Nothing to Be Frightened Of (15 page)

Grow up, says Dawkins. God is an imaginary friend. When you’re dead, you’re dead. If you want a sense of spiritual awe, get it from contemplating the Milky Way through a telescope. At the moment you’re holding a child’s kaleidoscope up to the light and pretending that those coloured lozenges were put there by God.

Grow up. On 17 July 1891, Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt went for a morning walk and discussed the minuscule chance of an afterlife. Much as he longed to see his dead, beloved brother Jules again, Edmond was sure that we are “totally annihilated at death,” being “ephemeral creatures lasting only a few days longer than those which live a single day.” He then produced an original argument, one from number, like Maugham’s
e consensu gentium,
yet with a contrary conclusion: even if there were a God, expecting the Deity to provide a second, post-death existence for each and every member of the human race is laying far too great a task of bookkeeping upon Him.

This is perhaps more witty than convincing. If we can conceive of a God in the first place, then the ability to bear in mind, tabulate, care for (and resurrect) every single one of us is, I’d have thought, pretty much the least we should expect as a job description. No, the more convincing argument springs not from God’s incapacity, but ours. As Maugham puts it, in his first entry for the year 1902, in
A Writer’s Notebook
: “Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life. With their little passions, their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited in the workaday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for beings cast on so small a scale.” Before becoming a writer, Maugham had trained as a doctor, and witnessed patients die both peacefully and tragically: “And never have I seen in their last moments anything to suggest that their spirit was everlasting. They die as a dog dies.”

Possible objections: 1. Dogs, too, are part of God’s creation (as well as being His anagram). 2. Why should a doctor, concentrating on the body, notice where the spirit is? 3. Why should the inadequacy of man preclude the possibility of a spiritual after-life? Who are we to decide that we are not worthy? Isn’t the whole point the hope of improvement, of rescue through grace? Sure we’re unimpressive, sure there’s a long way to go, but isn’t that the point—or what’s a heaven for? 4. Fallback Singerian position: “If survival has been arranged . . .”

But Maugham is right: we die as dogs die. Or rather—given medicine’s advances since 1902—we die as well-groomed, well-tranquillized dogs with good health insurance policies might die. But still caninely.

Chapter 26

During my inner-suburban childhood, we had a black-and-white Bakelite wireless, whose controls my brother and I were not allowed to touch. Dad would be in charge of turning the instrument on, tuning it, making sure it was properly warmed up in time. Then he might fiddle with his pipe, poking and tamping it before unleashing the scratchy flare of a Swan Vesta. Mum would get out her knitting or mending, and perhaps consult the
Radio Times
in its tooled-leather slipcover. Then the wireless would project the rounded opinions of the
Any Questions?
panel: glib MPs, worldly bishops, professional wise men like A.J. Ayer, and amateur, self-made sages. Mum would award them interjectory ticks—“Talks a lot of sense”—or crosses—anything from “Stupid fool!” up to “Ought to be shot.” On another day the wireless would disgorge
The Critics
, a band of suave aesthetic experts droning on about plays we would never see and books that never came into the house. My brother and I would listen with a kind of stunned boredom, which was not just of the present, but anticipatory: if such opinion-giving and -receiving was what adulthood contained, then it seemed not merely unattainable, but actively undesirable.

In my outer-suburban adolescence, the wireless acquired a rival: a vast television set, bought second-hand at auction. Swathed in walnut, with full-length double doors concealing its function, it was the size of a dwarf ’s armoire, and guzzled furniture polish. On top of it sat a family Bible, as outsize as the television, and just as deceptive. For it was the family Bible of someone else’s family, with their lineage not ours inscribed on the front endpaper. It too had been bought at auction, and was never opened except when Dad jovially consulted it for a crossword clue.

The chairs now pointed in a different direction, but the ritual was unchanged. The pipe would be lit and the sewing laid out, or perhaps the nail equipment: emery board, varnish remover, split-binding tape, undercoat, top coat. The smell of pear drops sometimes takes me back to making model aeroplanes, but more often to my mother doing her nails. And especially to an emblematic moment from my adolescence. My parents and I were watching an interview with John Gielgud—or rather, watching him effortlessly turn his interlocutor’s questions into pretexts for elaborate, self-mocking anecdotes. My parents enjoyed the theatre, from amateur dramatics to the West End, and would certainly have seen Gielgud from the gods a few times. His voice was for half a century one of the most beautiful instruments on the London stage: one not of rough power but of refined mobility, the sort my mother would admire on social as well as critical grounds. As Gielgud unfolded another of his urbane and slightly giggly reminiscences, I became aware of a quiet yet insistent noise, as if Dad was discreetly trying to light a Swan Vesta, but constantly failing. Dry scrape succeeded dry scrape, aural graffiti scratching on Gielgud’s voice. It was, of course, my mother filing her nails.

The dwarf ’s armoire was more fun than the wireless, as it contained Western serials:
The Lone Ranger,
naturally, but also
Wells Fargo
with Dale Robertson. My parents preferred grown-up fighting, like
Field Marshal Montgomery on Command in Battle
, a six-parter in which the general explained how he had pursued the Germans from North Africa all across Europe until taking their surrender at Lüneberg Heath; or, as my brother recently remembered it, “Ghastly little Monty poncing around in black and white.” There was also
The Brains Trust
, like a post-graduate—i.e. even more stultifying—version of
Any Questions
?, and also starring A. J. Ayer. More unitedly, the family watched wildlife programmes: Armand and Michaela Denis, with their frolicsome Belgian accents and multipocketed desert suits; Captain Cousteau with his frog-feet; David Attenborough panting through the undergrowth. Viewers had to keep their wits about them in those days, as monochrome creatures moved in camouflage across a monochrome veldt, seabed, or jungle. Nowadays, we have it easy, pampered by colour and close-up, given a God’s-eye-view of all the intricacy and beauty of a God-free universe.

Emperor penguins have been in fashion lately, with cinematic and TV voiceovers urging us to anthropomorphism. How can we resist their loveably incompetent bipedalism? See how they rest lovingly on one another’s breasts, shuffle a precious egg between parental feet, share the food search just as we share supermarket duties. Watch how the whole group huddles together against the snowstorm, demonstrating social altruism. Aren’t these egg-devoted, chore-dividing, co-parenting, seasonally monogamous Emperors of the Antarctic strangely reminiscent of us? Perhaps; but only to the extent that we are unstrangely reminiscent of them. We are just as good as they are at passing for God-created while being smacked and wheedled by implacable evolutionary urges. And given that this is so, what—again—does this make of the proposal that wonder at the natural but empty universe is a full replacement for wonder at the works of an imaginary friend we have created for ourselves? Having come to evolutionary self-consciousness as a species, we cannot go back to being penguins, or anything else. Before, wonder was a sense of babbling gratitude for a creator’s munificence, or squittering terror at his ability to deliver shock and awe. Now, alone, we must consider what our Godless wonder might be for. It cannot be just itself, only purer and truer. It must have some function, some biological usefulness, some practical, life-saving, or life-prolonging purpose. Perhaps it is there to help us look for somewhere else to live against the day when we have irremediably trashed our own planet. But in any case, how can reductiveness not reduce?

A question, and a paradox. Our history has seen the gradual if bumpy rise of individualism: from the animal herd, from the slave society, from the mass of uneducated units bossed by priest and king, to looser groups in which the individual has greater rights and freedoms—the right to pursue happiness, private thought, self-fulfilment, self-indulgence. At the same time, as we throw off the rules of priest and king, as science helps us understand the truer terms and conditions on which we live, as our individualism expresses itself in grosser and more selfish ways (what is freedom for if not for that?), we also discover that this individuality, or illusion of individuality, is less than we imagined. We discover, to our surprise, that as Dawkins memorably puts it, we are “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” The paradox is that individualism—the triumph of free-thinking artists and scientists—has led us to a state of self-awareness in which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience. My adolescent notion of self-construction—that vaguely, Englishly, existentialist ego-hope of autonomy—could not have been further from the truth. I thought the burdensome process of growing up ended with a man standing by himself at last—
homo erectus
at full height,
sapiens
in full wisdom—a fellow now cracking the whip on his own account. This image (and I melodramatize it a little—such realizations and self-projections were always insecure and provisional) must be replaced by the sense that, far from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip itself, and that what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which cannot be shrugged or fought off. My “individuality” may still be felt, and genetically provable; but it may be the very opposite of the achievement I once took it for.

That is the paradox; here is the question. We grow up; we trade in our old sense of wonder for a new one—wonder at the blind and fortuitous process which has blindly and fortuitously produced us; we don’t feel depressed by this, as some might, but “elated” as Dawkins himself is; we enjoy the things which Dawkins lists as making life worth living—music, poetry, sex, love (and science)—while also perhaps practising the humorous resignation advocated by Somerset Maugham. We do all this, and do we get any better at dying? Will you die better, shall I die better, will Richard Dawkins die better than our genetic ancestors hundreds or thousands of years ago? Dawkins has expressed the hope that “When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.” Clear enough, if illegal; yet death has an obstinate way of denying us the solutions we imagine for ourselves.

From a medical point of view—and depending where we live on the planet—we may well die better, and less caninely. Factor that out. Also factor out those things we might confuse with dying well: for instance, having no regret or remorse. If we have enjoyed our time, made provision for our dependants, and have little to feel sadness over, then looking back on life will be more bearable. But that’s a different matter from looking forwards to what is immediately ahead: total extinction. Are we going to get any better at that?

I don’t see why we should. I don’t see why our cleverness or self-awareness should make things better rather than worse. Why should those genes in whose silent servitude we dwell spare us any terror? Why would it be in their interest? We presumably fear death not just for its own sake but because it is useful to us—or useful to our selfish genes, which will not get passed on if we fail to fear death enough, if we fall for that camouflaged-tiger trick as others used to, or eat that bitter plant which our taste buds have taught us (or rather, been taught themselves, by mortal trial and error) to avoid. What conceivable use or advantage might our deathbed comfort be to these new masters?

Chapter 27