Religion for Atheists

VI

Pessimism

1.

Christianity has spent much of its history emphasizing the darker side of earthly existence. Yet even within this sombre tradition, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal stands out for the exceptionally merciless nature of his pessimism. In his Pensées, written between 1658 and 1662, Pascal misses no opportunity to confront his readers with evidence of mankind’s resolutely deviant, pitiful and unworthy nature. In seductive classical French, he informs us that happiness is an illusion (‘Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself’), that misery is the norm (‘If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it’), that true love is a chimera (‘How hollow and foul is the heart of man’), that we are as thin-skinned as we are vain (‘A trifle consoles us because a trifle upsets us’), that even the strongest among us are rendered helpless by the countless diseases to which we are vulnerable (‘Flies are so mighty that they can paralyse our minds and eat up our bodies’), that all worldly institutions are corrupt (‘Nothing is surer than that people will be weak’) and that we are absurdly prone to overestimate our own importance (‘How many kingdoms know nothing of us!’). The very best we may hope to do in these circumstances, he suggests, is to face the desperate facts of our situation head-on: ‘Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched.’

Given the tone, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that reading Pascal is not at all the depressing experience one might have presumed. The work is consoling, heartwarming and even, at times, hilarious. For those teetering on the verge of despair, there can paradoxically be no finer book to turn to than one which seeks to grind man’s every last hope into the dust. The Pensées, far more than any saccharine volume touting inner beauty, positive thinking or the realization of hidden potential, has the power to coax the suicidal off the ledge of a high parapet.

If Pascal’s pessimism can effectively console us, it may be because we are usually cast into gloom not so much by negativity as by hope. It is hope — with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians and our planet — that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.

Hence the relief, which can explode into bursts of laughter, when we finally come across an author generous enough to confirm that our very worst insights, far from being unique and shameful, are part of the common, inevitable reality of mankind. Our dread that we might be the only ones to feel anxious, bored, jealous, cruel, perverse and narcissistic turns out to be gloriously unfounded, opening up unexpected opportunities for communion around our dark realities.

We should honour Pascal, and the long line of Christian pessimists to which he belongs, for doing us the incalculably great favour of publicly and elegantly rehearsing the facts of our sinful and pitiful state.

2.

This is not a stance for which the modern world betrays much sympathy, for one of this world’s dominant characteristics, and certainly its greatest flaw, is its optimism.

Despite occasional moments of panic, most often connected to market crises, wars or pandemics, the secular age maintains an all but irrational devotion to a narrative of improvement, based on a messianic faith in the three great drivers of change: science, technology and commerce. Material improvements since the mid-eighteenth century have been so remarkable, and have so exponentially increased our comfort, safety, wealth and power, as to deal an almost fatal blow to our capacity to remain pessimistic — and therefore, crucially, to our ability to stay sane and content. It has been impossible to hold on to a balanced assessment of what life is likely to provide for us when we have witnessed the cracking of the genetic code, the invention of the mobile phone, the opening of Western-style supermarkets in remote corners of China and the launch of the Hubble telescope.

Yet while it is undeniable that the scientific and economic trajectories of mankind have been pointed firmly in an upward direction for several centuries, we do not comprise mankind: none of us individuals can dwell exclusively amidst the ground-breaking developments in genetics or telecommunications that lend our age its distinctive and buoyant prejudices. We may derive some benefit from the availability of hot baths and computer chips, but our lives are no less subject to accident, frustrated ambition, heartbreak, jealousy, anxiety or death than were those of our medieval forebears. But at least our ancestors had the advantage of living in a religious era which never made the mistake of promising its population that happiness could ever make a permanent home for itself on this earth.

3.

Christianity is not, in and of itself, an unhopeful institution. It merely has the good sense to locate its expectations firmly in the next life, in the moral and material perfection of a world far beyond this one.

This relegation of hope to a distant sphere has enabled the Church to be uniquely clear-eyed and unsentimental about earthly reality. It does not assume that politics could ever create perfect justice, that any marriage could be free of conflict or dissent, that money could ever deliver security, that a friend could be unfailingly loyal or, more generally, that Heavenly Jerusalem could be built on ordinary ground. Since its founding, the religion has maintained a usefully sober vision, of a kind that the secular world has been too sentimental and cowardly to embrace, about our chances of improving on the brute facts of our corrupted natures.

The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious — something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their apparent naivety and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realized on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics could together cure the ills of mankind.

We would be wise to locate ideas of perfection in another world altogether: Jan Brueghel the Younger, Paradise, c. 1620. (illustration credit 6.1)

4.

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships. We should cease to view the pessimism of religions as belonging to them alone, or as indelibly dependent on hopes for salvation. We should strive to adopt the acute perspective of those who believe in paradise, even as we live out our own lives abiding by the fundamental atheistic precept that this is the one world we will ever know.

5.

The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.

Christian and Jewish marriages, while not always jovial, are at least spared the second order of suffering which arises from the mistaken impression that it is somehow wrong or unjust to be malcontent. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan.

Notwithstanding their practical approach, these religions do recognize our desire to adore passionately. They know of our need to believe in others, to worship and serve them and to find in them a perfection which eludes us in ourselves. They simply insist that these objects of adoration should always be divine rather than human. Therefore they assign us eternally youthful, attractive and virtuous deities to shepherd us through life, while reminding us on a daily basis that human beings are comparatively humdrum and flawed creations worthy of forgiveness and patience, a detail which is apt to elude our notice in the heat of marital squabbling. ‘Why can’t you be more perfect?’ is the incensed question that lurks beneath a majority of secular arguments. In their effort to keep us from hurling our curdled dreams at one another, the faiths have the good sense to provide us with angels to worship and lovers to tolerate.

The faiths have the good sense to provide us with angels to worship and lovers to tolerate. (illustration credit 6.2)

6.

A pessimistic worldview does not have to entail a life stripped of joy. Pessimists can have a far greater capacity for appreciation than their opposite numbers, for they never expect things to turn out well and so may be amazed by the modest successes which occasionally break across their darkened horizons. Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, generally fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise.

Accepting that existence is inherently frustrating, that we are forever hemmed in by atrocious realities, can give us the impetus to say ‘Thank you’ a little more often. It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude: we no longer offer up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. On a superficial level, we might suppose that this is because there is no one to say ‘Thank you’ to. But at base it seems more a matter of ambition and expectation. Many of those blessings for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted. Is there really any need, we wonder, to carve out a moment of gratitude in honour of a sunset or an apricot? Are there not loftier goals towards which we might be aiming?

Seeking to induct us in a contrary attitude of humility, the Jewish Prayer Book of the United Congregation commends a specific prayer to be said on the occasion of ‘eating a seasonal fruit for the first time in the year’, and another to mark the acquisition of ‘a new garment of significant value’. It even includes a prayer intended to prompt admiration for the complexity of the human digestive system:

‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who formed man in wisdom and created in him many orifices and cavities.

It is revealed and known before the throne of Your glory that were one of them to be ruptured or blocked, it would be impossible to survive and stand before You.

Blessed are You, Lord, Healer of all flesh, who does wondrous deeds.’

7.

Religions have wisely insisted that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always slowly dying.

They have also, of course, in many cases believed in the possibility that a deity might be able to help us. We see this combination of despair and hope with particular clarity at Jerusalem’s Western or Wailing Wall, where since the second half of the sixteenth century, Jews have gathered to air their griefs and to beg their creator for help. At the base of the wall, they have written down their sorrows on small pieces of paper, inserted these into gaps among the stones and hoped that God would be moved to mercy by their pain.

The Wailing Wall, Jerusalem. (illustration credit 6.3)

Remove God from this equation and what do we have left? Bellowing humans calling out in vain to an empty sky. This is tragic and yet, if we are to rescue a shred of comfort from the bleakness, at least the dejected are to be found weeping together. Only too often, in bed late at night, we panic at sorrows which seem devilishly unique to us. No such illusions are possible at the Wailing Wall. It is clear that the whole race is forlorn. The Wall marks out a locus where the anguish we otherwise bear silently within us can be revealed for what it truly is: merely a thimbleful of sorrow in an ocean of suffering. It serves to reassure us of the ubiquity of disaster and definitively corrects the smiling assumptions unwittingly made by contemporary culture.

Among the advertisements for jeans and computers high above the streets of our cities, we should place electronic versions of Wailing Walls that would anonymously broadcast our inner woes, and thereby give us all a clearer sense of what is involved in being alive. Such walls would be particularly consoling were they able to afford us a glimpse of what in Jerusalem is reserved only for the eyes of God: the particulars of the misfortunes of others, the details of the broken hearts, dashed ambitions, sexual fiascos, jealous stalemates and ruinous bankruptcies that normally remain hidden behind our impassive fronts. Such walls would lend us reassuring proofs that others too were worrying about their absurdity, counting how few summers they had left, crying over someone who abandoned them a decade ago and dynamiting their chances of success through idiocy and impatience. There would be no resolutions on offer in these venues, no end to suffering, only a basic — and yet infinitely comforting — public acknowledgement that we are none of us alone in the extent of our troubles and our lamentations.

The gravest problems have no solutions, but it would help never again to have to labour under the illusion that we had been singled out for persecution. (illustration credit 6.4)