The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (18 page)

In other words, faced with a world without God and at the same time an ostensible moral base deriving from God, if we are to live together we must maintain fictions—even if, on occasion, they are lies—if they oil the wheels of the community to which we wish to belong. Maintaining community is the all-important priority (this is Habermas’s “solidarity”). More than that, we must treat these shared fictions as sacred. “In the fallen world of James’s novels, the shared fiction seems to be the only remnant of faith that can allow James’s characters to live together. The problem for James, his characters, and his readers is that these shared fictions can hardly be distinguished from lies.”

James’s characters, especially in
The Golden Bowl
, are both conscious of evil and aware of the absence of supernatural intervention in the mod
ern world.
The Golden Bowl
probes this dilemma and explores what fictions might allow us to overcome it. In the book, Maggie Verver, the only child of Adam, a very rich American moneyman and art collector, is set to marry, in London, an impoverished but stylish Italian nobleman, Prince Amerigo. In the run-up to the marriage the prince encounters Maggie’s lifelong friend, Charlotte Stant. It is in fact a re-encounter from years before: without Maggie being aware of it, Charlotte and the prince had enjoyed an affair in his native Rome. Before the marriage, Charlotte and the prince go shopping for a wedding present for Maggie and in an antique shop they inspect a golden bowl which, in the end, they don’t buy because the prince suspects it has a hidden flaw. Following the marriage (at which point the prince’s debts are paid off by Adam), Maggie begins to worry that her father is lonely and she persuades Charlotte to marry him. This brings all four characters closer and, while Maggie seems more interested in her father than in her new husband, Amerigo and Charlotte are again thrown together and re-consummate their affair.

Maggie, all innocence at the beginning of the book, is now acquiring some European sophistication and polish, and she begins to suspect the affair between Charlotte and Amerigo. Her suspicions are soon to be confirmed. She visits the same antique shop where Charlotte and the prince discovered the golden bowl, is shown the very object they didn’t buy, and acquires it for her father. However, the shopkeeper has overcharged her and is feeling remorse, so he goes to her house to confess. There he sees photographs of the prince and Charlotte and tells Maggie about their earlier visit to his shop. They had spoken Italian in front of him, not knowing that he understood every word they were saying.

In the last part of the book, crucial from our point of view, Maggie sets about separating Charlotte and Amerigo, but without letting her father know what’s been going on. She persuades him to return to America, taking Charlotte with him. Impressed by Maggie’s newfound sophistication and guile, Amerigo warms to his wife and goes along with her plans.

The symbolism of the bowl has been criticized as heavy-handed, but it successfully fulfills several functions. Its potential flaw draws attention to the shortcomings of the characters, each of whom is either a gift or the recipient of a gift, though those shortcomings are never discussed—
as so much is not discussed, in particular the affair and Maggie’s plotting to induce her father to return to America, thereby taking Charlotte away from the prince. The point is that everyone colludes in
not
discussing these issues. The weather pattern of general well-being is on the surface of things, while underneath the weather is anything but pleasant—and is in fact a collectively shared fiction. “Although the characters constantly deceive one another, they do so in order to make their lives together bearable.”

James’s point is that we need to feel some things are sacred and, in a secular world, there is still this need, but notions of
what
exactly
is to be kept sacred have changed: since transcendence is no longer possible—transcendence with a supernatural meaning—then to live in this secular world, as a community, means living with,
accepting
, the fictions of the others “among whom one is thrown.” Any form of the sacred appropriate to this modern age will be, as for William James, one that is effective because people accept it.
21

Henry James’s novels are, at root, about the intransigence—the insistence—of desire to manifest itself, and its ability to disrupt a social cohesion that traditionally was kept in place by the evolved rituals of organized religion (marriage, above all). In the modern world where ideas of transcendence, of an afterlife, of the sense of community offered by the rituals of organized religions, are no longer open to us, the only way to live, to
have
a community, James is saying, is to act “as if” the disruptions of desire are not taking place, “as if” social cohesion is not being disturbed. This gives us the best means of attaining such social cohesion—a sense of community—and of maintaining it. James has identified what for him (and for many others) is the most substantial threat arising from the death of God—the threat to our social sense of who we are. He also recognized that traditional religious organizations had been devoted, in large part, to coping with desire.

For him, belief in God has been replaced—is to be replaced—by the belief that shared fictions are more than just a form of lying: they are a way of living together, of living with and containing desire, and therefore both a shared flaw, a tacit acknowledgment that we are all fallen, and a consolation.

THE COLLECTIVE MIND AND THE GENERAL PURPOSE

There was an “as if” element in H. G. Wells’s thinking, as we shall see. At the same time, he thought that lying was “the blackest crime.” There was not much common ground between Wells and Henry James (indeed, they had had an acrimonious debate), and although he shared
some
of the views of Shaw, Valéry and Wallace Stevens, Wells found it hard to accept beauty and art as self-justifying, as ends in themselves. He thought artists had “abundant but uneducated brains,” that their activities were essentially arbitrary and uncoordinated. In his view, aesthetics was pointless if it had no use, and “art for art’s sake” would eventually lead to the neglect of its original inspiration. His books, including his novels, were purely functional, as he put it, designed specifically to produce social and ethical reform.
22

Wells decided to become a writer after breaking his leg in 1874, when he was forced to spend some weeks in bed. His father, a part-time professional cricketer (for Kent), brought him a succession of books that fired his enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that survived an early unhappy spell as an apprentice draper, then as a teacher.

Wells’s real calling, however, was science. He attended Midhurst Grammar School for a while as a boy, where he was taught science by T. H. Huxley, famously known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his robust espousal of the theory of evolution. Wells was inspired specifically by Huxley and by evolution but also by science generally. He concluded that, given the way science operated, revealing new possibilities as it solved old problems, we should always remain skeptical that a “final reality” would ever become known. He thought that ideas of Right and God were only “attempts to simplify and so bring into the compass of human reactions what is otherwise humanly inexpressible.” Writing at the time that he did, and having the background that he did, Wells recognized around him a process of cultural, intellectual and political evolution of which science and socialism were both parts and that would lead, he thought, to the emergence of what he called a “Synthetic Collective Mind,” “arising out of and using and passing on beyond our individual minds.” In 1900 there was a widespread
feeling that capitalism had run its course, and many people, especially in the Western democracies, assumed that some form of socialism would triumph and spread across the world in the new century.
23

These ideas were developed in, among other publications,
A Modern Utopia
(1905),
New World for Old
(1908) and
Mankind in the Making
(1903), in which he argued that a more scientific and socialistic society would be brought about through the creation and institutionalization of a caste of philosopher-kings, called Samurai, a “voluntary nobility.” All political power was to be in their hands; they would be the sole administrators, lawyers, doctors, public officials, and also the only voters. The privileges were considerable but the positions were to be open to all. By means of this caste, Wells felt, society could look forward to an orderly and efficient administration. The Samurai would be international and cosmopolitan in outlook, intellectually open and, crucially, would base their activities and innovations on scientific research. The best science, he maintained, offered the only form of “universalism” that overcomes—indeed at times abolishes—the difference between
is
and
ought
.
24

Taking the name Samurai from the upper-class Japanese military caste was an eye-catching tactic, and by it he implied that this caste would, above all, be educated in science and would therefore know how to learn from experience, keep society developing and changing—in effect, this is how the collective mind would operate in reality. As one reviewer in the science journal
Nature
put it, speaking of
A Modern Utopia
, “He aims rather at laying down this principle of an order which shall be capable of progressively growing toward perfection; and so it may well be that in his ideal society men will be less reluctant than now to learn from experience.”

Wells thought that Christianity and the other major religions had failed “to subordinate the individual,” that they had in fact “usually offered rewards” for individuality, punishing only the really deviant and “vile” exceptions and even then offering absolution. However, “The essential fact in man’s history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of community with his kind, of the possibilities of cooperation leading to scarce dreamt-of collective powers, of a synthesis of the species, of the development of a common general idea, a common general purpose out of a present confusion.” Wells argued that man is perfectible “within the great
instinctual drives of life,” and “it is to that goal that we should strive, incidentally improving the race, and cutting down on the distortions and the prismatic views which most humans accept so easily.”
25

He conceived of “perfectibility” not in a theological way, therefore, but as a three-pronged process—perfectibility of the individual but within the greater structure of the state and of the race.

“The continuation of the species, and the acceptance of the duties that go with it, must rank as the highest of all goals; and if they are not so ranked, it is the fault of others in the state who downgraded them for their own purposes. . . . We live in the world as it is and not as it should be. . . . The normal modern married woman has to make the best of a bad position, to do her best under the old conditions, to live as though [as if] she were under the new conditions, to make good citizens, to give her spare energies as far as she can to bringing about a better state of affairs. Like the private property owner and the official in a privately conducted business, her best method of conduct is to consider herself [as if she were] an unrecognized public official, irregularly commanded and improperly paid. There is no good in flagrant rebellion. She has to study her particular circumstances and make what good she can out of them,
keeping her face towards the coming time.
 . . . We have to be wise as well as loyal;
discretion itself is loyalty to the coming state.
 . . . We live for experience and the race; the individual interludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in which we lovers met and refreshed was but a halt on the journey. When we have loved to the intensest point we have done our best with each other. To keep to that image of the inn, we must not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire. We must go on to new experiences and new adventures [italics added].”
26

Wells had a mystical side, which we shall come to, but religion “does not work” for him, he said, a cathedral being no more “real” for him than a Swiss chalet. Instead, he believed that perfection for society, for the race (which for him came before perfection for the individual), lay in the marriage of science and socialism. “The fundamental idea upon which socialism rests is the same fundamental idea as that upon which all real scientific work is carried on. It is the denial that chance impulse and individual will and happening constitute the only possible methods by which
things may be done in the world. It is an assertion that things are, in their nature, orderly; that things may be computed, may be calculated upon and foreseen. In the spirit of this belief, science aims at systematic knowledge of material things . . . the socialist has just that same faith in the order, the knowableness of things, and the power of men in cooperation to overcome chance.” Science, he liked to say, is the mind of the race.
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Wells agreed with Huxley that the process of evolution was basically amoral and “could not be expected in itself either to produce a more moral species than
Homo sapiens
, or to provide the principles for an ethically conscious society. Thus, there being no inherent virtue in nature, man must strive to correct and control his own evolution, including the evolution of society, and not merely accept or blindly follow the Darwinian process.” He really did think, as many socialists with him, that science and technology would bring an end to toil and shortage. He thought eugenics could help perfect mankind, and that proved controversial too.

Within this general context of science and socialism, Wells thought that fulfillment (of society first, then the individual within it) depended on “five principles of liberty . . . without which civilization is impossible.”
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These were the principles of privacy, of free movement and of unlimited knowledge, the view that lying is “the blackest crime,” and free discussion and criticism. And underlying all was a sixth principle, that of scientific research. Research produced rational results, their very rationality and impartiality giving them an authority beyond all other claims to knowledge.