Let me begin by observing: What a stupid question to ask. In my subsequent and continuing re-appraisals of the consciousness-raising polemics against organised religion, I’ve been hoping to show that atheism is neither a movement, a set of ideals, nor a thing in actual existence. A-theism is classified alongside a-goblinists and a-fairyiests as been redundantly unhelpful in defining oneself. No one defines themselves by what they do not believe or have (I do not define myself as a man “without three arms”, for example), so to set this question out with atheism as a noun, should set you on your guard.
Yet, I feel a need to begin answering this question: Where is the so-called “spiritual side” in nonbelief?
I believe ourselves, as a species, to be in the position of Captain Ahab pursuing an ever-evading white whale of gratification. Says Ahab: “Some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.” No matter the mask or form it takes, it still may be treated as the longing it is.
But domination has also been a prevention for us. Yet, it seems to be changing.
I do not accept the dominion of organised religion over the numinous and transcendent; I do not accept any celestial dictatorship from up-high, yet from so low a time in our past, to command the moments which should belong to me, and me alone; I do not accept that these utterly human moments, ill-defined as “spiritual”, are, too, the targets of New Age tom-foolery. We remain, then, stranded on our own Pequod, poised between the organised religion we reject and the New Age Nonsense we appall. What then, Captains, do we pursue?
Because the rush of reality continues to set our minds ablaze, we know the journey has not ended. We yet continue our search for the white-whale of transcendental posturing.
Paul Heelas, Professor of Religious Studies at Lancaster, has written a beautiful piece on just this question. He asks us to take a look at the secularist variety of spirituality in existence, which he states ‘refer to the collection of practices, beliefs and activities known as “New Age”.’ I am weary of the claims myself, and am very sceptical due to my research in psychology. The point he raises, however, is an intriguing one: Are we not, as secularists and humanists, rejecting the very thing that could lead to a better world? Namely: the offer to those who see humanistic ethics as “cold” toward spirituality is retracted, as we embrace all the beauty on offer from the varieties of religious experience1.
It is an important point and one I don’t think taken seriously enough. But, for this, we must understand why: Why do so many nonbelievers reject what Heelas notes as probable alternatives for reaching numinous, “spiritual” life-styles? To some degree, it lies in our constant search for evidence and validation. The “New Age” market has teeth marks from where flimflam farrago has laid waste to human sensibility. Reiki, crystal-healing, psychics, acupuncturists, and others are all lumped together in a category of Tom-Foolery for a lot of us, best avoided and to be the recipients of neither our time nor money.
Yet again, Heelas asks us to question our outright rejection of it. ‘New Age spiritualities are routinely dismissed more or less in toto. The customary mode is scorn.’ But wait, he says, ‘What is the basis of the secular humanist ethic if not the quest for a good life, to live in a way consistent with an evolved sense of the universe and humanity? Why then do humanists rush so quickly to dismiss those who seek precisely these things in New Age?’
Throughout this article, Heelas forgets our utter abandoning of all things group-orientated, dictating how we should achieve what should be completely personal, beautiful and unstigmatised. Too long has humanity slunk in the shadow of a church steeple, as the bell for Sunday prayer told us what was the path to the numinous. Too often did we don our hats, bathe our feet and slink toward the Arabic a’thaan (call to prayer)- bending and creaking as we supplicated before a tyrannical overlord. Yes these domains exist for everyone, as he highlights, but he forgets our utter distrust of all who lay claim to know how to get there. And for forming groups centered around such things.
Consider the varieties of terms2 located within the monotheisms catering for just these transcendent notions.
Baqa (Arabic): The return of the mystic to his enhanced and enlarged self after ‘fana
Batini (Arabic): One who devotes himself to the esoteric, mystical understanding of the faith of Islam.
Brahman: The Hindu term for the sacred power that sustains all existing things; the inner meaning of existence.
En Sof (Hebrew: ‘without end’) The inscrutable, inaccessible and unknowable essence of God in the Jewish mystical theology of Kabbalah.
‘Fana (Arabic) Annihilation. The ecstatic absorption in God of the Sufi mystic.
Hesychasm (from the Greek hesychia: ‘interior silence’) The silent contemplation cultivated by Greek Orthrodox mystics with eschewed words and concepts.
Ouisa (Greek) Essence, nature. That which makes a thing what it is. A person or object as seen from within. Applied to the monotheist god, the term denotes that divine essence which eludes human understanding and experience.
This list not so much is the tip of the iceberg, as the tip of another continent. One will find many such terms, usually applied to different theologians and philosophers, in one’s investigations into the so-called deeper aspects of religious faith.
The last term should give us pause. Did you spot the white blubber roll beneath the sea of words? Did you spot the burst of sudden awareness from its distant blow-hole? We may have found our whale. We are in pursuit – that we can not deny. But our rejection comes not so much from knee-jerk reactions as from our investigations into the damages done by those who claim to know how to take us to a level so personal it has a million different names.
Faust states, in the beginning of Goethe’s masterpiece, that after studying all of human knowledge, he has nothing to show for it. “You’re no wiser than you were before!” he yells at himself. He continues to lament:
There’s no joy in self-delusion
Your search for truth ends in confusion.
Don’t imagine your teaching will ever raise
The minds of men or change their ways.
But I do not use morbid Germans as inspiration. No one should. However, it raises this speculation: What do we have to show for it? Where is the numinous if we are forever seeking and fulfilling our need for the numinous and trascendent?
Acupuncture has its needles; religions have their songs, art and beautiful mosques and cathedrals; and there in the darkly-lit corner are the nonbelievers. Are we to take Heelas’ advice? I believe many people, those I consider co-thinkers, would find gratification in the balanced expression of the “New Age” for good ideals: The promotion of happiness, gratitude and serenity. Some of us can not.
Heelas also correctly agrees that secularists and humanists have a most powerful tool, which I believe need not preclude the numinous: Reason. Indeed, the use of reason to promote secularism is perhaps the best for modern society, as AC Grayling highlights – and colleagues here at Edger naturally. Reason is the best tool we have, and we must protect it. We can let it lead us to the moments long dominated by religious dogmatists, proclaiming to be metatrons for their god. Reason might stand on the shores of an island we pass, as we traverse the chaotic waters after our white whale. Yet, it may still be our guide if we are to stop, listen and understand.
As Andre Comte-Sponville says: “What frightens us is our own imagination. What reassures us is our reason.” Comte-Sponville’s book on this very subject, The Book of Atheist Spirituality, is very enlightening (pun intended).
Nothing prevents us from reaching the numinous through art, music, literature and theatre; gazing through telescopes at the macrocosms and microscopes at the microcosms – teeming universes filled with beauty which make talking burning bushes and virgin births somewhat uninteresting. Nothing stops us from creating or appreciating those things long paid for by the Church and now called on by apologists as foundations for faith-defence. No nonbeliever rejects these with his previous faith, that would be baby-bathwater stupidity. Even if you tried, I doubt that as a human you could. We are all programmed to need this dimension of the numinous in our lives. We have all been designated a white whale to pursue.
I only say this: The harpoons and arrows from religions may perch out from the skin of your white whale, but is not yet dominated by them. Your own whale is forever evading you. Not as a trial, but as a journey. It is time to follow and pursue, but not with god-given knowledge, not with the hope of capture, but with the hope that the journey with reason can be fulfilling.
NOTES
1. William James has a book by this same title, worthy of any solid investigation by those interested in understanding humanity.
2. Source: A History of God by Karen Armstrong.
Waving Goodbye to Romance
Friday, January 2nd, 2009It is not out of pure chance that Gabriel Garcia Marquez chose to entitle a book Of Love & Other Demons. Equipped with such a vestigial reminder of how we explained strange phenomena – demons, witches, ghosts – it is no wonder that such mystery continues to enshroud this notion of love. Put simply, one of the most bizarre things we as humans do is fall in love. I find it petty, pointless and ultimately sanctimonious, lacking the depth, beauty and fulfilment that underpin none-romantic relationships.
Many are the forms of “love”, all petals from the same poison plant. We must choose our poison and not dim our sights when disappointment looms. Signing up for life, says AC Grayling, is signing up for disappointment. Things, people and activities will wither and die; transformation will grab hold of our reality and shake it till everything in our tiny box of “truth” is upset, dishevelled and chaotic; and yet we must grab onto something. Love, or eros, is said by Freudians to be part of the driving force for all activities. In a sense this is true, but still the classification of love is important.
At the highest is what we maintain with life-long companions, who change and grow with us like a tree’s refection in a pond. At its lowest and most parochial is the romantic love. It is no secret that Greeks viewed love with women as lower to that of loving a pretty, young boy: who you schooled, taught and so on, to be a good citizen. The rational is what mattered to them and the constant flow of ideas in the agora (the market place of ideas and discussions) laid open the path to a better life (of course it is now irrational to think of the “better” sex as unequal to men). It was not the purely quivering emotional repository of barbarism – latent, it is true, within all of us – mixing with the poison of emotional love, which opened up doorways of reason. It was logic, rationality and knowledge. True – this is not a time we wish for, not an Atlantis of good thought, but certainly one we openly learn from. And what we learnt – but somehow forgot – is that romantic love is not necessarily “good” love.
I have the weight of literature, art and music standing before me. But truly I see no reason why romantic love is upheld or seen as “good”. It baffles us social scientists how love continues. In biological terms, it makes sense: We have short lives, raising a child is difficult. If two people try the best they can, with each other, investing time and money, a good healthy child can be produced. Both parties invest and because of this people like Robert Frank have looked at love in economic terms.
Consider: if you settle for the best you can get, (rationally) you should leave your partner as soon as Mr or Mrs Right is spotted. He or she should not expect to be permanent in your life, unless he or she is – in your eyes – 10 out of 10. However, since we are fallible, this is not possible. So, according to Frank, this paradoxically means we should never allow ourselves to think we are going to remain with anyone. The statistics show that you are almost guaranteed to meet someone who is “better” looking, better catered to your personality, and so on, whilst you are involved in a relationship.
People like Helen Fisher and others have also tried to understand love. Steven Pinker provides the answer: “Don’t accept a partner who wanted you for rational reasons to begin with: look for a partner who is willing to stay with you because you are you.” He goes on to quote Douglas Yates, who no doubt is voicing most readers opinions about me: “People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.”
But that’s just romantic love! And that’s my problem. I do not see why we need romantic love because I think we still need to defend our own existence. If the answer to being romantic and so on is that we must procreate – a crass and unhelpful answer – we must answer what gives us the right to breed? What gives us the arrogant notion that we should foster offspring on to an already tired world? If, however, the answer is that it leads to a fulfilled life, I would tentatively agree. However, my problem is not with romantic love as a whole but the continual search, media-hype and glamorising of love; the horrible genre of “romance” in film and books (I refuse to call it literature); the investment and intense emotions felt by friends and others who give themselves wholly to the search or capture of The One.
Truly, experiencing romantic love one, twice or thrice is important. But why continue? Why should we foster the notion that romantic love is somehow a good thing? In what sense is it more fulfilling than other important endeavours? I will not accept that romantic love is emotional and therefore defeats my rationalist approach – that’s a defeatist and avoidant response. And I also respect the private actions of sensible human beings: I do not plan on stopping people holding hands, kissing and so on (as much as it personally disgusts me). That is not my point. I am merely attempting to understand why romantic love has gone under the radar, has become accepted as somehow “good”, and beyond the rationalist approach.
I am not speaking, of course, of the love for friends, family and perhaps ideas and opinions. It is only the people I would die for, of course. I would die for them because of my “love” for them. But that is the “good” love, which is the love we should be celebrating. The romantic love is frail, pathetic and rather mundane compared to the beauty and fulfilment derived from life-long companions and family. I think the corollary is true: Those who love purely because of emotions must be avoided. We can usually say exactly why we love someone and for that reason it is better. But for ideals or ideas or nations or religions: Dying for them, or justifying them emotionally, is pure idiocy. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - “sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country” – wrote Horace. I do not think so. My love for my country does not extend to my life, or encompass that short, frail thing in a grip of power.
I am not denying my own emotions: Indeed, I know about love and have fallen in love numerous times. Yet, the reciprocity is the key and is hardly ever turned to open the door of companionship. So, I fight off the emotions because the puerile, pestilential notion of romantic love is an insult to human sensibilities. The genre of romance is quite weak, using only two or three or four people’s smitten emotions with each other to drive the story. I am not a fan of movies but I have noticed the same trend with romance movies. Why is romance a good thing? What on earth is convincing people of this awful “fact” when in truth, love is so much more grand than the insult called “romance”.
Tags: ac grayling, agora, Greeks, horace, love, rationality, reason, romance, yates
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