The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (19 page)

In a chapter in
Anticipations of the Results of Mechanical and Scientific Progress
(1901) dealing with “faith, morals and public policy in the twentieth century,” he foresees the spread of a vaguely pantheistic humanism as the religion “of all sane and educated men.” They will have no definite idea of God, being well aware of the “self-contradictory absurdities of an obstinately anthropomorphic theology.” This might leave them with a vague, non-anthropomorphic idea, a God who “comprehends and cannot be comprehended,” but for Wells such a God is useless because he plays no part, offers no guidance, as regards the efficient running of society, and therefore has no role, that Wells can see, in the development of the race.
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For such a God, “perfection” is an anomaly.

The one element of mysticism to which he confessed was his belief in a
“sense of community,” one embracing all of mankind. “The essential fact in man’s history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of community with his kind . . . between us and the rest of mankind there is
something
,
something real, something that rises through us and is neither you nor me, that comprehends us, and that is thinking and using me and you to play against each other.” He repeated these sentiments in the preface to the 1914 edition of
Anticipations
, again in a discussion of the “Collective Mind”: “I saw then [during his period in the Fabian Society] what hitherto I had merely felt—that there was in the affairs of mankind something unorganized which is greater than any organization. This unorganized power is the ultimate Sovereign in the world. . . . It is something transcending persons. . . . This Collective Mind is essentially an extension of the spirit of science to all human affairs, its method is to seek and speak and serve the truth and to subordinate oneself to one’s conception of a general purpose. . . . We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves. . . . I believe in the great and growing being of the species, from which I rise, to which I return, and which, it may be, will ultimately even transcend the limitation of the species and grow into the conscious Being of all things . . . what the scheme as a whole is I do not clearly know; with my limited mind I cannot know. There I become a mystic.”
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Some of these later ideas do not sit comfortably with his earlier position. But he argues in both his non-fiction and his novels that individuals, nations and ethnic groups are aspects of what he terms the “continuing stream of the race.” At one stage he had a plan to write a history of the world which “should be as free as possible of any national bias, and hence acceptable everywhere as a common textbook.” This unrealized project reflected his view that “We are all experiments in the growing consciousness of the race”—a “great opening out of life,” as one of the characters says in
The World Set Free
(1914). It is in this novel, too, that the main character, Marcus Karenin, who after two operations is near death, still has the energy to cry out defiantly: “And you, old Sun . . . beware of me . . . I shall launch myself at you and I shall reach you and I shall put my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by your fiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leap at you . . . Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual that have held me dispersed so
long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common purpose.”
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In
The Food of the Gods
(1904), Wells also talks about a mystic “ongoing force,” the narrative being a parable of growth, when an experiment in developing a growth-encouraging substance gets out of hand and generates races of giants (giant humans, giant chickens, giant vermin, giant mosquitoes) all over the countryside. At the close of the novel, the civil engineer Cossar addresses the giant children who have been raised as an experiment by the protagonists: “Tomorrow, whether we live or die, the growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit for evermore. To grow according to the Will of God! . . . Greater . . . greater, my Brothers! . . . growing . . . Till the earth is no more than a footstool.”
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Wells was himself criticized for not having “a metaphysical dimension,” a complaint also directed against his fictional characters. “His figures do not have the inner life so typical of nineteenth-century novels.” But that is to ignore the fact that these same characters are nonetheless exhaustively analyzed into other components, and as often as not, as with Wells himself, a social conscience was replacing religion as the arbiter of their morality.

The fundamental idea behind Wells’s approach was that science, and especially scientific
research
, would produce new knowledge that would replace
ought
with
is
. When that happened, morality would be rational, not religious. Some of his ideas were uncannily echoed by physicists of the late twentieth century (see chapter 24).

MEMORY AND DESIRE

The title
À la recherche du temps perdu
, Marcel Proust’s life’s work, contains a word that means “search” or “research,” if not necessarily scientific. At the same time the book has religious overtones throughout, right from the start, where the famous episode of the madeleine echoes parts of the Catholic mass. Here the narrator, savoring the mixture of cake and tea, experiences a rush of “all-powerful joy” that is transcendental: “I sensed that [this joy] was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended these savors, could not, indeed, be of the
same nature.”

The very name
petite madeleine
derives from Mary Magdelene, and echoes of Catholic theology continue throughout the book, leading several critics to suggest that Proust’s “religion of art” is to an extent modeled on the Christian theological tradition of confessional writing.

Pericles Lewis has a different and more original notion. He argues that Proust drew heavily on the ideas of the early French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
, which appeared in 1912, just a year before
Swann’s Way
, the first of the seven volumes that comprise
À la recherche.
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Durkheim, who based a lot of his theories on the study of “primitive” religions among the aborigines of Australia, argued that totemism was/is the basic form of religion, containing all the essences of later religious forms. Totemism refers to the worship by a clan or tribe of a specific animal or plant, which is sacred, and acknowledges an anonymous and impersonal force that is immanent in the natural world. In totemism, a primitive clan or tribe worships
itself
as a “power” that exerts a moral force on fellow members, keeping the community intact and confirming and sacralizing its
communal
identity.

By this account, Proust’s novel is itself a kind of sociology, regarding the clan as the source of all values—Madame Verdurin’s salon, for example, is referred to as a
petit clan
. Proust’s story alights throughout on objects that are regarded—by one character or another—as sacred, totemic, in a secular way; or they have “magical” properties to transport us to another place and time (the way shamans do, in primitive clans). The episode with the madeleine is only the best known of these: “such sacred objects restore to the narrator the kind of communion he can no longer, even in his most intimate relations, achieve.”
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The profound influence of Durkheim on Proust has been more or less overlooked, Lewis argues, but some links are plain. For example, at the École Normale Supérieure, Durkheim was a classmate of Henri Bergson, who married Proust’s cousin. At the ENS, Durkheim studied philosophy, and then received his doctorate from the Sorbonne. Proust also studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where his professors included two who examined Bergson for his PhD. One of these men, Émile Boutroux, who wrote an influential work on William James and also wrote on spiritualism, was
described by Proust as one of his heroes, and he made specific reference to Boutroux’s work in
À la recherche
. There is no evidence that Durkheim and Proust ever met or, for that matter, that Proust ever read Durkheim’s great book. But their social and intellectual lives undoubtedly overlapped, says Lewis, adding that Proust’s high-school teacher, Alphonse Darlu, founded a journal in which Durkheim’s introduction to
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
first appeared.
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Furthermore, both Proust and Durkheim came from Alsatian Jewish families, at a time when Judaism was supposed to be a private matter with no political or social dimension. But that stability didn’t last: as in the novel, conflict between church and state erupted in France itself—with the Dreyfus affair, a scandal following the wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army officer. Both Proust and Durkheim took active roles in supporting Dreyfus’s case; it became a highly public matter, secularists pitted against believers in traditional religion. The sociologist in Durkheim saw that, with the enormous forces of modernity coming together—urbanization, industrialization, materialism, massification and the growth of technology—it was more necessary than ever to view the individual as sacred: the individual is “the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred. . . . It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods.”
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The individual life thus becomes the focus of social forces.

And this, of course, aptly describes the aims of Proust’s massive work, in which the narrator is searching for a “genuine community” such as was available in the early church (and in his early childhood) but “which today is available in neither institutional religion nor in the social groups that present themselves as alternative religions. Proust also understands the technological and social forces controlling modern life on a religious analogy, not with an omniscient God, but with the variety of powers, spirits, fairies, and gods [with a small g] that populate primitive and folk religions.”
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Proust laces his work with anthropological metaphors and references—totemism, animism, paganism, magic. Even the form of the narration can be seen as a post-monotheistic phenomenon, a search for sacred, magical, transcendental moments. The narrator moves through the book, attaching himself to various clans, observing the myths and
stories they tell themselves—their shared fictions, as Henry James would say—in order to keep their clans together. He is constantly disappointed, but finds salvation in what Proust called
les moments bienheureux
—“blissful” moments brought about by
involuntary
memories which, he shows, are the royal road to the past, and to our unconscious.

What Durkheim and Proust share, according to Lewis, is not a concern with the individual’s relationship with God, but rather “the sacred power [that] bonds the individual to modern society and to its new gods.” These new sacred universal principles are, for Durkheim, such things as “Fatherland,” “Liberty,” “Reason” (especially powerful in France after the Enlightenment and the Revolution). While not denying these, Proust shows that
les
moments bienheureux
are invariably individual, even solitary, but “each one opens up a portal to a whole social world.” In his book, Proust focuses on the painstaking reconstitution of a coherent self “from the competing impulses [desires] of an unconscious life.” Theodor Adorno emphasized that Proust was obsessed “with the concrete and the unique, with the taste of a madeleine or the color of the shoes of a lady worn at a certain party,” through which he shows that our most private self is not self-generating or isolated from society, “but rather begins its journey shaped by forces that precede and control it.”
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The narrator shows, for instance, that to be admitted to Madame Verdurin’s “little clan,” you had to share her view that the pianist she had discovered was better than all others then available—her clan shows elements of a sect, admission to which requires full participation in its rituals and commitment to its beliefs. Madame Verdurin is even described as “an ‘ecclesiastical power’ who brooks no disagreement with her religion of art, in which Beethoven’s Ninth and the operas of Wagner are ‘the most sublime of prayers.’” Those of a critical disposition, the heretics, are scapegoated.

Another feature of
À la recherche
is the narrator’s repeated experience of disillusionment, his discovery that the sacred rituals of the communities he joins turn out, invariably, to have no transcendent power; they are social forces, no more, and salvation, the bliss of
les moments bienheureux
, is the only transcendence on offer.

Although critics thought that Proust made a religion of art, in fact he was arguing that both religion
and
art have social cohesion as their pri
mary social function. “When the faithful believe that they are worshipping Wagner, Beethoven or Vinteuil, they are in fact worshipping the standards of the clan itself. . . . Specific works of art thus serve for the little clan something of the function that the totem does for Durkheim’s Australians.”
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Proust is observing that, with the death of God, the death of a monotheistic Christian God, more primitive forms of religious ritual—totemism—may fill the gap. This is because humans like the
experience
of the sacred: “the modern sacred is still sacred.” But he is also saying that such experiences are essentially hollow: they offer no transcendence, but merely confirm our membership of communities. This may be no small thing, but it is not a big thing either; it is experienced, for the narrator, as a disappointment.

And at this point Proust joins forces with Henry James. What the episodes of involuntary memory build up to in the book is the explanation of desire in the narrator. And he observes, and is drawn to, desire in others. It is the unconscious that explains desire, it is desire that enchants our world, desire that makes us feel “full” or “whole.” After the death of Albertine, the narrator muses on the afterlife. “Desire is powerful indeed; it engenders belief. . . . I began to believe in the immortality of the soul. But that did not suffice me. I required that, after my own death, I should find her again in her body, as though eternity were like life.” This echoes James: “Belief in an afterlife isn’t really a question of belief . . . it is on the other hand a question of desire.”
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