The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (8 page)

A parallel process occurred with Alexander Tille (1866–1912), who was described as a rabid Nietzschean and social Darwinian. Tille was a leading light in the
Alldeutsche Verband
from 1898 on, and an earnest Nietzsche publicist. (He also, incidentally, helped bring Nietzsche to Britain, taught German for ten years at Glasgow University, and in 1895 was appointed editor of an English edition of Nietzsche’s works.) As deputy director of the Organization of German Industrialists in Berlin and later as a representative of an employers’ association in Saarbrücken, he was not without influence, and his own interpretation of Nietzscheanism emphasized the philosopher’s dismissal of equality, Christian ethics, socialism and democracy. And all this combined in Tille’s case with an especially brutal form of social Darwinism. Tille expressly advocated “helping” nature by exterminating “unproductive elements” of society (cripples, lunatics, the educationally subnormal), and instead favoring its “efficient and gifted”—as they were called then—members. He even believed that slums were beneficial insofar as they “purged” the nation of its “useless citizens.”

His
From Darwin to Nietzsche
(1895) made this all very plain. For him a crucial fact was that, unlike Darwin, Nietzsche believed that the new dis
pensation took society outside and beyond the “Christian-human-democratic ethic.” Nietzsche’s fundamental insight, for Tille, was that people “did not possess equal worth.” The strong constituted “upward development,” while the weak threatened decay. “A physiologically high form of human being was the moral goal of mankind.”
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The fundamental appeal of Nietzsche, to which the Nietzsche generations responded, was perhaps most clearly put by Karl Joel, a philosopher of a slightly mystical bent, in his
Nietzsche and Romanticism
(1905): “One sees Nietzsche against the gloomy background of socialism, Darwinism and pessimism from which he freed himself. Without it Nietzsche appears as a fool and a criminal. With it he appears as a hero.” Only the
Übermenschen
were capable of making the future more enchanting and meaningful than the past.
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No One Way That Life Must Be

F
or America, the Civil War was a watershed in all sorts of ways. Although not many realized it at the time, her dilemma over slavery had kept the country back, and the war at last allowed the full forces of capitalism and industrialism to flex their muscles. Only after the war was over was the country free to fulfill her early promise.

Her population was still small by European standards, but the frontier was still opening up and there was much uncertainty. The pattern of immigration was changing, and questions of race, tribe, nationality, ethnic affiliation and—not least—religious identity were ever present. Intellectual life, like everything else, was still in the process of formation, and in this context America had to fashion herself, devising new ideas where they were needed and using ideas from the Old World where they were available and relevant. But America did not lack confidence.

The assimilation of European ideas into the American context was achieved via a small number of nineteenth-century individuals, all New Englanders, who knew each other personally and between them created what we may call the characteristically American tradition of modern thought—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Benjamin and Charles Peirce and John Dewey. Their ideas changed the way Americans (and the rest of us) thought and continue to think, about education, democracy, liberty, justice, tolerance—and, of course, about God.

THE LIMITS TO HAPPINESS

We can say that what these thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas but, in a sense, a single idea, an idea
about
ideas. “They all believed that ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like knives and forks and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. And they believed that since ideas are
provisional
responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability. . . . There is also, though, implicit in what they wrote, a recognition of the
limits
of what thought can do in the struggle to increase human happiness [italics added].”
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The first sighting of what would be called the “pragmatist” philosophy, and what linked it with the Civil War, came courtesy of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was a great admirer of Emerson, whom his father had known and befriended. As a freshman at Harvard in 1858, Holmes Jr. found that Emerson, as he said later, “set me on fire.” He meant, among other things, Emerson’s address to Harvard Divinity School in 1838, when he described how he had been “bored to distraction” by a recent sermon and had contrasted its artificiality with the wild snowstorm then raging outside the church. This, plus many other musings, had caused him, he said, to renounce his belief in a supernatural Jesus and organized Christianity in favor of more personal revelation. Holmes Jr.—long-faced and with a distinctive handlebar mustache—agreed with Emerson that it was possible to live in a better relation with one’s fellow men outside organized religion than within it.

Holding such views, Holmes was provided with the opportunity to do something practical when the Civil War broke out in 1861, and he accepted a commission “in a spirit of moral obligation”—he hated slavery and found even
The Pickwick Papers
distasteful because of its treatment of West Indians. Holmes suffered no fewer than three injuries during that bloody war—still the war in which most American lives have been lost—and amid the carnage he learned one thing, he said, that was to remain with him all his life. He looked about him and observed that although the abolitionists
in 1850 appeared to many Northerners as subversives, by the end of the war “they were patriots.” He concluded from this, famously: “There is no one way that life must be.” This guided him and formed him into the wise judge that he became, his wisdom emerging in his great work
The Common
Law
, which began life as the Lowell Lectures at Harvard, all twelve given before a full house, where he spoke throughout without notes.
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The philosophical brilliance of Holmes was to see that the law has no one overriding aim or idea. (This was the perception he brought from the disaster of the Civil War.) That it had evolved pragmatically, that in any one case there is “a whole weather pattern” operating—precedence, deterrence, social benefit—in which there are no hard-and-fast distinctions, and whose constituents combine to produce a verdict in individual cases. He wasn’t sure that experience is reducible to general abstractions, even though human beings spend so much time trying to do just that. “All the pleasure of life is in general ideas,” he wrote in 1899, “but all the use of life is in specific solutions—which cannot be reached through generalities any more than a picture can be painted by knowing some rules of method. They are reached by insight, tact and specific knowledge.” (See pp. 299–302 for a similar argument made by Ludwig Wittgenstein.)

“Insight,” “tact” and “specific knowledge.” We shall see how important those words are in the story we shall be telling. More, we shall see how those words linked American and European thought, how they became the leading ideas for people who tried to live without God; and how—and this is too often overlooked—they unified people in their opposition to, and criticism of, the scientific worldview. It is a fact too little appreciated that the very people who attempted to construct a liveable lifestyle without supernatural or transcendent dimensions also found the scientific approach not up to the task either.

Holmes’s father was a doctor who discovered the causes of puerperal fever, demonstrating conclusively that the disease was transmitted from childbirth to childbirth by doctors themselves. His career culminated as dean of Harvard Medical School, though he became just as widely known for being what many people regarded as the greatest talker they had ever heard. Partly because of this, he took a founding role in the so-called Metaphysical Club, also known as the Saturday Club, where literary matters
were discussed over dinner and whose other members included Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton and, later, Holmes Jr., William James, philosopher and psychologist, and Benjamin and Charles Peirce.
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“DAMN THE ABSOLUTE!”

Each of these latter figures had impressive credentials. John Jacob Astor aside, William James’s grandfather, a dry-goods millionaire, would have been the richest man of the time in New York State. Instead of a formal education William had traveled across Europe with his family, including his brother, the writer Henry, and although William never stayed long at any particular school, this traveling gave him
experience
. He did finally settle on a career, in science, at Harvard in 1861, where he formed part of the circle of Louis Agassiz, a deist, the discoverer of the Ice Age and, at the time, one of the most vociferous critics of Charles Darwin. Although Agassiz was a member of the Saturday Club (it was also often referred to as Agassiz’s Club), James wasn’t so sure about his mentor’s opposition to Darwin. He was particularly skeptical of Agassiz’s dogmatism, whereas he thought evolutionary theory sparked all sorts of fresh ideas and—what he liked most—revealed biology as acting on very
practical
, even pragmatic, principles. James, like Holmes, was skeptical of certitude, one of his favorite phrases being “Damn the Absolute!”
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At about this time, there was a remarkable development in the so-called new, or experimental, psychology. Edward Thorndike at Berkeley had placed chickens in a box which had a door that could be opened if the birds pecked at a lever. In this way they were given access to a supply of food pellets. Thorndike observed that “although at first many actions were tried, apparently unsystematically [that is, at random], only successful actions performed by chickens who were hungry were learned.” James wasn’t surprised by this, but it confirmed his view, albeit in a mundane way: the chickens had learned that if they pecked at the lever the door would open, leading to food, a reward. James went one step further. For all intents and purposes, he said, the chickens
believed
that if they pecked
at the lever the door would open. As he put it, “Their beliefs were rules for action.” And he thought that such rules applied more generally. “If behaving as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true. . . . ‘The Truth’ is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.” In other words, truth is not “out there”; it has nothing to do with “the way things really are.”

Most controversially of all, James applied this reasoning to intuition, to innate ideas. He took Kant’s line, for the most part, that many ideas are innate, but he didn’t think there was anything mysterious or divine about this. In Darwinian terms, it was clear that “innate” ideas are just variations that have arisen and been naturally selected. “Minds that possessed them were preferred [by natural selection] to minds that did not.” But this wasn’t because those ideas were more “true” in an abstract, metaphysical or theological sense; it was because it helped the organisms to adapt. The reason we believed in God (when we did believe in God) was because experience showed that it paid to believe in God. When people stopped believing in God (as they were doing in sizeable numbers when James was alive), it was because such belief no longer paid.
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A CORE UNEASINESS IN US

James’s most important, best-known and probably best-loved book on this subject is
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. This remains distinctive in a number of ways. For a start, it began life as a series of Gifford Lectures.
I

The Varieties
is also distinctive (given the host audience the lectures were intended for) in treading a fine line, managing to be respectful about religion while at the same time telling the stark truth as James saw it. The book takes as its main theme the various psychological states and emotions that he took to be at the center of religious experience. He considered whether religious leaders in the past had been frankly pathological in their religious concerns and ideas; he noted that “cranks” often had fixed ideas; he looked at the role of fear in religious belief, at surrender and passivity, at failure in life (in his words, a “pivotal human experience”). He touched on yoga, Buddhism, Lao-tzu and Vedanta, though he admitted he didn’t know much about Eastern religions; he looked at conversion, at saintliness, at mysticism and martyrdom, at the phenomenon of cosmic consciousness. And at root, he said, religion was about “emotionality,” religion was a “massive chapter” in human egotism, born of a core uneasiness within us, a sense that there is something wrong about us, with religion providing the solution to that unease. He believed that there is always something solemn about religion—solemn, serious and tender—that satisfies a need we have, a solemnity which we feel enlarges us, produces a “gladness,” an inner unity.

At the same time James noted that many people go through the same emotional journey but without turning to religion, so that while religion “works” for people who are religious, this says nothing about whether any one set of religious beliefs is “true,” and he thought that mystics have no right to impose their views on the rest of us. In fact, he went so far as to argue that “we must say goodbye to dogmatic theology.”
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He made only
passing reference to Josef Breuer, Pierre Janet and Freud (
The Interpretation of Dreams
[see p. 83] had appeared only in 1900, in German), but he dwelled in detail on what he called “the subconscious.” He thought that people are dimly aware of subconscious influences on their lives, that there is always some part of the self that is, as he put it, “unmanifested.” It is this, he proposed, that produces the urge to be “larger,” more complete, more unified.

What James was advocating, then, was first the pragmatic argument that, for those who believe in God, he is real because he produces real effects; people believe they achieve a more satisfying life because of religion (and he examined many detailed first-person accounts of religious experiences, most of which, he said, were trustworthy). At the same time, with his aim to create a “science of religions,” he saw religion primarily as a psychological phenomenon, an entirely natural emotional response to the “misty” ambiguity of life, to fear, and to the conflict within us between assertion and passive surrender as ways to face life, the ever present conflict between the “yes-function” and the “no-function”; a response to the very real pragmatic predicament that, in life, lots of ideas negate other ideas. He claimed that many people suffer from what he called “over-belief,” too strong a faith state; that the religious life always risks self-indulgence; and that any attempt to demonstrate the truthfulness of any one set of religious beliefs is “hopeless.”

In his Gifford Lectures, he was pointing out that religion is a natural phenomenon, rooted in our divided self; but he was also saying, indirectly, that advances in understanding the subconscious might well lead to a better understanding of the central uneasiness that we have within us.

“GROWTH IS THE ONLY MORAL END”

More generally, as the American philosopher Richard Rorty has pointed out, James’s main accomplishment was of a piece with John Dewey’s. Dewey, though he boasted “a Vermont drawl,” was not a member of the Metaphysical/Saturday/Agassiz Club, since he was based in Chicago, more than seven hundred miles away, where he was a professor. With his
rimless eyeglasses and complete lack of fashion sense, he was not the formidable presence that some of the other pragmatists were, but in some ways he was the most successful, or at least the most productive. Through newspaper articles, popular books and a number of debates with other philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, Dewey became known to the general public in a way that few philosophers are. Like James, Dewey was a convinced Darwinist and for him the start of the twentieth century was an age of “democracy, science and industrialism”; and this, he argued, had profound consequences.