Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  Whether or not God exists, belief in philosophical materialism leads not immediately, but within a generation or two, to consumerist materialism, or it is at least a contributing factor. If you believe not only that this life is all you have, but also that your life is not part of some spiritual ecology that nurtures your own life and is to some infinitely small degree influenced by your own life, then you are drawn towards a mindset where everything is justifiable in order to obtain the maximum pleasure for yourself out of this brief, unconnected worldly existence and in so doing you’re turning the pleasant greenness of our human world into a moral desert. Of course, many – probably most – atheists live moral lives. We are never consistent with our ideas. The pious are often the most “sinful”, if I can borrow a term they use. But the intellectual core of materialism is, I believe, affecting the way we relate to each other, and this is also true of many of those who claim to be religious in our societies. Capitalism likes materialism, because it is consistent with its unsubtle, linear, common-sense approach to life. In Europe this is the direction of travel. In North America and possibly in both the Americas, capitalism follows an extreme faith-based assertion of the self, which is often in direct contradiction of the religion it is supposed to represent. Both these extremes lead towards solipsism and an isolation of the self, which is damaging to the individual’s psychological health.

  If we can divide how we live from how we behave, then we should perhaps live as atheists and behave as believers in God. Or put more simply, we can forget about the afterlife, which is whatever it is, like all other natural phenomena, and we can at least entertain the possibility of God, understood as some kind of interconnection between all humanity or, as many argue, between all animal life, all organic things or even all things without exception. I have no idea, but by inclination or prejudice, I prefer the interconnection between all humanity, but I realise that modern science – particularly the discovery of DNA – suggests that humanity is not so unique. One thing is certain: our ideas on this subject are going to develop dramatically, and religions will inevitably have to adapt to these changes if they are to survive. In any case, we can no longer conceive humanity outside its dependency on its restricted environment.

  I don’t want to convert any atheists to religion – heaven forbid! – and I don’t want to convert any religious person to agnosticism. While I defend religion, I have little time for proselytising, an acceptable activity but one I always perceive as a form of bad manners. What I would like is more tolerance and less caricature, although some religious people do lend themselves to caricature, such as the UKIP official who claimed the floods in England resulted from God’s anger at the law introducing gay marriage. Once such idiocies only provoked mild jollity, but not now the threat of the various fundamentalisms appears to be more real.

  Tolerance does however have to be tolerant of history and tradition to some extent. I would not support a law banning Holocaust-denial except in Germany and Austria where such laws are entirely justifiable and in fact necessary. Irving initiated a court case in England and the process only served to reveal his dishonest methodology. The legal balance was correct for England, but that doesn’t mean that this balance should be respected everywhere. So it is with religious tolerance: the French republican tradition in public institutions may be acceptable, but only if it is applied to all religions with the same rigour. The problem is that categorising forms of dress as religious symbols is questionable. Consistency is essential in state tolerance, but the individual should apply a greater and more nuanced tolerance, adapting to situations and complexities. If someone commits an act of bigotry in a public institution, it cannot be tolerated, but in private encounters even in public places, greater tolerance is usually the best way to deal with it, and intolerance of that intolerance may be counterproductive. In any event, we should not equate religion with religious fundamentalism.

  I am not a particularly religious person, and whatever religiosity I have is personal and suited only to me. I am not a particularly selfless person, and am not therefore close to God. I have, though, a certain experience of this world and feel that I have encountered people close to God who are recognisable by their detachment from the self, and some of them have been members of a religion, some have been clergy (very few), some have been agnostics and some atheists. Labels, as ever, are not indicative of precise realities – not even the labels we apply to ourselves with a degree of self-knowledge. I am interested in religions perhaps for the same reason that I am even more interested in languages. They have been around me in their diversity, particularly during my childhood. I observe with horror the complete misrepresentation of the Islamic world, which has replaced communism as America’s favourite bete noire – communism apparently being no more.

  How then should I summarise my defence of religion? I think that my defence is not just to be found in this essay, but in all these essays. I argue against the idea that all things – politics, sport, culture and you name it – are forms of religions, which is a passing fashion amongst academics who illogically infer that similar social phenomena produced by religious and political organisations prove that religions and political movements are the same. All it proves is that they are both produced in human society. Political movements and religions are very different, and religions, which are concerned with eternity and eternal truths even though they are constantly changing them, are much more resilient than political movements. Is there a political movement that has survived two millennia like the Catholic Church? Religions survive principally because, while they are busying with eternity, it is often unclear what they are doing about the present, so they are less likely to be held to account and they claim to be above or outside politics. I also argue that in spite of themselves, politics and religion do permeate each other to some extent, and the influence of one on the other is more cultural than anything else. I argue in these essays for the primacy of politics – in particular class politics, but religion is important to politics and also to itself – that is to say that it has its own aims, and some of which affect us while others don’t. There are signs that as the crisis starts to bite, the major religions are going to play a more significant but still secondary role in affecting political developments, and this may assist in increasing social responsibility, which would be helpful for the left. The shift is from pronouncements on matters of personal morality as interpreted by the churches to ones on public morality. Leading clerics are usually wise enough to restrict the number of times they join in public debate, and their influence is often exaggerated. So the private religious functions of religions are precisely that, and are not the business of anyone else. Their public ones, which they have a right to exercise anyway, are probably going to tend towards the “progressive” in the near future, if I may use an irritatingly vague adjective, but public religious pronouncements usually are a little vague. Religions are not the threat they once were – from the religious wars of the sixteenth century through to the mass religious bigotry of the first half of the twentieth century, and much bigotry along the way. There is the nightmare of the so-called clash of civilisations between the incredibly similar religions of Christianity and Islam. This is not however an interference of religion in politics, but an interference of politics in religion.

  We still have a margin of freedom in our conformist Western societies. I don’t say that these are wholly free societies: there is no absolute rule of law, there is corruption, there is surveillance and there is abuse of power, particularly against minorities and most particularly against black people. I know from my experience as a shop steward in the seventies that private companies used to issue death threats against trade unionists, and I would be surprised if things have improved since then. But there is also a lot of space for invention that simply isn’t being made use of. Partly this is because our regime seems very secure to us, the powerless, while the powerful, quite aware of the instability in the system, are intent on reducing our powers befor
e they carry through structural changes that will undo everything we have gained over the last hundred years. Partly this is because we are wedded to the consumer society and feel we could not survive without its tasteless, anodyne, sometimes quite unnecessary and, more rarely, toxic bounty. Partly this is because we have finally allowed a wholly materialist philosophy, invented over a century ago with some very positive initial effects, to implant itself so deeply in our consciousness that we have become not so much atheists or humanists, as pagans – not the distant pagans of hunter-gatherer societies, who may or may not have been noble savages, but the near pagans of early classical times: the religion of success, fame, celebrity and above all the sacralised self – what we might call the “because-I’m-worth-it” society. And worth, here, is most definitely a monetary quantity.

  We are not living in the Soviet Union under Stalin or the United States under McCarthyism, which was a much more widespread repression than is generally admitted. If people in those societies could continue to write and challenge their regimes in various ways, we have no excuse for remaining silent, and many do not. But too many are living like automatons, driven by financial needs – not always necessary ones – and a consumerist culture that judges people on their ability to consume. I am not saying everyone should rush out to the church, mosque or synagogue. I am not saying that to act independently and challenge the status quo, you have to be religious. What I am saying is that for many people, religion is a useful way to get out of that sense of being powerless and trapped in a self whose desires can never be fulfilled. About a decade ago, Caspar Melville, the editor of The New Humanist and therefore no friend of religion, interviewed a group of black converts to Islam and found that religion gave them a sense of belonging and being in control of their own lives. But quite often conversions can lead to fanaticism; I’m suggesting something even gentler: an awareness of something beyond ourselves, which does not have to be dressed up in religion, but if that makes it easier, then there should be no objection. Equally, if people wish to believe that this will store up a place in heaven, then there may be no harm to the public good in that either. A sensitivity to the world beyond the self, which we might define as a belief in God, is something that brings a reward in this life. It makes it easier to engage politically, socially, emotionally, creatively and perhaps spiritually with the world around us. It takes us back to Martin Buber, I think.

  To my mind, education is more important than religious sensitivity, but that is much less controversial. Perhaps religion is also now less controversial than it was when Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens wrote their fierce attacks on it,3 and that is why this is a much less ambitious work than the one I originally planned at the time.

  One of the most potent arguments used by such critics of religion is that religion leads to bitter inter-communal strife, and this cannot be denied, although often perpetrators of such violence are not particularly religious. In many ways, it is no different from the conflicts between language communities, ethnic groups, and all the other identities some people cling to. There is however another division, more subtle and less catastrophic than the inter-communal one, but damaging to the individual nonetheless.

  Religion can lead to separation from society. The pious wish to keep away from the “sinners”, and this is often found amongst the founders of religions and religious organisations. George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends (or Quakers), went to the tavern with a cousin and some others to have a drink. But one round did not suffice, and they called for more, saying that whoever did not drink would have to pay for them all. Fox was shocked by this behaviour, so he paid and left, resolving to leave his family and never to be familiar or friendly with young or old. While he was overreacting, the Lord spoke to him, “Thou seest how young people go together into vanity and old people into the earth; and thou must forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be as a stranger unto all.”4 To my mind, he should have got back down to the tavern, where life was. As a young man, he wouldn’t learn anything from the constant companionship of himself and his piety. And I don’t think that God speaks to anyone. Apart from the assumptions this makes about the nature of God, who through the two-way dialogue becomes a personal protector of the elected person, the very contradictory orders that God is supposed to have given betray a voice that is surely generated in the mind of the listener.

  As I think that the Quakers’ religion is one of the best, this episode says more about founders than adherents. I would like to balance that quote with another, which in my opinion shows great wisdom. It is William Penn on the unity of all religions:

  The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here makes them strangers. This world is form; our bodies are forms; and no visible acts of devotion can be without forms. But yet the less form in the religion the better, since God is a spirit; for the more mental our worship, the more adequate to the nature of God; the more silent, the more suitable to the language of a Spirit.5

  Perhaps he is right about form, but personally I like it. I have no interest in participating in it, but I enjoy the fact that it exists and that people get something from it. Above all, I enjoy their variety and feel that, like art, they add something to our understanding of the world. It is sad that the Yezudis, whose faith is a syncretic mix of Christianity and Islam with a strong emphasis on baptism, have been driven from their Iraqi homeland as a result of the reckless Anglo-American invasion, but it’s good that many of them have found refuge in Sweden where, in the absence of a warm river like the Tigris, they have to baptise themselves in a warm bath. They put on long-flowing white robes, similar to the ones Muslims wear at the Mosque during Ramadan, and immerse themselves in the warm water while saying their prayers. There is no end to the ways that human beings can express their religious sentiments, but in the end they are all saying the same thing: there is a better way to live beyond self-interest, and we find significance and dignity in helping one another. It is true that this shared core is surrounded by innumerable accretions, often of bizarrely minor differences, which divide people and lead to violence, such as the persecution of the Old Believers who crossed themselves with three fingers rather than two.

  My arguments and my own unpleasantness are best summed up by a conversation I had with a religious zealot. I had gone to hear Professor Mona Siddiqui at a public event. She gave an interesting talk on Islam which was marred by the presence of Christian zealots who had packed the meeting with the express purpose of verbally attacking the speaker and her religion. Not that Siddiqi seemed particularly bothered. Perhaps she had encountered such people before. I hadn’t, but they did vaguely remind me of the American Sparticist League.6 Afterwards a fierce woman marched towards me, and I could feel her anger even before she spoke. I must have said something in defence of Islam, and this had caused great hurt.

  “Are you a Christian,” she asked.

  I knew this to be an awkward question. I was certainly not a Christian as she was, but clearly a negative answer was going to trigger an avalanche of moralistic opprobrium.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A born-again Christian?”

  “No,” I replied emphatically.

  “How very clever of you! How did you manage that?” She made no attempt to disguise her sarcasm, lest I had any doubt.

  “By having Christian parents. Not very devout ones, it’s true, but they considered themselves to be Christians.”

  “And that’s all you need to be a Christian?”

  “No, you can also convert. But if my parents had been Muslims, I would have been a Muslim too. That’s generally how it works. You can reject a religion, but its cultural imprint remains.”

  There followed a heated dialogue of the deaf. She was so angry that I found it easy to appear calm, even though her ignorance and bigotry riled me. Eventually I sai
d, “Well, I don’t want us all to be of the same religion.”

  “And I do!”

  “That, I’m afraid, is the road that leads to Auschwitz.”

  There was something wrong in my reply, although it held an undoubted truth. The road leads somewhere, but it is not always followed the whole way. She looked hurt and left like scalded cat. I doubt that what I said dented her certainties, so it was foolish to engage in that conversation, and I was sorry to have offended her.

  If, however, I lived in the United States, where atheists are a discriminated minority, this essay would have been called “A Defence of Atheism”, and that conversation would have appeared at the beginning, not the end. All these religions and all these philosophies (including atheism) have their share of truth and their patent untruths. If they are treated in a measured fashion, they can be a useful part of our cultures. But I live in Europe, and most people I meet are atheists. Occasionally we argue on this point, and they are much politer than the zealot was but no less prejudiced. Their reaction is one of surprise and you can see them quietly placing you in the religious nutter category as soon as you fail to agree with their simple narrative. If they have any doubts, they would never express them, because the associations are so deeply entrenched.

  Can we deny with absolute certainty that the decline of religion has not damaged some of the core values that hold society together? We cannot assert it with absolute certainty either, but we should at least admit to the possibility. I wrote a novel that was a modern reversal of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass principally because I thought that the post-Christian West may be returning to classical paganism. Apuleius was a rich and powerful patron of gladiatorial games, and his book was an ancient literary precursor of the video nasty. His morality was stark and nasty too: failure is contagious, so no one should help anybody who has fallen on hard times, even if they were once a close friend; the important thing is not to be found out, and if you aren’t, what you did is of no importance; finally it is necessary to project an image of success onto society (by, for instance, organising gladiatorial games) and this helps you to increase your success. This looked remarkably familiar in the late eighties when I wrote the book, and still does.