Theodore Dalrymple
What the New Atheists Don't See
To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
The British parliament's first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh,
would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch,
and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but
got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was
once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met
his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with
all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the
evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul
Sartre* came up with a memorable line: "God doesn't exist-the bastard!"
Sartre's wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as
easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this
is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least,
Sartre's line implies that God's existence would solve some kind of
problem-actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human
existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable
with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing.
However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and
that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people
still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times
philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find
the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent
in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should
not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of
love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath
its reasons that reason knows not of.
Of course, men-that is to say, some men-have denied this truth ever since
the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on
reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to
Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator
of man's mental or moral economy.
The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human
passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence,
continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared
success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy
of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling,
Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and
critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning
religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of
men, at least of authors.
The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to
think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves
to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised
himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his
unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books
have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of
Dennett's, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not
have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm's ontological argument for God's
existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on
the weakness of the argument from design).
I first doubted God's existence at about the age of nine. It was at the
school assembly that I lost my faith. We had been given to understand that
if we opened our eyes during prayers God would depart the assembly hall. I
wanted to test this hypothesis. Surely, if I opened my eyes suddenly, I
would glimpse the fleeing God? What I saw instead, it turned out, was the
headmaster, Mr. Clinton, intoning the prayer with one eye closed and the
other open, with which he beadily surveyed the children below for
transgressions. I quickly concluded that Mr. Clinton did not believe what he
said about the need to keep our eyes shut. And if he did not believe that,
why should I believe in his God? In such illogical leaps do our beliefs
often originate, to be disciplined later in life (if we receive enough
education) by elaborate rationalization.
Dennett's Breaking the Spell is the least bad-tempered of the new atheist
books, but it is deeply condescending to all religious people. Dennett
argues that religion is explicable in evolutionary terms-for example, by our
inborn human propensity, at one time valuable for our survival on the
African savannahs, to attribute animate agency to threatening events.
For Dennett, to prove the biological origin of belief in God is to show its
irrationality, to break its spell. But of course it is a necessary part of
the argument that all possible human beliefs, including belief in evolution,
must be explicable in precisely the same way; or else why single out
religion for this treatment? Either we test ideas according to arguments in
their favor, independent of their origins, thus making the argument from
evolution irrelevant, or all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion
of being only evolutionary adaptations-and thus biologically contingent
rather than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox
of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products of
evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to
be true.
One striking aspect of Dennett's book is his failure to avoid the language
of purpose, intention, and ontological moral evaluation, despite his fierce
opposition to teleological views of existence: the coyote's "methods of
locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency." Or: "The
stinginess of Nature can be seen everywhere we look." Or again: "This is a
good example of Mother Nature's stinginess in the final accounting combined
with absurd profligacy in the methods." I could go on, but I hope the point
is clear. (And Dennett is not alone in this difficulty: Michel Onfray's
Atheist Manifesto, so rich in errors and inexactitudes that it would take a
book as long as his to correct them, says on its second page that religion
prevents mankind from facing up to "reality in all its naked cruelty." But
how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or
transcendent purpose?)
No doubt Dennett would reply that he is writing in metaphors for the layman
and that he could translate all his statements into a language without
either moral evaluation or purpose included in it. Perhaps he would argue
that his language is evidence that the spell still has a hold over even him,
the breaker of the spell for the rest of humanity. But I am not sure that
this response would be psychologically accurate. I think Dennett's use of
the language of evaluation and purpose is evidence of a deep-seated
metaphysical belief (however caused) that Providence exists in the universe,
a belief that few people, confronted by the mystery of beauty and of
existence itself, escape entirely. At any rate, it ill behooves Dennett to
condescend to those poor primitives who still have a religious or
providential view of the world: a view that, at base, is no more refutable
than Dennett's metaphysical faith in evolution.
Dennett is not the only new atheist to employ religious language. In The God
Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments
for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering
odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely
ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last
of the atheist's Ten Commandments ends with the following: "Question
everything." Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so
on ad infinitum?
Not to belabor the point, but if I questioned whether George Washington died
in 1799, I could spend a lifetime trying to prove it and find myself still,
at the end of my efforts, having to make a leap, or perhaps several leaps,
of faith in order to believe the rather banal fact that I had set out to
prove. Metaphysics is like nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork,
yet it always returns. What is confounded here is surely the abstract right
to question everything with the actual exercise of that right on all
possible occasions. Anyone who did exercise his right on all possible
occasions would wind up a short-lived fool.
This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of
certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and
intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris's book The End of Faith. It is
not easy to do justice to the book's nastiness; it makes Dawkins's claim
that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.
Harris tells us, for example, that "we must find our way to a time when
faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the
present state of the world, there appears to be no other future worth
wanting." I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not see the future of
reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by the status of the
compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted. Is Harris writing of a
historical inevitability? Of a categorical imperative? Or is he merely
making a legislative proposal? This is
who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt, but
not open to a generous interpretation.
It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the
following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in
a book by a man posing as a rationalist: "The link between belief and
behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous
that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an
extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the
world in which we live."
Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three sentences
raise. For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to
be: "Who is genociding whom?" To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from
universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind
of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed
adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies
and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in
Christopher Hitchens's drumbeat in God Is Not Great: "Religion spoils
everything."
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic
religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber-a type
unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church
of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he
probably wouldn't be interested in these books in the first place, that
religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have
committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and
though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have
proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior,
neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.
In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and
folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG
Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes,
no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather
evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term
metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to
find.
The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our
civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret
religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its
achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious
faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a
deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the
world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many
people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is
necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too
easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it
is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will
become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish
still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the
people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I
have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by
Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four
fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray
stone window.
Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century
Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this
picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things
that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on
it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage-or of anything
else-quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for
it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of
human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I
suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.
The same holds true with the work of the great Dutch still-life painters. On
the neo-atheist view, the religious connection between Catholic Spain and
Protestant Holland is one of conflict, war, and massacre only: and certainly
one cannot deny this history. And yet something more exists. As with Sánchez
Cotán, only a deep reverence, an ability not to take existence for granted,
could turn a representation of a herring on a pewter plate into an object of
transcendent beauty, worthy of serious reflection.
I recently had occasion to compare the writings of the neo-atheists with
those of Anglican divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I was
visiting some friends at their country house in England, which had a library
of old volumes; since the family of the previous owners had a churchman in
every generation, many of the books were religious. In my own neo-atheist
days, I would have scorned these works as pertaining to a nonexistent entity
and containing nothing of value. I would have considered the authors deluded
men, who probably sought to delude others for reasons that Marx might have
enumerated.
But looking, say, into the works of Joseph Hall, D.D., I found myself moved:
much more moved, it goes without saying, than by any of the books of the new
atheists. Hall was bishop of Exeter and then of Norwich; though a moderate
Puritan, he took the Royalist side in the English civil war and lost his
see, dying in 1656 while Cromwell was still Lord Protector.
Except by specialists, Hall remains almost entirely forgotten today. I
opened one of the volumes at random, his Contemplations Upon the Principal
Passages of the Holy Story. Here was the contemplation on the sickness of
Hezekiah:
Hezekiah was freed from the siege of the Assyrians, but he is surprised
with a disease. He, that delivered him from the hand of his enemies, smites
him with sickness. God doth not let us loose from all afflictions, when he
redeems us from one.
To think that Hezekiah was either not thankful enough for his
deliverance, or too much lifted up with the glory of so miraculous a favour,
were an injurious misconstruction of the hand of God, and an uncharitable
censure of a holy prince; for, though no flesh and blood can avoid the just
desert of bodily punishment, yet God doth not always strike with an
intuition of sin: sometimes he regards the benefit of our trial; sometimes,
the glory of his mercy in our cure.
Hall surely means us to infer that whatever happens to us, however
unpleasant, has a meaning and purpose; and this enables us to bear our
sorrows with greater dignity and less suffering. And it is part of the
existential reality of human life that we shall always need consolation, no
matter what progress we make. Hall continues:
When, as yet, he had not so much as the comfort of a child to succeed
him, thy prophet is sent to him, with the heavy message of his death: "Set
thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." It is no small
mercy of God, that he gives us warning of our end. . . . No soul can want
important affairs, to be ordered for a final dissolution.
This is the language not of rights and entitlements, but of something much
deeper-a universal respect for the condition of being human.
For Hall, life is instinct with meaning: a meaning capable of controlling
man's pride at his good fortune and consoling him for his ill fortune. Here
is an extract from Hall's Characters of Virtues and Vices:
He is an happy man, that hath learned to read himself, more than all
books; and hath so taken out this lesson, that he can never forget it: that
knows the world, and cares not for it; that, after many traverses of
thoughts, is grown to know what he may trust to; and stands now equally
armed for all events: that hath got the mastery at home; so as he can cross
his will without a mutiny, and so please it that he makes it not a wanton:
that, in earthly things, wishes no more than nature; in spiritual, is ever
graciously ambitious: that, for his condition, stands on his own feet, not
needing to lean upon the great; and can so frame his thoughts to his estate,
that when he hath least, he cannot want, because he is as free from desire,
as superfluity: that hath seasonably broken the headstrong restiness of
prosperity; and can now manage it, at pleasure: upon whom, all smaller
crosses light as hailstones upon a roof; and, for the greater calamities, he
can take them as tributes of life and tokens of love; and, if his ship be
tossed, yet he is sure his anchor is fast. If all the world were his, he
could be no other than he is; no whit gladder of himself, no whit higher in
his carriage; because he knows, that contentment lies not in the things he
hath, but in the mind that values them.
Though eloquent, this appeal to moderation as the key to happiness is not
original; but such moderation comes more naturally to the man who believes
in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than mankind. After
all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess,
might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is.
In his Occasional Meditations, Hall takes perfectly ordinary
scenes-ordinary, of course, for his times-and derives meaning from them.
Here is his meditation "Upon the Flies Gathering to a Galled Horse":
How these flies swarm to the galled part of this poor beast; and there
sit, feeding upon that worst piece of his flesh, not meddling with the other
sound parts of his skin! Even thus do malicious tongues of detractors: if a
man have any infirmity in his person or actions, that they will be sure to
gather unto, and dwell upon; whereas, his commendable parts and
well-deservings are passed by, without mention, without regard. It is an
envious self-love and base cruelty, that causeth this ill disposition in
men: in the mean time, this only they have gained; it must needs be a filthy
creature, that feeds upon nothing but corruption.
Surely Hall is not suggesting (unlike Dennett in his unguarded moments) that
the biological purpose of flies is to feed off injured horses, but rather
that a sight in nature can be the occasion for us to reflect imaginatively
on our morality. He is not raising a biological theory about flies, in
contradistinction to the theory of evolution, but thinking morally about
human existence. It is true that he would say that everything is part of God
's providence, but, again, this is no more (and no less) a metaphysical
belief than the belief in natural selection as an all-explanatory principle.
Let us compare Hall's meditation "Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted" with
Harris's statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed for their
beliefs:
With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin
punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every
one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of
revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the
miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean
time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many
insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins
have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me
of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others
rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be
humbled under the sense of my own.
Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more
honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of
Exeter and of Norwich?
No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose, prose that
merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls; prose of the kind
that none of us, because of the time in which we live, could ever equal. But
the style applies to the thought as well as the prose; and I prefer Hall's
charity to Harris's intolerance.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal
and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
* This quotation is from Samuel Beckett, not Sartre. We regret the error.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html
What the New Atheists Don't See
To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
The British parliament's first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh,
would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch,
and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but
got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was
once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met
his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with
all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the
evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul
Sartre* came up with a memorable line: "God doesn't exist-the bastard!"
Sartre's wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as
easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this
is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least,
Sartre's line implies that God's existence would solve some kind of
problem-actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human
existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable
with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing.
However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and
that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people
still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times
philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find
the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent
in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should
not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of
love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath
its reasons that reason knows not of.
Of course, men-that is to say, some men-have denied this truth ever since
the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on
reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to
Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator
of man's mental or moral economy.
The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human
passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence,
continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared
success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy
of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling,
Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and
critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning
religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of
men, at least of authors.
The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to
think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves
to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised
himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his
unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books
have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of
Dennett's, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not
have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm's ontological argument for God's
existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on
the weakness of the argument from design).
I first doubted God's existence at about the age of nine. It was at the
school assembly that I lost my faith. We had been given to understand that
if we opened our eyes during prayers God would depart the assembly hall. I
wanted to test this hypothesis. Surely, if I opened my eyes suddenly, I
would glimpse the fleeing God? What I saw instead, it turned out, was the
headmaster, Mr. Clinton, intoning the prayer with one eye closed and the
other open, with which he beadily surveyed the children below for
transgressions. I quickly concluded that Mr. Clinton did not believe what he
said about the need to keep our eyes shut. And if he did not believe that,
why should I believe in his God? In such illogical leaps do our beliefs
often originate, to be disciplined later in life (if we receive enough
education) by elaborate rationalization.
Dennett's Breaking the Spell is the least bad-tempered of the new atheist
books, but it is deeply condescending to all religious people. Dennett
argues that religion is explicable in evolutionary terms-for example, by our
inborn human propensity, at one time valuable for our survival on the
African savannahs, to attribute animate agency to threatening events.
For Dennett, to prove the biological origin of belief in God is to show its
irrationality, to break its spell. But of course it is a necessary part of
the argument that all possible human beliefs, including belief in evolution,
must be explicable in precisely the same way; or else why single out
religion for this treatment? Either we test ideas according to arguments in
their favor, independent of their origins, thus making the argument from
evolution irrelevant, or all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion
of being only evolutionary adaptations-and thus biologically contingent
rather than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox
of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products of
evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to
be true.
One striking aspect of Dennett's book is his failure to avoid the language
of purpose, intention, and ontological moral evaluation, despite his fierce
opposition to teleological views of existence: the coyote's "methods of
locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency." Or: "The
stinginess of Nature can be seen everywhere we look." Or again: "This is a
good example of Mother Nature's stinginess in the final accounting combined
with absurd profligacy in the methods." I could go on, but I hope the point
is clear. (And Dennett is not alone in this difficulty: Michel Onfray's
Atheist Manifesto, so rich in errors and inexactitudes that it would take a
book as long as his to correct them, says on its second page that religion
prevents mankind from facing up to "reality in all its naked cruelty." But
how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or
transcendent purpose?)
No doubt Dennett would reply that he is writing in metaphors for the layman
and that he could translate all his statements into a language without
either moral evaluation or purpose included in it. Perhaps he would argue
that his language is evidence that the spell still has a hold over even him,
the breaker of the spell for the rest of humanity. But I am not sure that
this response would be psychologically accurate. I think Dennett's use of
the language of evaluation and purpose is evidence of a deep-seated
metaphysical belief (however caused) that Providence exists in the universe,
a belief that few people, confronted by the mystery of beauty and of
existence itself, escape entirely. At any rate, it ill behooves Dennett to
condescend to those poor primitives who still have a religious or
providential view of the world: a view that, at base, is no more refutable
than Dennett's metaphysical faith in evolution.
Dennett is not the only new atheist to employ religious language. In The God
Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments
for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering
odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely
ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last
of the atheist's Ten Commandments ends with the following: "Question
everything." Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so
on ad infinitum?
Not to belabor the point, but if I questioned whether George Washington died
in 1799, I could spend a lifetime trying to prove it and find myself still,
at the end of my efforts, having to make a leap, or perhaps several leaps,
of faith in order to believe the rather banal fact that I had set out to
prove. Metaphysics is like nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork,
yet it always returns. What is confounded here is surely the abstract right
to question everything with the actual exercise of that right on all
possible occasions. Anyone who did exercise his right on all possible
occasions would wind up a short-lived fool.
This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of
certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and
intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris's book The End of Faith. It is
not easy to do justice to the book's nastiness; it makes Dawkins's claim
that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.
Harris tells us, for example, that "we must find our way to a time when
faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the
present state of the world, there appears to be no other future worth
wanting." I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not see the future of
reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by the status of the
compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted. Is Harris writing of a
historical inevitability? Of a categorical imperative? Or is he merely
making a legislative proposal? This is
who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt, but
not open to a generous interpretation.
It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the
following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in
a book by a man posing as a rationalist: "The link between belief and
behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous
that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an
extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the
world in which we live."
Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three sentences
raise. For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to
be: "Who is genociding whom?" To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from
universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind
of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed
adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies
and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in
Christopher Hitchens's drumbeat in God Is Not Great: "Religion spoils
everything."
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic
religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber-a type
unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church
of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he
probably wouldn't be interested in these books in the first place, that
religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have
committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and
though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have
proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior,
neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.
In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and
folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG
Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes,
no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather
evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term
metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to
find.
The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our
civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret
religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its
achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious
faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a
deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the
world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many
people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is
necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too
easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it
is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will
become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish
still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the
people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I
have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by
Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four
fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray
stone window.
Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century
Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this
picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things
that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on
it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage-or of anything
else-quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for
it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of
human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I
suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.
The same holds true with the work of the great Dutch still-life painters. On
the neo-atheist view, the religious connection between Catholic Spain and
Protestant Holland is one of conflict, war, and massacre only: and certainly
one cannot deny this history. And yet something more exists. As with Sánchez
Cotán, only a deep reverence, an ability not to take existence for granted,
could turn a representation of a herring on a pewter plate into an object of
transcendent beauty, worthy of serious reflection.
I recently had occasion to compare the writings of the neo-atheists with
those of Anglican divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I was
visiting some friends at their country house in England, which had a library
of old volumes; since the family of the previous owners had a churchman in
every generation, many of the books were religious. In my own neo-atheist
days, I would have scorned these works as pertaining to a nonexistent entity
and containing nothing of value. I would have considered the authors deluded
men, who probably sought to delude others for reasons that Marx might have
enumerated.
But looking, say, into the works of Joseph Hall, D.D., I found myself moved:
much more moved, it goes without saying, than by any of the books of the new
atheists. Hall was bishop of Exeter and then of Norwich; though a moderate
Puritan, he took the Royalist side in the English civil war and lost his
see, dying in 1656 while Cromwell was still Lord Protector.
Except by specialists, Hall remains almost entirely forgotten today. I
opened one of the volumes at random, his Contemplations Upon the Principal
Passages of the Holy Story. Here was the contemplation on the sickness of
Hezekiah:
Hezekiah was freed from the siege of the Assyrians, but he is surprised
with a disease. He, that delivered him from the hand of his enemies, smites
him with sickness. God doth not let us loose from all afflictions, when he
redeems us from one.
To think that Hezekiah was either not thankful enough for his
deliverance, or too much lifted up with the glory of so miraculous a favour,
were an injurious misconstruction of the hand of God, and an uncharitable
censure of a holy prince; for, though no flesh and blood can avoid the just
desert of bodily punishment, yet God doth not always strike with an
intuition of sin: sometimes he regards the benefit of our trial; sometimes,
the glory of his mercy in our cure.
Hall surely means us to infer that whatever happens to us, however
unpleasant, has a meaning and purpose; and this enables us to bear our
sorrows with greater dignity and less suffering. And it is part of the
existential reality of human life that we shall always need consolation, no
matter what progress we make. Hall continues:
When, as yet, he had not so much as the comfort of a child to succeed
him, thy prophet is sent to him, with the heavy message of his death: "Set
thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." It is no small
mercy of God, that he gives us warning of our end. . . . No soul can want
important affairs, to be ordered for a final dissolution.
This is the language not of rights and entitlements, but of something much
deeper-a universal respect for the condition of being human.
For Hall, life is instinct with meaning: a meaning capable of controlling
man's pride at his good fortune and consoling him for his ill fortune. Here
is an extract from Hall's Characters of Virtues and Vices:
He is an happy man, that hath learned to read himself, more than all
books; and hath so taken out this lesson, that he can never forget it: that
knows the world, and cares not for it; that, after many traverses of
thoughts, is grown to know what he may trust to; and stands now equally
armed for all events: that hath got the mastery at home; so as he can cross
his will without a mutiny, and so please it that he makes it not a wanton:
that, in earthly things, wishes no more than nature; in spiritual, is ever
graciously ambitious: that, for his condition, stands on his own feet, not
needing to lean upon the great; and can so frame his thoughts to his estate,
that when he hath least, he cannot want, because he is as free from desire,
as superfluity: that hath seasonably broken the headstrong restiness of
prosperity; and can now manage it, at pleasure: upon whom, all smaller
crosses light as hailstones upon a roof; and, for the greater calamities, he
can take them as tributes of life and tokens of love; and, if his ship be
tossed, yet he is sure his anchor is fast. If all the world were his, he
could be no other than he is; no whit gladder of himself, no whit higher in
his carriage; because he knows, that contentment lies not in the things he
hath, but in the mind that values them.
Though eloquent, this appeal to moderation as the key to happiness is not
original; but such moderation comes more naturally to the man who believes
in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than mankind. After
all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess,
might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is.
In his Occasional Meditations, Hall takes perfectly ordinary
scenes-ordinary, of course, for his times-and derives meaning from them.
Here is his meditation "Upon the Flies Gathering to a Galled Horse":
How these flies swarm to the galled part of this poor beast; and there
sit, feeding upon that worst piece of his flesh, not meddling with the other
sound parts of his skin! Even thus do malicious tongues of detractors: if a
man have any infirmity in his person or actions, that they will be sure to
gather unto, and dwell upon; whereas, his commendable parts and
well-deservings are passed by, without mention, without regard. It is an
envious self-love and base cruelty, that causeth this ill disposition in
men: in the mean time, this only they have gained; it must needs be a filthy
creature, that feeds upon nothing but corruption.
Surely Hall is not suggesting (unlike Dennett in his unguarded moments) that
the biological purpose of flies is to feed off injured horses, but rather
that a sight in nature can be the occasion for us to reflect imaginatively
on our morality. He is not raising a biological theory about flies, in
contradistinction to the theory of evolution, but thinking morally about
human existence. It is true that he would say that everything is part of God
's providence, but, again, this is no more (and no less) a metaphysical
belief than the belief in natural selection as an all-explanatory principle.
Let us compare Hall's meditation "Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted" with
Harris's statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed for their
beliefs:
With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin
punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every
one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of
revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the
miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean
time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many
insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins
have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me
of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others
rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be
humbled under the sense of my own.
Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more
honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of
Exeter and of Norwich?
No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose, prose that
merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls; prose of the kind
that none of us, because of the time in which we live, could ever equal. But
the style applies to the thought as well as the prose; and I prefer Hall's
charity to Harris's intolerance.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal
and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
* This quotation is from Samuel Beckett, not Sartre. We regret the error.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html
