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The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats though unseen among us

Shelley

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he has to say, and make fun of it.

Thomas Carlyle

In January 2012 the bald but perfectly formed philosopher Alain de Botton proposed the building of a huge tower somewhere in London to commemorate atheism – or, as he put it, Atheism. This suggestion immediately caused a schism in the new church of atheism – perhaps as momentous as that which rent apart Christianity in the eleventh century, when West and East were divided over stuff like the understanding of the Trinity and how long beards should be. (That particular schism is still in existence, despite centuries of attempts at reconciliation.) For immediately Britain’s most senior, gilded atheist cleric, Professor Richard Dawkins, stamped all over Botton’s tower idea, saying words to the effect that it was fucking stupid and unnecessary, and in any case ‘a contradiction in terms’. The whole spat had a wonderfully Pythonesque whiff to it, these fabulously self-regarding monkeys arguing about the appropriateness of a Tower of Babel which would undoubtedly be situated in someplace achingly secular and similarly self-regarding, like Hoxton or Islington, until God blew it down and smote anyone who had been inside, as you will find detailed in the Sibylline Oracles.

The Tower of Botton would, the philosopher revealed, stand precisely 151 feet tall, and its exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human DNA. Its height would be demarcated precisely into the various geological periods of the earth, with a ‘narrow band of gold’ representing the comparatively brief time that creatures almost as brilliant as Alain de Botton, i.e. humans, have been in existence. Gold, you will note; a metal which humans have worshipped on account of its supposed scarcity and irreducibility, although it is rather less scarce than was formerly believed. There are many, many much scarcer elements, including those which mankind has created by itself, in the manner of a flawed and somewhat reckless deity. I would suggest, if Alain is still intent upon building his fucking stupid tower, that he replace the gold band with one made of Einsteinium, a synthetic and extremely rare and short-lived element which was discovered in the cheerfully toxic debris left over from the first ever hydrogen bomb explosion, back in 1952. Something, then, that mankind, in its insuperable genius, made for itself, and of which it can be suitably proud. People visiting the tower would probably be advised to wear NCB gear and get scrubbed down afterwards, almost certainly by low-paid Eastern European babes – but then this would serve only to enhance the overall visitor experience; it would be a positive selling point. And it might also add a subtle counterpoint to the very premise of the tower: not everything we have done has necessarily been wonderful and uplifting. Quite often we’re just left with questionable stuff like Einsteinium, which of course was named in honour of a man almost as clever as Alain.

Can you imagine anything more self-regarding than a tower built to worship oneself? Because that’s what it is, really – a bit like the marble palace of some Soviet Bloc tyrant beholden to nobody but himself (well, maybe except for the whims of Moscow). An edifice which, even in de Botton’s description, celebrates merely an absence of something, i.e. an absence of God – hence Richard Dawkins’s correct analysis that it would be self-contradictory. This is what happens when we are freed from the requirement to be humble, to bow down, to accept that we are deeply flawed and are inclined – when liberated from the suspicion that someone powerful and vengeful and probably bad-tempered is watching everything we do – to behave rather badly, and with a consuming arrogance. We build things to praise ourselves, and then, having finally abolished God, we become a God to ourselves. We become gripped by intimations of our own brilliance.

Even before we have built the great Tower of Arse, we get ourselves into practice for the role of deity. We limber up, we do the requisite callisthenics. One such limbering-up exercise, for example, might be to rewrite the Ten Commandments, in our own image – but making sure all the while that we miss out the problematic stuff: the business about not coveting other people’s things, and not committing adultery, and how above all we must worship something which is not us, but is beyond and above us, i.e. God. And then replace these commands with vague and transient prescriptions which are so anodyne as to be, in effect, meaningless. Richard Dawkins, though he had no time for the magnificent Tower of Arse, rewrote the Ten Commandments in his book The God Delusion as something we could all cling to once we’d killed God. I suppose he did this as a kindness to the rest of us, in the belief that, having despatched God to the waste-paper bin of history, he ought to offer up something to put in His place. For which, thank you, professor. Here are Richard’s commandments numbers four and five:

Live life with a sense of joy and wonder!

Always seek to be learning something new!

Isn’t that lovely? Isn’t that absolutely lovely! That’s more fun than ‘Thou shall not kill,’ isn’t it? It is a slight surprise that Richard did not include, perhaps at number eight or nine on his fatuous list of spineless injunctions: ‘Always make sure you recycle your rubbish properly, putting the organic material in the green bag and the plastic stuff in the white bag.’ And then maybe at number ten: ‘Brush your teeth three times a day, and try to floss regularly, although not on public transport.’ I once mentioned to Richard – who, incidentally, I like personally, and respect as both a scientist and a propagandist for scientific enquiry – that his commandments seemed to be lacking something. You know: a little rigour, a certain sinew, a sense of permanence. He responded by saying that he thought that you, Rod, of all people, should appreciate that morality is ever-changing, that we do not cleave to the moral code which pertained a thousand or even one hundred years ago. I don’t know what he meant by ‘you, Rod, of all people’; I think it’s better if we let that lie. But his response was a partial evasion. Richard’s moral code, unlike the one given to us by Moses, will be defunct next week, it will have a half-life as brief as that of Einsteinium. It is not really a set of ‘commandments’ at all, but instead a flyer shoved through your letterbox from the local council’s Healthy Living subcommittee, or maybe from your nearest NHS provider; it asks nothing of us. Nobody could cavil at any one of its bland imprecations. It is close to meaningless.

Richard Dawkins is not the only person to have rewritten the Ten Commandments, of course – it’s been done, by vaulting secularists with the look of destiny in their eyes, plenty of times. The late Christopher Hitchens had a bash too, and his proscriptions were very similar to those of his ally, Dawkins; but at least Hitch included, at number eight: ‘Turn off that fucking cellphone.’ Yowser, Hitch; how did Moses miss that one?

Belligerent atheism has advanced, these last twenty years or so, partly as a consequence of sexually repressed and educationally subnormal jihadist maniacs blowing themselves up all over the place, which has made us question the attractiveness of religious certitude, and partly through the Wesleyan charisma and intelligence of its most voluble protagonist, Dawkins. We are, in effect, now a secular country, the obeisances paid to even the mild-mannered, clean-shaven and comparatively licentious God of the Church of England diminishing seemingly each week, by statute and by common practice. As J.S. Mill once urged us to do, we have wriggled free of Calvinism and its tiresome constraints; and so we have become dangerously free too of humility and the fear of existential censure. In place of God we cheerfully install ourselves – and immediately begin to draw up plans for building a giant Tower of Arse, a monument to our magnificence, with our own wondrous lives picked out in gold right at the top.

It is no coincidence that this rapid erosion of deference to an omnipotent, unseen other has occurred in tandem with the growth of institutionalised self-obsession, self-pity and public emoting. If there is no unseen other to bow down before, we bow down instead before ourselves; we are all that matters. And it is a short step from this delusion to the following thesis: ‘Actually, now I think about it, never mind this WE business – I am all that matters, and my petty vicissitudes, my miseries, will no longer be internalised but shared, at interminable length, with a grateful world.’ My parents’ generation were infected with none of this stuff, and would have found the current trend for intense introspection – of very boring and stupid people, often celebrities, perpetually ‘battling their demons’, to use the ubiquitous and carelessly obnoxious phrase – both deeply embarrassing and emetic. Keep it to yourself, your heroin addiction or your anorexia or your alcoholism or your mid-life crisis, you mug; you will answer, one day not too far away, for better or for worse – in the meantime, struggle on with fortitude and reserve.

Not any more. The mantra of our times is this: ‘But tell me, how do you FEEL?’, and its corollary – that the only thing that matters is how we feel about stuff – has taken on a bizarre, supernatural quality of late. A few years back I turned up at hospital to witness the birth of my daughter Emmeline, and was presented by the nurse with a chart enquiring of me my nationality and race. This was one of those PC bureaucratic procedures, the results of which would be of use to absolutely nobody except deathless bureaucrats, and which would undoubtedly cost a lot of money to process. But anyway, somewhere in the region of eighty races or nationalities were listed across two or three pages. All I had to do was pick one. Then I read a little more closely, and at the top of the page it said that I didn’t actually have to put down what race or nationality I really was – that, it seemed, didn’t matter. All I had to do was tell them what race or nationality I FELT I was, regardless (it made clear) of my parentage or where I was born. The actuality of who I was had no relevance whatsoever. The facts were of no consequence at all. So I told them I felt Somali. It seemed, in the circumstances, sort of appropriate, even if I was tempted to put ‘static traveller’ (which is the official description for people who were once travellers but now feel disinclined to move anywhere, so instead remain perfectly still, I’d guess). Still, sometimes I do feel Somali, you know? Fractious and dislocated and, through no fault of my own, unemployable. This enquiry – But what do you FEEL – has invaded every possible discourse. It has become almost the only discourse. It is the main criticism levelled at the people who devise the examinations sat by our children: that no longer are the kids required to actually know stuff, far more important is the emotive or interpretative reaction to stuff.

As if any of it really mattered – how we feel, inside – except to us. What is, is. Is it not?

Equally, the previous old-fashioned deference to an unseen other imposed upon us a responsibility to our fellow human beings: those commandments, the knowledge or suspicion or fear that we were being watched as we went about our nefarious business. We were, after all, equal in the eyes of God, and enjoined to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. It seems likely to me that our gradual rejection, over the last thirty years or so, of a collectivist approach to solving our problems and running our affairs has been at least partly occasioned by the rise of atheism and the slow occlusion of that unseen other. If we are freed from the depredations of a supernatural being, we are, by extension, sort of freed from a responsibility towards one another, too; we become atomised and aloof, we work towards our own ends, beholden to nobody. We succumb to the genetic selfishness which, as Richard Dawkins, in his previous and more palatable incarnation, beautifully depicted; driven onwards, ever onwards to replicate in competition with others, without even being conscious of that competition, altruism existing only as an adaptive trait, the basis of our behaviour largely pre-ordained by a markedly more brutal and callous God, our own genes.

It is undoubtedly true that as orthodox religious belief has retreated, so we have become more nakedly individualistic, more inclined to be immune to the needs and requirements of our fellow men. I suspect there’s a correlation. Dawkins, a decent metro-liberal bien pensant himself, of course, was always at pains to insist that somehow it needn’t be this way; that succumbing to the sociopathic and relentless and blind drive of our genes was not inevitable, but could be resisted and overcome. To which I would reply, yes, Richard, and yes again; and either our invention of God, or the actual existence of God – hell, take your pick, science boy – was our most potent means of successfully (more or less) resisting that drive. In place of that, what means of constraining our behaviour do we have? Dawkins’s ten commandments? Or Christopher Hitchens’s injunction to turn off that fucking mobile phone? I’m sorry Richard, but it won’t wash. Where is the power and the resonance, the force?

My point here isn’t to insist from an a priori position that God exists; hell, I don’t want you to think that I’m a weirdo like my lovely mother-in-law, who keeps averring, with a strange look in her eyes, that we’re all drenched in the blood of Christ. In the sense I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter if God exists or not. What matters is that our deference to something beyond ourselves, something real or strongly imagined – the feeling within us that we should not be quite so fucking pleased with ourselves, so confident of our decisions and our ideologies – has diminished hugely over the last half-century, and particularly rapidly over the last dozen or so years. Of course, Richard Dawkins, and any decent scientist, would be forced to admit that he could not say for sure whether or not God exists, and so would be left to mumble an embarrassed ‘Uh, s’pose it COULD be, but I don’t think so, we have no scientific evidence.’ But, this being the case, why continue with the frenetic flailing, the adverts on the sides of buses, the polemics? What exactly is it that you are flailing at? ‘The irrational, the superstitious,’ Dawkins would reply, and point you towards creationist mentalists teaching kids that dinosaurs walked the earth with man on a planet formed 4,500 years ago. Yes, OK, fair enough – I’m with him on the creationists, and I’ll sign up cheerfully enough to Charles Darwin for the time being, until science decides that actually he got some of it wrong, which is what of course will happen: all manmade certainties end up being knocked down, as Ptolemy will tell you. But the mentalists promulgating creationism are no more representative of those who believe in God than are Pons and Fleischmann, the proponents of that berserk but alluring notion ‘cold fusion’, representative of science. If religion is nothing more than a ‘meme’, an idea which replicates itself ‘like a virus’, synchronically and diachronically, as Dawkins has suggested, then it still might be a meme worth clinging to, for all that.

Nor do I want to trawl through that futile little argument that hinges upon the damage done to the world through religious ideology versus the damage done to the world as a consequence of atheistic ideologies. The jihadists, with the bombs strapped to their guts, the pogroms, the annihilations, the death camps, the ethnic cleansings, the gulags, the Lubyanka, the inquisitions, the foam-flecked imam urging the destruction of the Jews and the little foam-flecked Austrian Nazi urging the same thing – all that stuff. Was National Socialism an atheistic ideology? Was Stalinism? Stalin seemed to think it was. Marxism? It seems to me, from an admittedly unscientific weighting exercise, that in this argument the scores stand at about one all, with extra time now being played. Maybe I’m wrong.

The more important point is that religion has retreated, and with it deference. I don’t mean deference simply towards God, regardless of whether He exists or not. But deference to something. Because once you chip away at deference to God, then all deference becomes much easier to do away with. You end up deferring to nothing.

Like the majority of kids growing up in the middle 1960s, I went to Sunday school every week. I did not much enjoy this. On one occasion, when I was about nine years old, I was sent to Sunday school on a morning that my parents were themselves ‘too busy’ to attend church. This struck me as grotesquely unjust and hypocritical. I was so angry, so fuelled up with resentment, as I made my way to church that morning, that I kicked Gary Lewis’s head in halfway there. He had come out of his house to laugh at me dressed up in my Sunday school attire – a ridiculous fucking tweedy jacket with matching tweedy shorts set off by a white nylon poloneck jumper. The gobby little child stood on the other side of the road hooting with mirth and shouting insults. I can’t remember what, exactly. Something like ‘Fucking poof,’ I suspect. So I ran across the road and punched him hard in the mouth, something which, as a habitual coward, I would never normally do. Gary was a big, gangling, cheerful kid, if a bit thick – I suppose the sort of person who might now be a presenter on BBC Three. His dad came out to see what the fuss was about, and to his eternal credit shepherded the two of us into their backyard to slug it out properly, while he watched and occasionally commented with admirable neutrality. Reader, I won that fight. It was the anger that did it – not the anger at Gary, but at my mother and father. Gary was just the unfortunate recipient.

Until about 1972 my family went to church every Sunday, almost without fail. I suppose mine was a slightly more religiously inclined household than most at the time, although there probably wasn’t much in it. While church attendance in Britain began to dwindle after the Second World War – fairly rapidly in the case of the non-conformist faiths, of which my family were part, less so in the case of Roman Catholics – even by the mid-1960s more than 50 per cent of parents still sent their kids to Sunday school. Whether or not the parents themselves could be arsed to turn up to church and sing absurd and didactic Victorian hymns when they could be digging the garden, they still felt that it was somehow ‘right’ that their kids should be properly indoctrinated – not so much into a faith, but into a system of mores which were, more or less, shared by the country as a whole. Along with Sunday school came injunctions against criminality – an absolutist, simplistic, Manichean divide between right and wrong – and various other strictures which would today, I suppose, be seen as somewhat right-of-centre and de trop: work hard, save money, don’t shag around, marry for love and for life, don’t get pissed, don’t gamble, do as you’re fucking told – despite the fact that the church I attended, the Methodists, had long been regarded as left-leaning. Attending Sunday school was also a conscious sacrifice, something one did because it was apparently the right thing to do, and there’s an end to it, even if I hated it, most of the time. I’m not so daft as to suggest that if kids still went to Sunday school there’d be no criminality, no private debt, and everyone would love one another. Even by my standards, that would be overstating the case a little. But the decline of religious belief is in the mix, somewhere, as both a cause and a symptom.

Of course, the decline of a sort of semi-conscious adherence to organised religion has not been without its benefits. My point is not that the increasing irrelevance of God has been an unequivocally bad thing. One of the problems we have today is a sort of shrill infantile absolutism, which you will encounter on several occasions within this book. It is largely the construct of the libtard authoritarian left, but, frighteningly, those from beyond that smug and uniquely metropolitan middle-class tradition also succumb to it, often as a consequence of the public opprobrium whipped up by these intolerant and narcissistic monkeys, howling their outrage on the messageboards and the blogs.

Take the example of the decline of religious observance, which we will call ‘x’. I am suggesting that certain other stuff, which we might call a, b and c, has occurred as an unintended consequence, or partial consequence, of x, and that we might wish that this had not happened – an overweening narcissism, for example; and the loss of the notion of deferred gratification; the growth of moral relativism; an increase in what, pace Durkheim, we might call anomie; and a society in which the collectivist approach is increasingly rejected in favour of the individualistic, and a concomitant absence of something we might call ‘spirituality’. Even here, not all of these unintended consequences have been wholly bad – it is merely that something has been lost along the way, and that it would be better if we still had it, whatever it is. The problem with the liberal faux left is that in this instance – as in many others – it tends to deny that a, b and c have happened at all, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Because, for them, the decline of organised religion is a good thing per se, nothing bad can ever come of it, and any suggestion that bad stuff has happened must be denied outright. We will meet more of this witless and totalitarian argument later, especially when dealing with women’s rights.

To be clear, there are important caveats. Adherence to organised religion inculcated in the lower orders a mute quiescence and a refusal to ask difficult questions of their economic and political masters. Its strictures on marriage and sexual freedoms made the lives of many people more miserable than anyone, other than a thug, might have wished. There was an anti-intellectual narrowness about its multifarious certainties. And there was other stuff. It meant we couldn’t go shopping on a Sunday, or indeed do much else on a Sunday for that matter. (Hell, I wasn’t even allowed to play in the garden on a Sunday, which struck me as absurd and vindictive.) And we gathered in cold and musty Victorian buildings, often with corrugated-iron roofs, the smell of mildew and distantly brewed tea and polish from the altar and the pervasive leak of gas from the boiler, to sing stuff at Christmas like my mother’s favourite carol:

Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie,

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.

In 2010 a Church of England vicar decided to ban that particular hymn, incidentally. Why? Because he’d been taken on some sort of exchange visit to the West Bank and the Israeli-occupied territories, and had decided that the words were all wrong. Bethlehem isn’t lying still, is it? It bloody well isn’t still at all! It’s under the jackboot of Israeli oppression! Ban the hymn!

So, to be sure, there are benefits from the decline of religious belief, such as not having to concern ourselves with self-aggrandising narcissistic idiots like the vicar who banned ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ (and the one who tried to ban ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, for that matter). It’s just that there have also been unintended consequences which have been bad for all of us. Some specific, such as the abnegation of deferred gratification and its concomitant, self-sacrifice. And others that are more difficult to define, more ectoplasmic, if you like. But of all of them, the end of deferred gratification is the most important.