Throw out the baby (Jesus) but keep the bathwater

In a recent Guardian book review, Richard Holloway considers Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Holloway notes that the picture of the universe that science presents “leaves some of us with a kind of resonant absence” (what Buddhist philosopher David Loy terms “lack”).

 Spufford, feeling an existential need for forgiveness, decides that (Holloway’s summary), “Christianity, with its doctrine of unconditional acceptance, makes emotional sense.” He doesn’t know if there is a god, but sometimes “can feel that there is one. And so it makes emotional sense to proceed as if he’s there.”

 One reason for Spufford’s gut-feeling flight to religion seems to be modern atheism’s tendency, in Holloway’s words, “to bundle up all expressions of religion in the same ugly blanket before throwing it off a cliff.” Spufford’s wish for forgiveness can’t be denied, but does it have to lead to “he,” she, or a chorus line of elephants with pink toenails?

 No, says Alain de Botton in Religion for Atheists. de Botton poses the question--blindingly obvious once asked--of why humans invented religions in the first place. He answers,

we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

 Taking many of his examples from Judaism and Christianity, de Botton shows how religion has skillfully scratched humanity’s itch for tenderness, kindness and forgiveness, while encouraging our better natures, through myth, ritual, prayer, architecture, art and education. He then—and this is the brilliance of the book--goes on suggest ways that we might satisfy these needs through often similar secular initiatives.

 de Botton thinks that current education is failing us by not teaching us how to live. He is one of the founders of The School of Life, a UK institution designed to fill that gap. Another founding faculty member, Roman Krznaric recently gave an interview in which he discusses the school.  

--Julian

Comments

[David]

Why on earth would we want to keep that noxious baby?

It’s undoubtedly true that some people feel the absence that Holloway discusses and that David Loy calls “lack,” but these people—many of them ex-Catholics, unsurprisingly—are simply nostalgic for the security that religion gave them back when they were credulous children. Apparently they have forgotten about the authoritarianism, sexism, sexual Puritanism, hatred of homosexuals, and other awfulness. Apparently they liked not having to do much thinking, because the religious authorities did it all for them, and thus absolved them from having to take responsibility for their moral decisions.

Spufford seems to think that it makes sense to try to recapture the security that religious fairy tales gave us—we don’t really die; sky gods can forgive us and make the bad things we do okay; there’s a ghost that lives inside our bodies that is who we really are; and on and on—because it makes “emotional sense.” Christians would call this “faith.” To take something on faith means to believe it not because there is evidence that it is true, but because it would be nice if it were true, or because it makes us feel good to imagine that we live in a world where it is true.
This kind of thinking, or rather, not thinking—believing whatever we want for no particular reason—gets us into all sorts of trouble. To offer just one glaring example, George W. Bush—an ardent Christian—felt that it made emotional sense to believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He felt that the abundant evidence that Iraq didn’t have WMD presented by Hans Blix and others was irrelevant: it didn’t make him feel good. I’m pretty sure Julian would agree with me that the world would be better off if George W. Bush had ignored his gut (perhaps an antacid would have helped?) and paid attention to the evidence.

De Botton apparently believes that even if we dispense with the sky god part of it, religion has been, and can still be, of use. He says it can help us live together harmoniously, and I guess he presents examples where he believes it has done so. It wouldn’t be hard, however, to think of hundreds of counter-examples, where people’s commitment to what makes emotional sense to them, to their faith, has lead to all sorts of horrors. If nothing else, religion always defines an in-group and an out-group, believers and non-believers, the saved and the damned, and that is not the best starting point for harmonious communal relations.

DeBotton goes on, Julian reports, to suggest that engaging in religious practices, even when we don’t believe in sky gods, somehow helps us overcome the setbacks life hands us. That is, we pray to nothing (though we know that even prayer by the sincerely religious is ineffective), enjoy religious fairy tales (and some of them are good stories), subject ourselves to religious education (without believing in the religious indoctrination that is at the core of religious education) in the hope that doing these silly things will somehow make us better able to cope with, say, the death of a loved one or the loss of a job.

No thanks. It’s time to throw out the baby, and the babyish feel-good “thought” that DeBotton, I guess, is advocating along with the smelly bathwater to which it is inextricably bound.

[Julian Bamford]

Holy moley. I didn’t mean to suggest that De Botton is talking up a religion shorn of a sky god but otherwise intact, with an ingroup and outgroup, saved and damned, and praying to nothing for comfort. What he does offer is a smorgasbord of suggestions for satisfying the needs once addressed by religion: choreographed communal meals as a way to turn strangers into friends; eloquent and repetitious, thus memorable, reminders of life’ virtues in school rather than church, and advertising billboards shilling kindness and forgiveness (“There is… wisdom in accepting that we are in most situations rather simple entities in want of much the same kind, firm, basic guidance as is naturally offered to children and domestic animals” (p. 77); secular meditation to address “our need to impose greater discipline on our inner lives” (p. 158); public bulletin boards to express our frustrations (“The gravest problems have no solutions, but it would help never again to have to labour under the illusion that we have been singled out for persecution” (p. 193); and on and on. Babyish and feel-good maybe, but I think way more useful than what we have now: a republican, hands-off, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps attitude to mental health in the general population.

[David]

Sorry to have misunderstood. That's what happens when I respond to something at third hand.

I'm probably still misunderstanding, but most of us, it seems to me, haven't thrown out any of the things that de Botton thinks we have.

If we want to meet new people over a communal meal we sit at the counter at our local izakaya or pub. The meetings aren't choreographed, but spontaneous, and all the more fun for that.

If we want to learn more about our similarities (and differences), or to be motivated to be more kind, we learn more about other people, perhaps by reading books, or perhaps simply by paying attention to the folks around us. These things are not simple, and are therefore unlikely to be adequately expressed on a billboard.

Of course if one wants to be treated "firmly," "like a child or an animal," maybe slogans, maxims, commandments, and the like are the way to go. Actually, the Catholic Church would be a perfect fit.

Myself, I'd prefer to be treated like an adult human being.

Likewise the best way to grasp that it is "[an] illusion that we have been singled out for persecution," is to absorb as many novels, movies, ethnographies, journalistic accounts, etc. of other people's lives. Most of us privileged first-worlders will quickly learn that not only haven't we been singled out for persecution, we've actually been fortunate enough to be born into lives that are, for the most part, pleasant.

I wish that dealing with mental health issues were as simple as putting snappy slogans on billboards, but I think I'd prefer a good health care system for people whose problems are severe, and for those of us less severely afflicted, those of us who might occasionally feel a bit blue, I would prescribe: beer, friendship, exercise, and nature.

And again, I'm responding to a book I haven't read, so I'm probably getting it wrong, but isn't de Boton advocating exactly the Republican, hands-off, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps approach as the Republicans? His sort program seems to me exactly what the Republicans are offering the general population (though often with baby still floating in religious bathwater): pull yourself up by your religious (or quasi-religious in de Botton's case) bootstraps, because the government sure isn't going to pony up any money for, say, psychiatric care?

[Julian Bamford]

There’s nothing in Religion for Atheists that makes me think its author would disagree with you that books can be salutary and pubs convivial. And that psychiatric problems may benefit from psychiatric care. So as not to further muddy the waters, I’ll let him speak: “Religions [are] repositories of a myriad ingenious concepts with which we can try to assuage a few of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life.” He “hopes to rescue some of what is beautiful, touching and wise from all that no longer seems true.” “It must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling—and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm.” “In a world beset by fundamentalists of both believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.” And his book convinced me that life would be richer for it.

[David]

I guess I quibble with what I take to be the author's assumption that practices such as enjoying a convivial meal at the counter at an izakaya, or learning enough about other people to believe in their pain, somehow derive from religious rituals and concepts. True, religious people may have done these things (and it's possible they did them because they were religious) but so what?

You can practice these things without any reference to religion—and people have been doing so for a long time. More to the point in the present discussion, you can, like de Botton, advocate these things, but do so without any reference to the faith of our fathers. What de Botton feels he adds by linking the life-affirming things human beings have been doing or trying to do forever with superstition and mythology is mysterious.

(And some of the practices, if I've understood them correctly, seem just silly, most of all the slogans on signs: banners strung across our roads reminding us to "KEEP ON THE SUNNY SIDE" or that "TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE," or encouraging us to "HAVE A NICE DAY!" don't seem to me quite as helpful as, I guess, they do to de Botton.)

My uncharitable (and probably unfounded) suspicion is that de Botton had an idea for a self-help book, but that since self-help books are intellectually rather down-market he figured he'd better graft on something to make it more intellectually respectable, and religion was the graft he hit upon. (His back catalog suggests that he's always fancied himself a bit of a philosopher.)

Now, because I've decided to revive the ancient religious custom of sharing bread with our fellow men and women, I'm off to make dinner for my wife.