has some disadvantages. Old-fashioned monotheism had the merit of admitting that very little can be known of God. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, the faithful have allowed that the Deity may have withdrawn from the world. Awaiting some sign of a divine presence, they have encountered only deus absconditus – an absent God.
The end-result of trying to abolish monotheism is much the same. Generations of atheists have lived in expectation of the arrival of a truly human species: the communal workers of Marx, Mill’s autonomous individuals and Nietzsche’s absurd Übermensch, among many others. None of these fantastical creatures has been seen by human eyes. A truly human species remains as elusive as any Deity. Humanity is the deus absconditus of modern atheism.
A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom. Without the faith that they stand at the head of an advancing species they could hardly go on. Only by immersing themselves in such nonsense can they make sense of their lives. Without it, they face panic and despair.
According to the grandiose theories today’s atheists have inherited from Positivism, religion will wither away as science continues its advance. But while science is advancing more quickly than it has ever done, religion is thriving – at times violently. Secular believers say this is a blip – eventually, religion will decline and die away. But their angry bafflement at the re-emergence of traditional faiths shows they do not believe in their theories themselves. For them religion is as inexplicable as original sin. Atheists who demonize religion face a problem of evil as insoluble as that which faces Christianity.
If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites. If you can see what a millenarian theocracy in early sixteenth-century Münster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.