The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson
Authors: Peter Watson
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Other discoveries, such as dendrochronology, carbon valency, the Big Bang theory and the evolutionary synthesis, followed.
To say that such notions are not enchanting is to bend the meaning of enchantment. To many people they were certainly weird (“quantum weirdness,” in particular), equivalent to the magic on which religions relied in an earlier age. But the new enchantment was and is explicable—an advance, surely. Weber died in June 1920, soon after his pronouncement. Had he lived on through the 1920s, he would surely have changed his mind. Had he fully engaged with Darwinian variation, becoming ever clearer in the early years of the century due to burgeoning research in the new field of genetics, and had he come fully to terms with the clinical nature of psychoanalysis, in which interpretation was always made on an individual basis; had he encountered Niels Bohr’s linking of physics and chemistry in the structure of the atom, or Linus Pauling’s explanation as to why some substances are yellow liquids and others black solids—he would surely have concluded that the world was now more engrossinglyenchanting than ever. Similarly, had he lived to witness the rise of film, with silent movies giving way to sound, he would surely have seen this as an even more accessible source of enchantment—for most people, no doubt, much more so than quantum weirdness.
As Bruce Robbins says, the disenchantment narrative ignores a great deal about the premodern world that was far from enchanting (brought home recently in the German film White Ribbon ). It needs repeating that the world is vastly more enchanted now than it was before the death of God.
By the same token, is redemption any longer a useful concept? Richard Rorty didn’t think so because, as he put it, we are not degraded. Roger Scruton, though religious, half agrees when he argues that modern art is a “redemption of the commonplace” (this we might characterize as a “small” form of redemption). Transcendence has been dismissed time and again by modern philosophers (Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Jürgen Habermas) as a non-phenomenon. For Rorty, again, neither the word nor the concept of the “sacred” is any longer of use, because “everything is up for grabs.” And as already mentioned, if we accept Olivier Roy’s account of the globalization, deculturation and deterritorialization of religion, it is faith that is changing its contours, becoming “thinner,” not the secular life. Terry Eagleton said mischievously that he thought happiness was a “holiday-camp” sort of word. And as for happiness (or self-actualization), there seems to be general agreement that one can’t go looking for it, that it is the by-product of other, more worthwhile activities, and this may be why it is most often encountered in recollection.
The two big ideas that everyone seems to agree about, as regards our subject, are hope and the need for a more inclusive community—this is where we are to find meaning. George Santayana, Scott Fitzgerald, E. O. Wilson, Richard Rorty, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Taylor and Pope Benedict XVI all introduce the matter of hope into their writings. (Nietzsche, of course, regarded hope as a trick played on mankind, causing us to be more optimistic about progress than it really merited, especially since the “false dawn” of the Enlightenment.)
“THE METANARRATIVE OF EMANCIPATION”
For many people, too, hope is engendered by the expansion of the moral community that, despite all, is happening, if fitfully. Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty insist that “no experience of truth can exist without some participation in a community.” Minority ethnic groups, women, homosexuals, the disabled, religious sects and many others are now being accorded greater equality and respect; we are becoming less tolerant of such matters as “collateral damage” in wars, while at the same time more tolerant in any number of ways—this is
To say that such notions are not enchanting is to bend the meaning of enchantment. To many people they were certainly weird (“quantum weirdness,” in particular), equivalent to the magic on which religions relied in an earlier age. But the new enchantment was and is explicable—an advance, surely. Weber died in June 1920, soon after his pronouncement. Had he lived on through the 1920s, he would surely have changed his mind. Had he fully engaged with Darwinian variation, becoming ever clearer in the early years of the century due to burgeoning research in the new field of genetics, and had he come fully to terms with the clinical nature of psychoanalysis, in which interpretation was always made on an individual basis; had he encountered Niels Bohr’s linking of physics and chemistry in the structure of the atom, or Linus Pauling’s explanation as to why some substances are yellow liquids and others black solids—he would surely have concluded that the world was now more engrossinglyenchanting than ever. Similarly, had he lived to witness the rise of film, with silent movies giving way to sound, he would surely have seen this as an even more accessible source of enchantment—for most people, no doubt, much more so than quantum weirdness.
As Bruce Robbins says, the disenchantment narrative ignores a great deal about the premodern world that was far from enchanting (brought home recently in the German film White Ribbon ). It needs repeating that the world is vastly more enchanted now than it was before the death of God.
By the same token, is redemption any longer a useful concept? Richard Rorty didn’t think so because, as he put it, we are not degraded. Roger Scruton, though religious, half agrees when he argues that modern art is a “redemption of the commonplace” (this we might characterize as a “small” form of redemption). Transcendence has been dismissed time and again by modern philosophers (Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Jürgen Habermas) as a non-phenomenon. For Rorty, again, neither the word nor the concept of the “sacred” is any longer of use, because “everything is up for grabs.” And as already mentioned, if we accept Olivier Roy’s account of the globalization, deculturation and deterritorialization of religion, it is faith that is changing its contours, becoming “thinner,” not the secular life. Terry Eagleton said mischievously that he thought happiness was a “holiday-camp” sort of word. And as for happiness (or self-actualization), there seems to be general agreement that one can’t go looking for it, that it is the by-product of other, more worthwhile activities, and this may be why it is most often encountered in recollection.
The two big ideas that everyone seems to agree about, as regards our subject, are hope and the need for a more inclusive community—this is where we are to find meaning. George Santayana, Scott Fitzgerald, E. O. Wilson, Richard Rorty, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Taylor and Pope Benedict XVI all introduce the matter of hope into their writings. (Nietzsche, of course, regarded hope as a trick played on mankind, causing us to be more optimistic about progress than it really merited, especially since the “false dawn” of the Enlightenment.)
“THE METANARRATIVE OF EMANCIPATION”
For many people, too, hope is engendered by the expansion of the moral community that, despite all, is happening, if fitfully. Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty insist that “no experience of truth can exist without some participation in a community.” Minority ethnic groups, women, homosexuals, the disabled, religious sects and many others are now being accorded greater equality and respect; we are becoming less tolerant of such matters as “collateral damage” in wars, while at the same time more tolerant in any number of ways—this is
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