Irenic Road

Secularism Considered

It’s always a delight to come across a piece by James Wood, whose subtle insight and lack of pretension is scarce among literary critics (a label that to me connotes the opposite). His review of The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now almost makes me want to buy the book. I’d certainly like to read it, but I hesitate to invest in a project I essentially oppose and which is clearly written for a “we” that doesn’t include me. I certainly share Wood’s view that in spite of the editor’s aim to look at what secularism affirms rather than denies, “the questions remain,” and the most fitting of secular worldviews is “fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.” The review glances on the deep questions the subject naturally raises, and I feel compelled to offer some response. (I know the world is waiting to hear my opinion.) While I haven’t read the book, I have a little experience with living, so I’m going to discuss the meaning of life instead. Very humble of me, right?

In discussing the first essay, Wood comments on the problem of defining “the good” and its source:

Many people, for instance, believe that morality is a deliverance of God, and that without God there is no morality—that in a secular world “everything is permitted.” You can hear this on Fox News; it is behind the drive to have the Ten Commandments displayed in courtrooms. But philosophers like Kitcher remember what Socrates tells Euthyphro, who supposed that the good could be defined by what the gods had willed: if what the gods will is based on some other criterion of goodness, divine will isn’t what makes something good; but if goodness is simply determined by divine will there’s no way for us to assess that judgment. In other words, if you believe that God ordains morality—constitutes it through his will—you still have to decide where God gets morality from. If you are inclined to reply, “Well, God is goodness; He invents it,” you threaten to turn morality into God’s plaything, and you deprive yourself of any capacity to judge that morality.

I’m inclined to reply that way, but not quite. Socrates is suggesting there must be an objective standard of “good” that we appeal to in disputes. The opposing view is that there is no objective standard, which is probably the more popular position in Western culture today, and the one affirmed by most secularists. These people are not merely self-indulgent hedonists; it turns out the good is quite hard to define, and thousands of years of philosophizing have failed to do so conclusively. Naturally, some thinkers have decided the question “What is good?” is essentially meaningless and unintelligible. As the twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell puts it, “questions as to ‘values’ lie wholly outside the domain of knowledge.” 2 + 2 = 4 is factual and true, but “thou shalt not murder” is a matter of opinion. This is a difficult position to hold, for obvious reasons. Russell himself was a lifelong activist for pacifism and nuclear disarmament among other causes, and I believe he said something to the effect that his distaste for broccoli was different from his distaste for torture. Despite feeling that torture was truly bad and acting on that feeling as if it were true, in the end his philosophy compelled him to hold they were both just tastes: there was no logical reason to prefer one or the other. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong; I’m not a Russell expert.)

Like Russell, most people who say morality is relative can’t really bring themselves to act as if it were, and it’s not just because they would go to jail. It doesn’t take much insight to come to the conclusion that wantonly killing people is wrong, and most people, most of the time have reached it. Even murderers will give an excuse like “she was having sex with another man, so she deserved death.” It’s not really murder, because it was actually justice.

In the second of a series of lectures later published as The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis argues these basic moral precepts form the “tao” or moral law that is as axiomatic to ethics as a – 0 = a is to mathematics. There’s no way to prove “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” it must be accepted as a given.

There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

None of this requires belief in a deity or even a supernatural reality, but I think natural law tends to lead to it. The problem is that these rules shade into each other and it’s difficult to determine which is the best choice: torture a few terrorists in order to prevent the possibility of the deaths of many innocents, etc. etc. Moral choices do not have the clean precision of logic about them, but people nonetheless weigh the options against a standard. The perfect choice is perhaps unknowable to finite, mortal beings, but a perfectly good deity can been seen as the source and the intersection of goodness. Then again, faced with the difficulty of making moral choices, many people defer to some authority: maybe a pastor who claims to speak for God, or a celebrity who seems like one.

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I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. — Ecclesiastes 1:14

Wood’s excerpt from “The Lighthouse” is a good example of the other general problem facing those proclaiming secularism as an affirming outlook on life: meaninglessness. Though of course I haven’t read the whole essay, I don’t see what’s so “acutely intelligent” about Robbins’s piece he praises. Robbins seems to think devoting one’s life to a finite cause will provide meaning enough for anyone. Here’s what Russell, a Nobel laureate who avidly pursued many causes in his long life, has to say:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. — “A Free Man’s Worship”

Gee, have fun with that. Russell’s proposed solution seems to derive from that of another other famous pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that our lives are dominated by will, i.e. base, selfish instincts that can never be fully satisfied, and the best we can hope for is to struggle with limited success against them and try to be sympathetic to others engaged in the same struggle. David Foster Wallace said something similar, but without the grandiloquent pessimism or theorizing:

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. — Commencement Address to the Kenyon College class of 2005

Of course, he denied he was giving moral advice. His suicide three years later makes the address more poignant. Does it mean this task is impossible, or was just impossible for him? Earlier he says

…an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Lack of an ultimate meaning becomes pretty hard to live with. I’ve never read “To the Lighthouse,” but it reminded me of Woolf’s better-known essay “The Death of the Moth,” a memento mori in prose. It concludes, “Oh yes, [the moth] seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.” Her suicide note has the same sense of resignation. Her husband gave her “the greatest possible happiness” but it wasn’t enough to overcome her depression. Thinking of all this, I remembered her words to her sister concerning her fellow British literary modernist, T. S. Eliot:

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. — letter to Vanessa Bell, February 11, 1928

Oh, the irony, right? Eliot would go on to write Four Quartets, a ruminative series of poems focusing on life and man’s relationship to the divine despite our broken, time-bound lives. (That’s as good of a one-line summary as I can manage.) “Fare forward,” he writes, despite having had his share of disappointments in life. He concludes the poems with Julian of Norwich’s famous line:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

I know not everyone who has a secular or even explicitly negative outlook on life leaves the world in despair or suicide, and that some get away with murder while the innocent are condemned. Virginia Woolf was sexually abused by her stepbrothers and likely would’ve struggled with depression her whole life, whatever her spiritual beliefs. Yet as DFW suggests above, I think the odds of a happy ending are better if you believe in an ultimate, transcendent truth. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes may call everything in the world meaningless, but he also believes “everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.” A crucial difference.

These are simply the sort of things that come to mind when I read a piece like Wood’s, and I think it shows how my own outlook has been shaped by the things I’ve read.  I’m probably wrong about some things here, but someone being wrong on the internet is nothing new.