The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (4 page)

A survey published in Britain in 2008 showed that people across the country were “increasingly lonely,” and that the predicament had been accelerating in the previous decade. The increase in loneliness had started, the survey reported, in the late 1960s, when neighborhoods had been progressively weakened by increased rates of divorce, immigration, the need to move house for job-related reasons and the growth of transitory stu
dent populations (British universities have increased since 1963 from twenty-three to more than a hundred). Thomas Dumm’s
Loneliness as a Way of Life
(2008) characterizes America as the archetypal lonely society of the future, typified by a “possessive individualism” in which “personal choice” is a cloak rather than an opportunity.
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Happiness, touched on a few pages back, has received, perhaps inevitably, even more attention. Confining ourselves only to twenty-first-century sources, there has been a wave of books exploring happiness—how to achieve it, its links to the latest brain science, what gets in the way of it, how it varies around the world, why women are (in general) less happy than men.

One well-publicized finding is that although the developed Western nations have become better off in a financial and material sense, they are not any happier than they were decades ago. In fact, in
The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy
(2010), Michael Foley argues that modern life has made things worse, “deepening our cravings and at the same time heightening our delusions of importance as individuals. Not only are we rabid in our unsustainable demands for gourmet living, eternal youth, fame and a hundred varieties of sex, we have been encouraged—by a post-1970s ‘rights’ culture that has created a zero-tolerance sensitivity to any perceived inequality, slight or grievance—into believing that to want something is to deserve it.”
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Moreover, “the things we have are devalued by the things we want next”—another consequence of capitalism.

On the other hand, the latest World Values Survey, published in August 2008, found that over the past twenty-five years, in forty-five out of fifty-two countries where polling took place, happiness
had
risen. But the research also showed that economic growth boosts happiness noticeably only in countries with per capita GDP of less than $12,000. Happiness had fallen in India, China, Australia, Belarus, Hungary, Chile, Switzerland (Switzerland!) and Serbia. Happiness appeared more related to democratization, greater variety and opportunities in the workplace, access to travel and the opportunity to express oneself. Other research showed that individualistic nations, especially in the West, “were particularly susceptible to negative emotions,” whereas Asian or Latin American countries
were less so “because they consider their individual feelings less important than the collective good.”
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Let us be honest. These are all fascinating findings, and many of them are salutary and worrying in equal measure. But they are also contradictory and paradoxical. In America it is the churchgoers who are happiest, but worldwide it is those who are existentially insecure (and therefore extremely unlikely to be happy) who most attend church; religion is associated in America with less criminality, but worldwide with more; in America attendance at church boosts income, but worldwide a rise in income fails to increase happiness and it is the poorest who most attend church. Peter Berger says we are as furiously religious as ever but the members of Faithbook think we are in a spiritual recession; Peter Berger says it is the absence of transcendence that people miss but the World Values Survey shows that it is instead the absence of bread, water, decent medication and jobs that people miss, and which leads them to religion.

Despite the contradictions in these findings, amid the atavistic, violent and absurdly incoherent nature of many recent religious manifestations, and although the sociological explanations for both religious and non-religious orientations seem—rationally and convincingly—to outweigh theological ones, it is clear that many religious souls refuse to accept such a state of affairs.

Charles Taylor and the other authors referred to above lead the way in arguing that atheists suffer impoverished lives. But the Norris-Inglehart survey indicates that once existential insecurity is relieved, faith disappears. This sociological transformation is still occurring—it is even beginning to occur in the United States. A Pew Research Center poll published in 2012 reveals that the number in the United States with no religious affiliation has risen from 16 percent in 2008 to 20 percent four years later. Church attendance has dropped from around 40 percent in 1965 to under 30 percent now.
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•   •   •

One book cannot hope to have much of an impact when set against the absurd, tragic and horrific dimensions of recent religious history, but this one at least aims to offer something that hasn’t, to my knowledge, been done before. It aims to be an extensive survey of the work of those tal
ented people—artists, novelists, dramatists, poets, scientists, psychologists, philosophers—who have embraced atheism, the death of God, and have sought other ways to live, who have discovered or fashioned other forms of meaning in the world, other ways to overcome the great “subtraction,” the dreadful impoverishment that so many appear to think is the inevitable consequence of losing the idea of supernatural transcendence.

I hope to show that such an eventuality is far from inevitable. In fact, when you look at our recent history you encounter quite a lot of surprises in the works of luminaries you thought you knew; you make some unusual (and revealing) juxtapositions; and you discover that the search for other ways to live has been one of the core components—part of the DNA, to use a modern metaphor—of modern culture. You also realize that, far from atheists leading less than full lives, neither God nor the Devil has all the best tunes.

One more point, but an important one. Is Nietzsche to blame for our current predicament? Why is it that his intervention has caught our attention above all others? And what does that tell us?

THE PHENOMENON THAT WAS NIETZSCHE

Toward the end of March 1883, Friedrich Nietzsche, then aged thirty-nine and staying in Genoa, was far from well. He had recently returned from Switzerland to his old lodgings on the Salita delle Battistine but this brought no immediate relief from his migraines, stomach troubles and insomnia. Already upset (but also relieved) by the death the previous month of his erstwhile great friend the composer Richard Wagner, with whom he had fallen out, he came down with a severe attack of influenza for which the Genoese doctor prescribed daily doses of quinine. Unusually, a heavy snowfall had blanketed the city, accompanied by “incongruous thunderclaps and flashes of lightning,” and this too seems to have affected his mood and hindered his recovery. Unable to take the stimulating walks that were part of his routine and helped his thinking, by the 22nd of the month, he was still listless and bedridden.
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What added to his “black melancholy,” as he put it, was that it was
four weeks since he had sent his latest manuscript to his publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, in Chemnitz, who seemed in no hurry to bring out this new book, entitled
Thus Spake Zarathustra
. He sent Schmeitzner a furious letter of reproach, which brought an apologetic reply, but a month later Nietzsche learned the real reason for the delay. As he said in a letter: “The Leipzig printer, Teubner, has shoved the
Zarathustra
manuscript aside in order to meet a rush order for 500,000 hymnals, which had to be delivered in time for Easter.” This rich irony was not lost on Nietzsche, of course. “The realization that his fearless Zarathustra, the ‘madman’ who had the nerve to proclaim to the somnambulists around him that ‘God is dead!’ should have been momentarily smothered beneath the collective weight of 500,000 Christian hymnbooks struck Nietzsche as downright ‘comic.’”
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The response of the first readers of the work was mixed. Heinrich Köselitz, Nietzsche’s friend, who by long tradition was sent the proofs to read and correct, was rapturous, and he expressed the hope that “this extraordinary book” would one day be as widely distributed as the Bible. Very different was the reaction of the typesetters in Leipzig, who were so frightened by what they read that they considered refusing to produce the book.

The world has never forgotten—and some have never forgiven—Nietzsche for saying “God is dead,” and then going on to add that “we have killed him.” He had actually said that before, in
The Gay Science
published the previous year, but the pithy style of
Zarathustra
attracted much more attention.

What
is
it with Nietzsche? Why is it
his
phrase above all others that has been remembered and has stuck? After all, belief in God had been declining for some time. For some, perhaps even many, belief in God—or gods, supernatural entities of any kind—had never seemed right. In most histories of unbelief, or doubt, the account begins in the eighteenth century with Edward Gibbon and David Hume, moving through Voltaire and the French Revolution, taking in Kant, Hegel and the Romantics, German biblical criticism, Auguste Comte and the “positivist breakthrough.” In the mid–nineteenth century came Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the ravages of geological
and biological science brought about by Charles Lyell, Robert Owen, Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer and, above all, Charles Darwin.

These accounts, as often as not, add for good measure stories of celebrated individuals who lost their faith—George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Edmund Gosse. And those who didn’t, but who heard the signals, among them Matthew Arnold, who, in the decade following Darwin’s
Origin
, lamented in his poem “Dover Beach” “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith. Other accounts stress the sheer antiquity of unbelief, and here the cast includes Epicurus and Lucretius, Socrates and Cicero, Al-Rawandi and Rabelais. Here is not the place to rehearse these narratives. Our concern will be with the timing and the circumstances which culminated in Nietzsche’s notably bold proclamation (albeit, we should always remember, one made by a madman).

THE WHIFF OF DANGER AND THE CARGO OF LIFE

One of those circumstances was Nietzsche himself. He was a thoroughly unusual man—quixotic, contradictory, a young meteor who shone with an incandescent writing style but who burned out quickly and went mad at the age of forty-five. His aphoristic style lent itself to easy assimilation, by the public as well as by other philosophers, and was designed to be provocative and incendiary, succeeding only too well, as the reservations of those typesetters in Leipzig show. His madness, too, added a colorful salting to his biography, and to the biography of his ideas after his death in 1900. Were his extreme views “the uninterrupted consequence of his reason,” or were they flavored (distorted?) by his illness, an affliction that has grown more—not less—notorious since his death, as it has become clear that he was suffering from syphilis?

The uses to which his ideas have been put, or are said to have been put, since his death, are also a source of continuing notoriety. Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism caught the imagination of the world, one of its consequences being that he is the only person whose ideas, as Steven Aschheim points out, have been blamed for two world wars. This is a burdensome—and enduring—legacy.

His core insight—and the most dangerous—was that there does not exist any perspective external to or higher than life itself. There cannot exist any privileged viewpoint, any abstraction or force outside the world as we know it; there is nothing beyond reality, beyond life itself, nothing “above”; there is no transcendence, nothing metaphysical. As a result, we can make no judgment on existence that is universally valid or “objective”: “the value of life cannot be assessed.” As Nietzsche famously insisted, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
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From this, certain things follow. We are solely the product of historical forces. Contrary to what the scientists say, the world is a chaos of multiple forces and drives “whose infinite and chaotic multiplicity cannot be reduced to unity.”
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We must learn to situate ourselves in this multiplicity and chaos and the way we do so is via the “will to power,” by which we seek to gain control over inanimate nature. Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a “hidden prejudice” in favor of the “beyond” at the expense of the “here and now,” and this must be changed. This very likely means that much of our activity will be in
refuting
what has gone before, a task made no easier by the competing forces within us, a jostling, which is our natural state and requires us to be spirited in making sense out of this jostling.
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Importantly, Nietzsche tells us that this struggle to achieve mastery over the chaos that is both outside and inside us—the “cargo of life”—leads to a more
intense
form of existence, and it is the only aim we can have in life, in
this
life here and now. Our ethical stance should be to achieve this intensity at whatever cost: our only duty is to ourselves.
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The role of reason in our lives is to enable us to realize that many of our urges are irrational, and no less powerful or valuable for that: we must harness them, and unlock them intelligently, so that they do not continue to thwart one another. This rationalization of the passions in our life he defines as the spiritual quality of existence. We should seek harmony, but we should recognize that some passions are not what the traditional religions have approved of. For example, enmity is one of the passions; it should be accepted and lived with as much as any of the others.
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All this naturally affected Nietzsche’s idea of salvation. Salvation, he holds, cannot apply to some ideal “beyond” the here and now. “God
becomes the formula for every slander upon the ‘here and now,’ and for every lie about the ‘hereafter.’” And he goes so far as to propose putting what he called the “doctrine of eternal recurrence” in the place of “metaphysics” and “religion.” This was his idea that salvation cannot be other than resolutely
earthly
, “sewn into the tissue of forces that are the fabric of life.” The doctrine of eternal recurrence reads that you must live your life in such a way that you would wish to live it again. “All joy wants eternity,” he says, and is the criterion for deciding which moments in a life are worth living and which are not. “The good life is that which succeeds in existing for the moment, without reference to past or future, without condemnation or selection, in a state of absolute lightness, and in the finished conviction that there is no difference therefore between the instant and eternity.”