Modern Society and Spiritual Consolation

Modern Society and Spiritual Consolation

Religion for Atheists is not a book that advocates theism. Alain de Botton himself is an atheist. As he writes near the end of the book, “This book seeks to reconcile two positions: on the one hand, an aversion to the supernatural aspects of religion; on the other, an admiration for certain religious ideas and practices.” Seen from another angle, what Religion for Atheists tries to reconcile is not only the contradictory attitudes ordinary people hold toward religion, but also the question of how, in a contemporary society dominated by technology and commerce, we should respond to the gradual exhaustion of our inner spiritual world.

One of the passages that impressed me most is where the author suggests that wisdom may not depend so much on the quantity of reading as on its quality. In today’s world, where publishing has advanced alongside technology, even a moderately diligent literature student may read hundreds of books before graduation. But in medieval Europe, a household that owned three books would already have been remarkable. Too much reading can make us restless and hurried; it leaves us little room to reflect on and truly absorb words. We rarely read the same book again and again, yet religious texts often deepen people’s understanding precisely through this ritual of repeated reading. For modern people, whose memories are often weak and overstretched, this is especially meaningful.

In another passage, de Botton contrasts the ritual dimension of religious practice with the flatness and dullness of contemporary university education. If, in a university classroom, whether at a teacher’s prompting or spontaneously, you held the hand of the classmate beside you in gratitude, paused before a truthful or moving sentence, and recited it aloud together, education might well be more effective than the current bland approach, which assumes that truth will be firmly remembered no matter how tediously it is delivered. Still, it is admittedly hard to imagine a calculus class collectively chanting Lagrange’s theorem.

As technology has developed to a certain point, people have gradually become aware of their inner poverty and the absence of ritual in their lives. Calls such as “life needs a sense of ritual” have grown louder. But what exactly a sense of ritual is, and how one acquires it, differs from person to person. Atheists often ignore or avoid discussing rituals derived from religion, while at the same time consciously or unconsciously borrowing from what may be the oldest, most standardized, and most elaborate ritual traditions in human history. In China, where there is no strong indigenous religious tradition shaping daily ritual life, the gradual westernization of wedding ceremonies—or perhaps a distinctly Eastern version of westernization—is a typical example. On the other hand, if one completely abandons religious ritual and tries to build an independent system without drawing on those traditions, the result too easily becomes chaotic, vulgar, and incapable of stirring deep emotion, even though that is precisely the most important part of ritual.

Similar to what he discusses in The Art of Travel, de Botton also points out that today’s travel agencies mostly concern themselves only with logistics: when to depart, when to land, when to visit which attraction, and when to eat what. They never ask what kind of transformation such a journey might bring to a traveler’s life, what sort of spiritual growth it might foster, or what meaning and value the places visited actually possess. Likewise, museum objects have been stripped from the specific places where they once belonged, and once removed from that setting, they largely lose their value. Telling visitors what era an object came from and what material it was made of is, in most cases, meaningless. If museums instead explained what emotions such objects might help soothe, and organized them accordingly, they might become far more meaningful.

At root, religious systems have become vulnerable under the advance of science and technology. Today, those who truly believe are more likely to be the less educated, the elderly, and children. Much of religion’s understanding of the world may be primitive or factually incorrect, but that does not mean it is worthless. In regulating behavior, improving social relations, and comforting the inner life, the world’s religions have developed unique strengths over thousands of years, and these may be exactly what contemporary society lacks. Thus, how to discard the parts of religion that have no positive significance while applying its accumulated human wisdom to modern society—this is the bold and open discussion carried out by Religion for Atheists.

Selected Excerpts

1. Wisdom Beyond Doctrine

The real question is not whether God exists, but how one should live once one has concluded that God quite clearly does not exist.

The starting point of this book is that one may remain a committed atheist while still discovering that religion can at times be useful, interesting, and consoling; one may also wonder whether certain ideas and practices can be drawn from religion to enrich secular life outside the church.

First, although human beings are deeply prone to selfishness and violence, we still need to live together harmoniously in society. Second, we need to cope with the many frightening forms of human suffering—career setbacks, troubled relationships, the loss of loved ones, and the approach of old age and death. Human beings are all too vulnerable to misfortune.

2. Community

If we look more closely at the causes of modern alienation, our loneliness can to some extent be attributed to a simple numerical problem. Billions of people live on this planet, which makes the idea of speaking to a stranger more frightening than it would have been in less populated times, as if the depth of social connection were inversely proportional to population density. Even if we have withdrawn from one another, we clearly have not abandoned all hope of forming relationships.

In the lonely canyons of the modern city, no emotion is more revered than “love.” Yet this is not the love spoken of by religion—not a universal love of humankind—but a jealous, selective, and ultimately narrower kind of love. Romantic love drives us to pursue one particular person with desperation, hoping to achieve a lifelong fusion with them, as though this person alone could spare us from having to face the rest of humanity.

Many of us enter our careers with something like a desire for revenge. In a world where professional success is treated as the primary badge of worth—promising not only material security but also the intoxicating admiration of others—it can seem entirely rational to bury ourselves in work and ignore almost everything else. Only when our appetites have been satisfied do we tend to be willing to let our minds attend to the needs of others.

To promote that most important Christian virtue, we would need to listen attentively to stories of fear, guilt, anger, depression, frustrated love, and infidelity—stories that leave us with the impression that we are all caught in a kind of collective madness, and yet an oddly endearing fragility.

Such conversations would strip away our defensive exterior and reveal the truth that most of us are, in one way or another, somewhat unwell. In doing so, they would free us from distorted fantasies about the lives of others and give us the psychological energy to reach out to our fellow sufferers. Religions are wise in not expecting us to handle all our emotional problems alone.

Religion understands how lost and ashamed people can feel when they have to admit that they cannot control emotions such as despair, greed, jealousy, and pride.

4. Education

John Stuart Mill: “The goal of a university is not to produce skilled lawyers, doctors, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.”

No matter how grandly admissions brochures may speak, modern universities seem to have little interest in teaching students emotional or ethical skills for living, much less how to care for their neighbors or leave the world a little happier than they found it.

Defenders of secular university education rarely worry about the problem of “lack of self-command.” They confidently assume that if people hear certain ideas once or twice at the age of twenty, even if fifty years of finance or market research follow, and even if those ideas were delivered in a dull voice in an empty room, those ideas will still somehow influence them completely. But ideas must not only be expressed vividly; they must also be repeated. We must remind ourselves of beloved truths several times a day, even up to ten times, or they will not leave a deep impression.

There are too many things in this world that once moved us profoundly and then vanished in an instant: the grandeur of the ruins of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the unique experience of gazing out from Mount Sinai, a resonant poetry reading in Edinburgh, the feeling after closing Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In the end, all modern artistic masterpieces suffer the fate of fine cuisine: exquisite creations are chewed up and gone in a moment.

The prestige of news rests on an unspoken assumption: that because of the two great driving forces of modern history—politics and technology—our lives are always on the verge of major transformation. Therefore the earth must be crisscrossed with fiber-optic cables, airport terminals must be filled with television screens, and public squares in cities must be embedded with constantly flashing stock tickers.

If we lament today’s age of an overwhelming abundance of books, it is because we have realized that the most effective way to develop our intelligence and emotions is not to read more, but to focus on certain books, deepen our understanding of them, and revisit them from time to time.

If most of our troubles are caused by the state of our minds, then the modern leisure industry seems deeply misguided, for its persistent aim is to bring comfort only to our bodies, while failing to soothe and discipline what Buddhism insightfully calls the “monkey mind.” To restore our whole selves, we need effective places of retreat—new secular sanctuaries devoted to educating both mind and body through a series of secular spiritual exercises.

6. Compassion

Happiness is an illusion (“Anyone who cannot see through the falseness of this world is himself deeply false”); suffering is the norm (“If our condition were truly happy, there would be no need to think about anything else”); true love is a fantasy (“How empty and filthy is the heart of man”); we are shallow in the same way that we are vain.

Compared with our medieval ancestors, our lives are still filled with accidents, shattered dreams, heartbreaking sorrow, unbearable jealousy, nameless anxiety, and inevitable death. Religion wisely recognizes that we are flawed creatures by nature: incapable of lasting happiness, troubled by sexual desire, anxious for fame and status, vulnerable to devastating accidents, and always moving step by step toward death.

8. Art

The story of Jesus gathers together many kinds of suffering, including betrayal, loneliness, self-doubt, and physical and mental torment. Through these sufferings, our own pain is mirrored and set beside another’s, and the sense that we suffer alone is transformed.

The six-syllable mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, translated from Sanskrit, signifies generosity, discipline, patience, diligence, meditation, and wisdom.

9. Architecture

One of the unforeseen disasters of the modern world is that our unprecedented access to information has come at the cost of our attention. The kind of deep, wholehearted concentration that once produced many of civilization’s greatest achievements now faces challenges unknown at any earlier time.

Travel agencies believe their role is merely to provide logistical services—booking connecting flights, negotiating discounts on tickets and hotel rooms, and so on—while rarely making any effort to help customers reach destinations that might bring concrete benefits to the soul.

10. Institutions

This book seeks to reconcile two positions: on the one hand, an aversion to the supernatural aspects of religion; on the other, an admiration for certain religious ideas and practices.