We began reflecting upon our times with a reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. At a distance of half a century since it first made an impact upon the imagination of its readers, it still seems the most powerful work of fiction of its age. In the last decade or so, the only book which rivals it in power and imaginative range is Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. It begins with one of the central myths of our times, the disappearing child. This motif from the World of Faerie returned over and over again in the news reports of the last half-century. Folklore throughout the world, and throughout history, has externalised the fear of losing children by making them vulnerable to the witches, Little Folk, merfolk or gods who might apprehend them, take them for seven years, sometimes for ever. In the comparatively debased form which these stories take in newspapers, the predators are always paedophiles. These figures, who at the beginning of our times were regarded as a sinister joke, especially by children themselves, who knew that there were ‘strange men’ to whom it was unsafe to speak, became–after such horrors as the Moors murders–truly nightmarish projections. The paedophile was the embodiment of everything which our society took to be evil, matched only by the racist.
Every time the newspaper told the story of a disappearing child, the bucket was lowered into the well, stirring primitive responses which have been there since our fear of separation from our parents turned into Hansel and Gretel being kidnapped in the woods, or the ‘little men’ who stole Bridget for seven years long. Philip Pullman’s trilogy began with such a theme. Children all over England are being taken by a sinister group popularly called the Gobblers–at heart, as we slowly discover, an ecclesiastical body called the General Oblation Board.
The adventures of Lyra Belacqua, the little girl allowed to grow up as a ragamuffin in a superbly archaic Oxford college, compose a rich narrative. The story takes her to the North, in the company of Gyptians–gypsy bargees whom she has befriended in Oxford–an armoured bear, an American adventurer in a hot-air balloon who seems to have flown in from the pages of Jules Verne, and some superbly sexy witches.
A central conceit to the whole myth is that fully rounded human beings have an alter ego, or soul, which is called a ‘daemon’, pronounced demon. When we are children, these daemons are constantly changing. Lyra, the heroine of the story, has a daemon called Pantalaimon. He takes many beautiful forms–a cat, a butterfly, a rat, a goldfinch–but he is always part of her. Grown-ups have fixed daemon forms. Pullman’s daemon idea was suggestive of many deep thoughts, both about human souls and about our relationship with animals. The daemon is like a soul. The bears do not have them, a fact which increases our sense of their sturdy, northern sadness. In the first volume of the trilogy, it does not become entirely clear why the Gobblers are grabbing the children. But Lyra discovers this much. When they catch the children and take them to the northern laboratory, they separate them from their daemons. They want to get their hands on elementary particles, called simply ‘dust’ in that universe. Puberty, when your daemon becomes fixed, is also the time when your relationship with dust alters. Dust gives power.
Pullman’s guiding genius is William Blake, and the General Oblation Board–the masterminds of the Gobblers–corresponds to the ‘priests in black gowns’ who bind with briars our joys and desires.
There is real Blakean lyricism in the wonderful descriptions of the Northern Lights. And the ragamuffin children of the Oxford bargees, and Lyra herself, at large in a Gormenghast version of an Oxford college, are essentially innocents; their ‘daemons’ are not sin-drenched burdens as for St Augustine, but instruments of light and joy. But though Pullman, like Blake, reworked Milton, and his angelology, in the service of his own mythological view of things, he did so in a spirit which was reflective of his age. And this is what marks Pullman off from Tolkien.
Tolkien’s assembly of myth was a massive, tragic, dark bulwark against the spirit of the age. He saw the past itself, with all its heroism and all its mythology, being obliterated by the modern. Although a religious man himself, he buried overt religious reference in the myth, which is about wider and older themes than those which separate Homer from the Christian world.
For Pullman, however, as for so many liberals at the end of our times, religion was seen as a deadly force, an enslaver of the human spirit which has risen up as a surprise monster to threaten democracy and freedom, just when we might have hoped to have seen the end of superstition. A lesser myth-maker than Tolkien, Pullman cannot resist intruding into his story the views of any contemporary liberal newspaper columnist into a tale which seems everlastingly trying to be bigger than its author’s narrow views. Hence, as the story goes on, its collapse into incoherence.
For example, at the beginning of the story we learn that no one in Lyra’s universe can be separated from their daemon, an embodiment of soul which usually takes the form of an animal. But in the Virgilian journey to the world of the dead, undertaken by Will and Lyra in volume three, Lyra does leave her daemon behind, much to her and his sorrow. Then again, the whole book is posited on the notion that the Authority (God) does not exist; but we then see the poor old Authority, a doddering, decrepit old creature being borne aloft on a bier–a sort of Titurel from Parsifal. We seem to have strayed here from the Victorian atheism which underpinned volume one to the ‘Death of God’ theology of the 1960s. There are wonderful things in Pullman’s story–the angels on both sides of the war, or tiny spy-creatures, the Gallivespians, who ride on dragonflies; a splendid American hot-air balloonist; old Oxford bargees (the Gyptians); and the ever-beguiling Mrs Coulter, Lyra’s mother, who starts as a wicked society hostess, secretly working for the church, and ends as a much more complicated figure, shaken by true maternal feeling into joining forces against religion.
Mrs Coulter’s reignited passion for Lord Asriel is matched by the truly touching love between Lyra and Will, who, because they belong to different universes, are obliged in the end to part. There were no novels written in English in the last decade of our times to match this one for range, depth and passion. Yet future generations will surely see it not merely as a great, if flawed, work of the imagination, but also as an expression of contemporary liberal angst about the growth of religious fundamentalism.
From a Western European perspective, there is surely something paradoxical in this, since throughout the half-century which we have considered in this book, the institutional Churches, and especially the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, have declined in numbers and influence. This has not been true, however, of religion when taken as a whole and viewed from a global perspective. Seen from a narrowly British perspective, Pullman might be thought to have chosen an odd moment to make the General Oblation Board, a sort of malign General Synod, into an instrument of terror. Not since St Augustine arrived in Kent in the late sixth century had the Church exercised less influence, for good or ill, upon the juvenile minds of the archipelago. Yet perhaps for this very reason, precisely because modern Europeans had become so secularised, the religious resurgence in our times seemed so alarming to the liberal mind.
‘Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty’, wrote President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran in an open letter to President George W. Bush in 2007. Similar words had been spoken by Dr Billy Graham during his missionary journey to London in 1954. The difference is that, in those days, very few influential or intelligent people, even if themselves adherents to a religion, would have found the words credible. In Britain, as in Western Europe, institutional Christianity rapidly evaporated. The numbers of practising Catholics and Anglicans was halved. Secularism was rampant. But to take a wider global viewpoint, as our times rolled onward into other times, the President of Iran’s words were self-evidently true. When, in the early 1950s, Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, one of the greatest English novelists of our times, heard that her friend Rose Macaulay had reverted to the habit of churchgoing, she expressed her exasperation, ‘when for a lifetime she had been a perfectly sound agnostic, like everybody else’. It was something which puzzled many a liberal secularist in the opening decade of the twenty-first century who contemplated the religious frenzy which possessed the globe. Tony Blair had been a preacher on a tank.1 His successor as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the son of the manse, quoted the Gospels in his first speech as Prime Minister to the Labour Party Conference. George Dubya was a born-again Christian. Unlike previous American Presidents, who saw their principal adversary as godless Marxism, Bush’s greatest enemies were Islamists, who turned to Mecca in prayer as often as he clumsily thumbed the Epistles of St Paul. In Nigeria, where between 1990 and 2007,20,000 people were killed in conflicts between Muslims and Christians, the Evangelical Church of West Africa doubled in number over the same period.
In Burma, the chief opposition to the repressive regime of Lt General Soe Win was led by Buddhist monks. In Guatemala, Pentecostals built the largest building in Central America, the 12,000-seater church of Mega Frater, which was not named, we must presume, in playful allusion to Orwell. The Yoido Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, boasted 830,000 members, a number which was growing, in 2007, at a rate of 3,000 per month. The number of Christians in China grew from 10 million in 1900 to 400 million in 2000–and rising. In Russia, following the collapse of communism, not only were all the churches full on Sundays, but the monasteries and convents which had been so mercilessly destroyed by Lenin were rebuilt and bursting with aspirant monks and nuns. The proportion of people attached to the world’s four biggest religions–Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism–rose from 67 percent in 1900 to 73 percent in 2005, and according to the prognostications of The Economist, looked set to rise to 80 percent in 2050.2
Was this what it had all been leading up to, as the intelligent sons and daughters of the Enlightenment tried to rebuild the world ruined by the mid-twentieth-century clash of European ideologies? The heirs of Bloomsbury had assumed that theology would vanish with the extension of education. Bertrand Russell’s atheism had taught two generations to think as he did. A. J. Ayer’s dismissal of religious questions as meaningless had been as apparently devastating as his tutor Gilbert Ryle’s dismissal of God Himself as a category mistake. The Church of England had done its bit to spread Enlightenment, with a Bishop of Woolwich in the 1960s trying to be Honest to a God in whom he could scarcely believe, and a Bishop of Durham in the 1980s wondering whether the Resurrection itself had been anything more remarkable than ‘a conjuring trick with bones’. The Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, had surely taken matters to their logical conclusion when, having mused on the ebb tide of The Sea of Faith, he wrote a book with the candid title Taking Leave of God. British primary schools were no longer teaching the children Bible stories but were giving them hazy versions of comparative religion, so that rather than having their heads filled with wonders which they would later dismiss as fables–Moses and the Burning Bush or Christ Walking on the Water–these progressive tots knew about Diwali and Ramadan and Yom Kippur, and, it could be hoped, by the kindly minded educational theorists, develop into mature beings who had the vague sense that religions, no more than social constructs, were phenomena out of which human beings progressed, when they came to learn about science. With no common mythology, they could learn to put their trust in the integrity of relationships, in intellectual sincerity, in respect for one another’s differences. What else was religion, but, in the words of one of the most eloquent poems of our times:
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die?3
After half a century of ‘perfectly sound agnosticism’, it must have been galling, and worse than galling, for those who believed that human beings could simply be taught not to be religious, to watch the innumerable pairs of sandals and trainers cast off at the doors of mosques in every big British city, and to hear the jaunty strains of ‘Sing Hosanna!’ or ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ drifting from the packed doors of evangelical churches. No wonder some of the perfectly sound agnostics felt beleaguered, and, like religious people when beleaguered, began to say and write things which were no longer sensible.
The long-running British television series Doctor Who was a popular illustration of how science fiction provided an alternative metaphysic, comparable to, though not a substitute for, religious mythology. Dr Who was a Time Lord travelling through time and space in his Tardis (‘Time And Relative Dimension in Space’) which had the reassuring outward appearance of a police telephone box. These boxes became obsolete in reality so that the Doctor, by the time he was once again thrilling audiences in the early 2000s, had a dated rather than timeless quality whenever he fetched up on the planet earth. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was played by an agreeably toothy actor called Tom Baker whose long face somewhat resembled that of the polymathic opera director Dr Jonathan Miller and whose long woolly scarves gave him the appearance of a fun-loving lecturer at one of the new universities which had sprung up in the real-life Britain of the period. At one stage his companion on his journeys in the Tardis was the Time Lady Romana, played by the Honourable Sarah Ward, daughter of the 7th Viscount Bangor. (Half)-sister-in-law of the biographer Sarah Bradford, she acted under the name Lalla Ward. Dr Who was not unlike a crude version of Christ, immortal yet apparently wholly human, who visited the planet to overcome evil. Baker and Lalla appeared in a number of adventures together, including Destiny of the Daleks, City of Death and State of Decay. The pair married for sixteen months, but separated, and it was at the fortieth birthday party of the science fiction writer Douglas Adams that she was introduced to a strikingly handsome and amusing biology don, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, named Dr Richard Dawkins. The same year Lalla and Dawkins were married.4
Dr Who had been fearless in his war on monsters, his most popular adversaries with television audiences being the Daleks, metallic dustbins covered in flashing lights who rolled along on castors pointing something like sink plungers at their victims with the throaty, agitated cry of ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’
Dr Dawkins was to become even more famous than Dr Who. He was one of the most successful popularisers of scientific ideas, occupying a position in our times comparable to that of Thomas Huxley in the time of Darwin, and, like Huxley, consumed not only with a zeal for scientific knowledge but also for the denunciation of superstition. In such elegant monographs as The Selfish Gene, The River of Life and The Blind Watchmaker, he explained the working of Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of the species by natural selection, while never hesitating to point out that Darwin’s theories, confirmed by twentieth-century discoveries about genetics, obviated the need for the mechanistic ‘creator’ envisaged by the cruder Deist philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He devoted much of his intellectual energy, during his prime, to the demolition of such obsolete theological writers as Archdeacon Paley (1743–1805), whose View of the Evidences of Christianity defended a mechanistic idea of creation, owing more to Leibniz than to the Bible or the Church Fathers. Dawkins wrote as if he was unaware of the existence of William James (1842–1910), the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist who had concluded that Leibniz’s God was ‘a disease of the philosophy shop’.5 James had a tentative belief in God, based on the widespread evidence that human beings had religious experiences. Whereas Dawkins preferred to concentrate on the nonsensical things which some religious people had written or said, and enjoyed seeking out proponents of intolerant and ugly theological points of view, James had pointed to the many cases where prayer or the awareness of God’s presence appeared to bring courage, calm, a sense of wellbeing and an urge to be kinder.6 (His brother Henry, an agnostic, had written in his notebooks, the sentence Be kind, be kind, be kind.)
A book which showed Dawkins at his most attractive and articulate was a volume of essays entitled A Devil’s Chaplain. It contains a celebration of a great science teacher Frederick William Sanderson (1857–1922), who had been headmaster of Oundle School a generation or two before Dawkins himself picked up his infectious enthusiasm for science at the same establishment. It is a joyous essay, which celebrates the pleasures and duties of intellectual knowledge. Sanderson directed that the laboratories be left unlocked so that boys could go in at any time and work on their research projects. Dawkins longed for an educational system which, rather than making students cram for exams, inspired them with a thirst for knowledge, a passion for truth. Sanderson was an inspiration both in his own enthusiasm for science and in his ability to communicate it to others. Dawkins himself had this wonderful ability.
In the essay he quoted quite extensively from Sanderson’s sermons in Oundle School chapel. One such paragraph summons up a cloud of scientific witness–‘Mighty men of science and mighty deeds. A Newton who binds the universe together in uniform law; Lagrange, Laplace, Leibniz in their wondrous mathematical harmonies.’ And on the catalogue goes. Not surprisingly, Dawkins shortens the quotation a little and indicates his omissions in the traditional manner by the occasional…
There must have been readers of A Devil’s Chaplain who felt tempted to turn from this essay to the compilation Sanderson of Oundle, put together by his grateful pupils. There they would have found the catalogue of great scientists, quoted by Dawkins–Faraday, Ohm, Ampère, Joule, Maxwell, Hertz, Röntgen. The words not quoted by Dawkins are that these scientists are ‘all, we may be sure, living daily in the presence of God, bending like the reed before His will’.7
Nor did Dawkins quote Sanderson when he told the boys, ‘We perish if we cease from prayer. Of course, true, earnest helpful prayer is difficult. It is difficult to fix the attention, difficult to know what to pray for, what to pray about. Perhaps the best way is to meditate with a notebook.’8
Sanderson the inspirational science teacher exclaimed, ‘Thou, O God, dost reveal thyself in all the multitude of Thy works, in the workshop, the factory, the mine, the laboratory, in industrial life. No symbolism here, but the Divine God.’9 The ‘biological purpose of man’, thought Sanderson, was, ‘to bring and maintain order out of the tangle of things; he is to diagnose diseases; he is to co-ordinate the forces of nature; he is above all things to reveal the spirit of God in all the works of God.’ And education? ‘The business of schools is through and by the use of a common service to get at the true spiritual nature of the ordinary things we have to deal with.’10
Some would consider it dishonest of Dawkins to have omitted these sayings in the account of his hero. Obviously, what Dawkins admired in Sanderson (the communicated enthusiasm for science) would have been admirable whether or not he himself shared the religious beliefs. But no one would guess from the account in A Devil’s Chaplain that religious belief underlay all Sanderson’s wonder at scientific discovery and all his faith in the curiosity, resourcefulness and healing creativity of human beings. ‘Individuals are not hard Newtonian molecules. Individuals are like atoms under radium. The life within a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, is the most powerful, vital, complex, energetic thing there is. It cannot be treated as a “hard” molecule any longer. There are vast stores of energies to be liberated.’11
It was clear from Dawkins’s animated, handsome face, and from his laugh, and even from the arrogant contempt which fell from his lips or pen in anger that he did not believe, any more than had Sanderson, that human beings were hard Newtonian molecules. Ethical statements, denunciations of intellectual immorality, passion for liberty, animated much of Dawkins’s rhetoric. In his accounts of life on earth, however, and his expositions of how natural selection operates, he never revealed by so much as a syllable that he considered himself, and other sentient beings, to be mysterious. Nor did he ever ask the question which had puzzled mankind at least as long ago as the pre-Socratics: what is Being itself? When we see, say, observe that we, or the Universe, are, rather than are not–what is it that we are saying? Instead, when he turned from the excellent explanations of science, which were his métier, to the area of metaphysical inquiry, Dawkins often gave the impression that these deep questions were scientific speculations about, say, the origin of the universe, or the origin of species. He answered What? questions with How? answers. What is Man that thou art mindful of him? was not a question which ever seems to have troubled him. What Wordsworth in The Prelude called ‘a dark/Invisible workmanship’ at work in each of us was central to the life-view of Sanderson of Oundle but apparently absent from that of Dawkins.
But so was it absent, apparently, from those ‘fundamentalists’ whom Dawkins attacked with such Huxleyian zeal. This is even odder. Readers of Dawkins’s bestseller The God Delusion will find that his bullets reach a bull’s-eye not when he is attacking what he understands as religion, but when he is demolishing those who themselves believe in the ‘religions’ he lambasts. In Emmanuel College, Gateshead, for instance, one of the ‘city academies’ set up by Tony Blair for promoting higher intellectual standards, Dawkins found an object worthy of his scorn. The school was endowed by Sir Peter Vardy, a car salesman whose life had been changed by the combination of becoming a very rich man and conversion to neo-con American-style evangelicalism. It was Andrew Brown, the Independent’s first religious affairs correspondent, who had drawn attention to a lecture given at the school on ‘The Teaching of Science: A Biblical Perspective’ in which the speaker, the head of science in the school, spoke about the legendary narratives in Genesis as if they were texts of a different order. Defence of the historicity of Noah’s Flood–a global catastrophe which took place ‘in the relatively recent past’–appear, from Dawkins’s quotations in The God Delusion, to be only part of a story which includes assertions from the science teacher that the earth itself–contrary to all evidence from geology and palaeontology–is also of recent origin.
Disputes between ‘fundamentalists’ or their subtler co-partners the ‘creationists’ and the debunking materialists became commoner in our times as year succeeded year and not, as might have been predicted, less common. Matters which some observers might have been thought settled for good and all by Stanley Kramer’s film Inherit the Wind, of 1960, were more of a live issue than ever in the year 2008, both in the US and in Britain. In that film Spencer Tracy played the role of a hard-bitten lawyer coming to a Southern town to defend a schoolmaster accused of teaching Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the so-called monkey trials of 1925. Maybe in 1960 the Southern backwoodsmen who professed themselves outraged by a young teacher’s scientific honesty seemed like historical freaks. Kramer’s film celebrates the passion for truth and justice which the Spencer Tracy character exemplifies. But there is more than a hint of patronage and swagger in the portrayal of the hayseed-sprinkled hicks who actually believe in old-style religion. Kipling bid the Christians
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakara
They did not heed his advice. Nor did the modern unbelievers display gentleness to the believers. The ‘debate’ which became louder and uglier as the twenty-first century unrolled, was not really a debate: more a species of trench warfare in which one side, only semi-visible to the other, hurled verbal abuse and occasional threats of actual violence. Dawkins quoted some of these poor crazies with evident relish in his book–such letters as this addressed to the author and director Brian Flemming, whose film The God Who Wasn’t There had clearly hurt:
You’ve definitely got some nerve. I’d love to take a knife, gut you fools, and scream with joy as your insides spill out in front of you. You are attempting to ignite a holy war in which some day I, and others like me, may have the pleasure of taking action like the above mentioned. However GOD teaches us not to seek vengeance, but to pray for those like you all.12
It is a happy accident that the English word pray (from Middle English preien, old French preier (Latin precari) should be a homophone for prey–(from Middle English preye, Old French preie, Latin praeda, booty). The Christian Bible itself ends with the alarming series of visions known as The Apocalypse in which all those of a different persuasion from the seer are made to perish everlastingly in a burning lake, and in which civilisation itself, the day-to-day life of the civis, is deemed to be in itself sinful (see especially the XVIIIth chapter of the Revelation of St John the Divine which exults over the desolation and fall of Babylon the Great): ‘And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth her merchandise any more: the merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet…’. A great catalogue. So must the disciples of Osama bin Laden have exulted when they watched the mass murder of office workers in New York and imagined that they beheld the vengeance of the Almighty upon the unjust city.
Those who studied the alarming, and profoundly uncongenial fundamentalism of our times were bound to investigate the source and origin of all this violence and hatred. The ardent secularists took the view that religion was itself the poison from which the human race needed to be cleansed. While having some fun at the expense of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Christopher Hitchens concluded in his diatribe that religion ‘poisons everything’. ‘What we’–the non-believers–‘respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake,’ he claimed. He called for a ‘new enlightenment’ which believed that ‘the proper study of mankind is man, and woman’. He had little to say about the Anglican monks who had spearheaded resistance to apartheid in the 1950s, or about the phenomenon of the Peace and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa when apartheid came to an end and Christians led by Archbishop Tuto steered that country to majority rule without bloodshed. Nor did the Peace Now movement in Israel in which religious Jews played a striking role move him to moderate his tone, nor the Peace Movement in Northern Ireland, which was the impulse of practising Christians trying to build understanding in a community wrecked by the activities of neo-Marxist gangsters. The resistance to Hitler by Confessing Christians such as Pastor Bonhoeffer or the defence of Human Rights in Latin and Central America by heroic figures such as Archbishop Romeiro were conveniently passed by, as was the lifetime’s witness for peace of the Dalai Lama or resistance to tyranny by the Buddhist monks of Burma. Nor were the works of aid agencies such as Christian Aid or CAFOD allowed to interfere with the argument that those who said their prayers were filling their minds, and presumably those whom they helped in famine and disaster, with poison. God, for Hitchens, was a Santa Claus–style invention, religion the cause of hatred and conflict in the world, the tool by which such evils as misogyny, child abuse and brainwashing kept the human race in the Dark Ages.13
If the first premises were accepted, that religion causes such abuses of human power as Al Qa’eda, or the Spanish Inquisition, who could have not sided with Hitchens and those who believed in ‘open-mindedness for its own sake’? But what if he was using language lazily? What if by saying religion causes enslavement he was making a syntactical utterance of the same order as ‘War causes nuclear weapons’? Human beings will always wish to exercise power over one another, and the invention of a ‘Santa Claus’ who shared all the xenophobic or misanthropic prejudices of the (usually collective) inventors was indeed toxic. It was unsurprising that the anti-Godders took this view of religious origin at a period in history when they had about them so many examples of those deluded by religious hatred. Hitchens’s need to enlist Mother Teresa in the same brigade of murderous maniacs as Osama bin Laden, however, was revealing, as was Dawkins’s suppression of the religious foundation of a great science teacher’s ideas.
It would be frivolous to have denied that the anti-Godders had alerted their contemporaries, if such alert were needed, to a poison deadly indeed. Whether one considered the mental processes of the religious right in America, or of the radicalised Islam, or of the enraged Buddhists of Sri Lanka, or of the anti-Islamist Hindu nationalists in India, it was impossible to ignore the fact that religion appeared to be at the heart of very many of the world’s most intractable political problems. Far from providing peaceable solutions to these problems, religion appeared to be the problem. One could indeed go the whole way with the anti-Godders–religion was the problem–if, a very big if, religion connotes the closed mind, the implacable will, the ability to swallow nonsense and justify murder and suppression in the name of an invented Deity.
The scientific work before the world is to co-ordinate, to harness the radio-active souls of men, just as we have to harness the energy of the atom. This is the stupendous work for which you boys are to be prepared: in the existence and needs of which you have to believe.
And for this the centre of gravity must be changed. The viewpoint must be changed. Astronomy was once looked at from the earth as the fixed centre of vision. Through much conflict and many persecutions the viewpoint was changed to the sun–the sun a fixed star. Then the sun began moving. It is now changed to an ‘atom’, shall we call it, of light, moving with the velocity of 186,000 miles per second. And the new things must be viewed from that moving chariot of light…
A new vision. A new Horeb and Sinai. A new Mount of Transfiguration. ‘And after three days He took with Him His disciples, Peter, James and John, and went into a mount and was transfigured before them.’ So, too, if we are to see a new world arise out of this conflict and strife, we also must go up into the mount–the new mount of vision.
See, boys, that you make it after the pattern which hath been shown you on the Mount.14
The attitude of that kindly liberal Protestant headmaster towards science was very decidedly not that of any of the popular defenders of what might be called a scientific viewpoint from the middle of the twentieth to the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Karl Popper has been mentioned as the advocate of an open society and the identifier of its enemies. He did not invent the open society. It has come about as a result of a number of factors, chief of which is economic growth. Popper was also concerned with the philosophy of science and in the more difficult area of trying to establish the objective truth of scientific statements. He tried to wrench the subjective element out of traditional epistemology which must always lead to the logical scepticism of Berkeley and Hume. (If your sole criterion is your own sense-perceptions, you cannot be said to know the laws of thermodynamics.) Popper, however, was as unable as anyone else has ever been to establish any criterion by which we could be said to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that any statement, whether made by a scientist or not, is true.
The modern idolatry offered to ‘scientific truth’ goes back far beyond our times to the late seventeenth century, when the Cartesian philosophy threatened the very notion of objective knowledge. Unbelief in God began at this time, as did the deist conception of God–the idea of God as an inventor or mechanic who established the laws of nature and then retired to allow the universe to run itself. The pathetic need for certainty, in a world of unalterable, impersonal laws, led to the development of the ‘scientific outlook’, the need to claim that some concepts or objects were beyond dispute, were verifiable or falsifiable by some means other than sense-impression, so that they might be accepted as universal truths. From this superstition–the idea of ‘science’ being the sole arbiter of the verifiability of statements–sprang the slow death of religion(s). This was not, as scientists such as Thomas Huxley supposed, because scientific facts had been presented which disproved religious claims. It was because the human notion of truth had altered, and Christianity disastrously reacted by adopting the ‘scientific’ or ‘materialist’ outlook. Christians began to defend the Bible and its stories as if they were works of ‘history’ or ‘science’. In so doing, whole generations of men and women, whether or not they believed in God any more, were seduced into thinking that these matters could be decided by ‘scientific’ investigation. Hence the truly ludicrous spectacle in our times of clever journalists or popularisers of Darwin thinking to set themselves up against the deep wisdom which had produced the Upanishads or the Book of Psalms or the works of Pythagoras.
A belief in ‘science’ as the sole arbiter of what is true must always resolve itself into a belief in force, in blind force. Before this idea, the nineteenth century fell prostrate, and from it emerged two of its most influential determinist prophets, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin. The writings of Marx were said to have been discredited in our times, although it only takes a crisis in the stock market or a run on a bank for his picture of Western man’s dependence upon the vacillations of capital to seem mythologically true. Too much concentration on the failure of Marx’s prophecies–that the revolution would first take place in the industrial heartlands of England, for example–can blind observers to how much Marx actually got right. Darwin got many things right, too, about the evolution of finches’ beaks, about the breeding habits of earthworms and the expression of emotion in animals. That was only part of the reason why this great Victorian natural historian was deified in our times. He was placed on the throne once occupied by God, overseeing like a sad old bearded Jehovah the workings of a purposeless, blind process of procreation.
When confronted with this mythology, the Christian fundamentalists were stupid enough to question the impersonality of nature, or, more horrifyingly, they tried to personalise it, so that the blind force of nature which led to a child developing cancer became the act of a cosmic sadist.15 Whether siding with the atheists who worshipped Darwin, or with one or another of the muddled ‘creationist’ standpoints, Western humanity found itself still in the Victorian ‘semi-recumbent posture’ of a worshipper at the throne of blind force.
For Simone Weil, ‘the modern conception of science is responsible, as is that of history and art, for the monstrous conditions under which we live, and will, in its turn, have to be transformed, before we can hope to see the dawn of a better civilization’.16 Her book The Need for Roots was first published in English in 1952, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession. Half a century on, it seemed a no less remarkable diagnosis of what had gone wrong–as undoubtedly something had gone wrong–in Western European society. Simone Weil, who had died aged thirty-four in 1943, was in England working with the Free French. It was they who commissioned this luminous genius to write a manifesto for what might bring regeneration to France after her defeat and occupation in 1940. Weil wrote The Need for Roots in her last months of life, and it is a frenzied, urgent book. T. S. Eliot, who wrote an introduction to its first English publication, said, ‘I cannot conceive of anybody’s agreeing with all of her views, or of not disagreeing violently with some of them.’ He nonetheless urged readers to ‘expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints’.
Weil made the connection–inescapable to anyone who has read his by now innumerable biographies–between Hitler and the nineteenth-century worship of science. She quoted Mein Kampf: ‘Man must never fall into the error of believing himself to be the lord and master of creation…He will then feel that in a world in which planets and suns follow circular trajectories, moons revolve round planets, and force reigns everywhere and supreme over weakness, which it either compels to serve it docilely or else crushes out of existence. Man cannot be subject to special laws of his own.’
Simone Weil added, ‘These lines express in faultless fashion the only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from the conception of the world contained in our science.’17 She added, ‘Who can reproach him for having put into practice what he thought he recognized to be the truth? Those who, having in themselves the foundations of the same belief, haven’t embraced it consciously and haven’t translated it into acts, have only escaped being criminals thanks to the want of a certain sort of course which he possesses.’18
Simone Weil, as a French patriot and the daughter of a secularised Jewish family, had every reason to work ardently for Hitler’s defeat, but she was able to see, as were her readers more than half a century after she wrote, that Hitler was Darwin’s natural heir. The regeneration of post-war society could only, Weil believed, be achieved through a rediscovery by France–by Western society as a whole–of how it understands truth itself. She saw the defeat of France by Hitler not as the victory of a lie over truth, rather ‘an incoherent lie was vanquished by a coherent lie’.19
As Queen Elizabeth II’s reign drew to an end, the lies in which her subjects were asked to believe became, if possible, increasingly incoherent. The intellectual classes–taking that phrase broadly to include the academic world, the more intelligent writers and journalists–nearly all subscribed to the worship of blind force which Weil rightly diagnosed as impossible to detach from the modern view of science. To counteract this belief, to guarantee, as it were, that they would not turn into Hitler, the thinking classes and their pupils the political classes tried to invent a number of ‘values’ in which everyone was supposed to believe. After the elevation of Gordon Brown to the premiership, these values became vahlews and his audiences were compelled to hear quite a lot about them without being left much wiser about how the vahlews were to be defined or understood.
In denouncing ‘the modern conception of science’ Weil was tempted to denounce science itself. This was a mistake. If quantum physics was, as she claimed false, how are we to explain nanotechnology, silicon chips, computers–all of which owe their very existence to the pioneers of quantum physics?
Science did, however, take over from theology, or the Church, the role of intellectual dictator.
The science of genetics teaches us that we are the inevitable consequence of our inheritance. Scientific knowledge of our environment has led to what is, in effect, the chief alternative religion of our times, the belief that the planet itself is doomed by the failure of the human race to be its responsible custodian. The catalogue of loss–of rainforests, of flora and fauna–is presented as a new Myth of the Fall, with greedy Humanity raping the environment for short-term gain and thereby imperilling any chance of future happiness. Global warming is an alternative hellfire, with believers dividing, as in the old dispensation, between those who thought that by good works it is possible to be saved–that is by recycling milk cartons, reducing gas emissions and avoiding air travel–and those who believe that it is all too late, that the Chinese and the Americans are beyond persuasion, and that we shall all without doubt perish everlastingly. Another form of determinism which grips the modern mind is economic determinism. Though Marxist states have abandoned communism, Karl Marx nevertheless left the world with the belief that we are all the product of our economic and social environment. It would be very rare, perhaps impossible, to meet anyone of our times who did not believe this.
Religions have often themselves been forms of determinism, as the previous paragraphs would suggest. But they have also been ways of making the kind of illogical leaps out of the determinist circle, which modern physics appears to have made. Whereas genetics and economics follow deterministic patterns of thought, physics post the Big Bang Theory has been a story of surprises, of lurching out of systems, of inhabiting a universe which did not need to be the way it is, and which began its life in a completely weird series of throbs, leaps–no words can succinctly describe what it is that astronomy seemed to have been saying since the 1980s and 1990s.
This corresponds to those religious traditions and myths which, in the past, have insisted upon free will.
The struggle between free will and determinism is one of those philosophical conundrums which can never be adequately solved, which is why neat-minded people will always be determinists–it is easier. But determinism crushes the imagination, and almost all exciting developments in Western thought, Western art, Western music and literature over the last seven hundred years have been in one way or another an assertion of free will. Without free will, the human race has lost its moral purpose. Each generation, therefore, tries to escape its determinist straitjacket by some myth, or ritual, or grand gesture, which will give to us dignity, individuality, freedom. Those who hate religion will see it, and especially Islam and Evangelical Christianity, as the ultimate determinism. But is not the advantage of religion over irreligion (speaking of it merely as a life tool, and ignoring for a moment the question of whether ‘it’ is ‘true’ or ‘false’) that it sees every person as a soul, a person who carries about their own destiny? If this is the case, then the Muslims in their seemingly identical ranks, bowed to Mecca in prayer, may perhaps be closer to perfect freedom than a Western materialist who believes he is merely the product of genetic inheritance and economic circumstances. Ever since the Second World War, as Weil’s Need for Roots makes plain, the human race has been trying not to live with the knowledge that if the blind determinisms of science and economics were the only truths, there should be nothing to prevent another archipelago of Gulags, another Belsen, another Dachau, another Auschwitz. The little spark, the ‘irrational’ little glow in the dark, the belief that each individual is of importance–it might not derive from religion, but when religion goes, it becomes very difficult to keep it alight.