Religion for Atheists

X

Institutions

i. Books vs. Institutions

1.

When sceptics and atheists began their assaults on religion in the late eighteenth century, they did so primarily through the medium of books. They wondered in print whether a dead man could really roll back a tombstone and make his way unaided into the upper atmosphere, whether a young woman could be immaculately impregnated by a deity, whether battles could be won by the intercession of angels or earaches cured by contact with the shin bone of a martyred saint (Cornelius). And they tended to conclude their arguments by looking forward to the day when mankind might replace its superstitions with rationally based ideas, of the sort they admired in works of secular science, philosophy, literature and poetry.

Although these sceptics proved to be caustically entertaining critics of the faiths, they failed to appreciate the fundamental difference between themselves and their enemies: the latter were not relying primarily on the publication of books to achieve their impact. They were employing institutions, marshalling enormous agglomerations of people to act in concert upon the world through works of art, buildings, schools, uniforms, logos, rituals, monuments and calendars.

While laying out ideas in books — which might sell anywhere from a few hundred copies to a few hundred thousand at very best — may seem a noble enough ambition, the medium itself claims a dispiritingly meagre reach compared to the wide-ranging influence which institutions can wield in the development and perpetuation of attitudes and behaviours. In his Republic, Plato conveyed a touching understanding (born from experience) of the limits of the lone intellectual, when he remarked that the world would not be set right until philosophers became kings, or kings philosophers. In other words, writing books can’t be enough if one wishes to change things. Thinkers must learn to master the power of institutions for their ideas to have any chance of achieving a pervasive influence on the world.

However, secular intellectuals have, unfortunately, long suffered from a temperamental suspicion of institutions, rooted in the Romantic worldview which has coloured cultural life since the nineteenth century. Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and their tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, cut off from practical affairs and privately proud of being unable to read a balance sheet.

If people’s inner lives remain even today more likely to be influenced by the biblical prophets than by secular thinkers, it is due in large part to the fact that the latter have been consistently unwilling to create institutional structures through which their soul-related ideas might be successfully disseminated to a wider audience. Those with an interest in addressing the needs of the secular soul have typically lacked scale, stable conditions of employment and the capacity to transmit their views through the mass media. Instead, volatile individual practitioners run what are in effect cottage industries, while organized religions infiltrate our consciousness with all the might and sophistication available to institutional power.

The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.

The challenge is hence to create — via a study of religious institutions — secular entities that could meet the needs of the inner self with all the force and skill that corporations currently apply to satisfying the needs of the outer.

2.

Among the fundamental lessons of religions as institutions are the importance of scale and the benefits that flow from being able properly to aggregate money, intelligence and status.

Whereas Romanticism glorifies the achievements of singular heroes, religions know how much will be impossible if individuals act alone. Outside of an organization, we may now and then succeed in securing a brief spike of fame for ourselves, but we will never be able to place our achievements on a stable footing, consistently replicate our insights or bridge our weaknesses. Sole authorship cannot be a logical long-term response to solving the complexities of significant issues. We should ask why in matters of the soul we continue to believe in cloistered, companionless methods of assembly that we long ago disavowed in relation to the manufacture of pharmaceuticals or aircraft.

That we often think about deodorant and God but much less often meditate on the ideas of individual writers is reflected in a comparison of three statistics: the annual revenues of, respectively, the Catholic Church, a consumer goods company and the best-paid individual writer on the planet (the other 99.9 % of authors would not, of course, even register on the chart).

Then there is the matter of income. Institutions spare their members the humiliations and terrors of the sole trader. Their ability to pool capital, distribute it between projects and let it accumulate over decades enables them to survive lean periods and make adequate investments in research, marketing, recruitment and technology.

Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.

Scale has a similar impact on recruitment. Wealthy institutions can attract the best members of a generation, rather than just the blindly devoted or the irrationally committed. They can appeal to the large and psychologically healthy pool of candidates who care as much about garnering esteem and material comfort as they do about bettering the lot of mankind.

That a job is simply ‘interesting’ is never going to be enough to attract high numbers of the most energetic and ambitious employees.

Consider the respective careers of Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of the differences between their fates came down to the relative mental stability of the two men, but a good share of Aquinas’s equanimity must also be attributed to the benevolent spiritual and material atmosphere he benefited from, first at the University of Paris, where he was Regent Master, and then at the theological college he helped to found in Naples. Nietzsche felt he lived by contrast (and in his own words) ‘like a wild animal hunted out of every lair’. His life’s project — to replace Christian morality with a secular ideology revolving around philosophy, music and art — found no favour with nineteenth-century German academia, forcing the philosopher into nomadic exile. Although he is frequently celebrated as a supreme exemplar of heroic individualism, the philosopher would in truth have appreciated nothing more than to exchange his isolation for a collegial establishment which could have lent his ideas a greater weight in the world.

Institutions have the added benefit of being able to offer permanent status to individuals simply on the basis of their membership, saving them from having to earn it on their own, over and over again, year by year. A lone thinker may be near the end of his or her life — or even, like Nietzsche, long dead — before the public notices that a good idea has sprung from someone without corporate status. Within an institution, all members can tap into a reputation built up by illustrious forebears and reinforced by elegant buildings and sleek bureaucratic processes. They can take on an ancient title — priest or archdeacon, professor or minister — and make use, for genuine ends, of the resources and lustre stored within a structure that is larger and more enduring than themselves.

Many would no doubt argue that modern society must already have all the institutions it needs. In practice, however, those who are drawn to what Catholicism has termed cura animarum, ‘the care of souls’, but who feel unable to effect this care in religious ways, are all too likely to end up compromised for want of a coherent network of colleagues, a tolerable income and a stable and dignified professional structure within which to operate. It is a measure of how deeply ingrained the problem is that we would even now struggle to give Nietzsche a professional home.

Only religions have been able to turn the needs of the soul into large quantities of money. (illustration credit 10.3)

3.

Another useful feature of institutions is their ability to coalesce the efforts of their members through a shared visual vocabulary. Here again, the strategies of religions and commercial corporations overlap. While the sight of a cross emblazoned on the side of an ecclesiastical building or a lamb embroidered on an altar cloth has frequently prompted the observation that Christianity was an early and adept practitioner of the same kind of ‘branding’ that our modern corporations specialize in, the truth is, of course, the reverse: it is the corporations that have faithfully adopted the lessons in identity pioneered by religions.

The most important function of a brand is to promote consistency. Institutions trust that the appearance of their logo, whether on a remote mountainside or on top of a skyscraper, on a bedsheet or on a cloak, will instantly communicate the reliable presence of a particular set of values and act as a promise of uniformity and quality.

The enemy of branding is local variation. Here too we sense a certain tension between Romantic and institutional values, for whereas Romanticism appreciates the charms of the particular and the regional, the home-made and the spontaneous, institutions cannot forget the hazards of provincial initiatives. Instead of touching improvements on the rules of the centre, they see only depressing deviations from minimal standards. They are reminded of corruption, laziness, degeneracy and the abandonment of initial ambitions. To stamp out eccentricities, the training manual for new staff of the McDonald’s Corporation runs to 300 pages, providing instructions for every imaginable action and transaction: there are rules about where the employee’s name badge must be placed, what sort of smile each customer must be treated to and precisely how much mayonnaise should be added to the underside of every top bun. The hamburger company has little faith in what the members of its workforce will do if left to their own devices.

(illustration credit 10.4)

In this, at least, McDonald’s has much in common with the Catholic Church, which has similarly spent a good deal of its history struggling to ensure a regularity of service across a vast and scattered labour force. Taken collectively, its edicts — specifying details down to what sort of wine should be used at Holy Communion and what colour priests’ shoes ought to be — indicate extreme concern about the standards of its peripheral branches. Following the Fourth Council of the Lateran, convoked by Pope Innocent III in 1213, the Church decreed (with evident irritation over the frequency with which even such basic rules were being broken) that ‘clerics shall not attend the performance of mimes, entertainers or actors. They shall not visit taverns except in case of necessity, namely when on a journey. They are forbidden to play dice or games of chance or be present at them.’ And lest some be tempted to show flair in their hairstyles, it was added that ‘they must always have a shaved crown and tonsure’.

Heavy-handed though such decrees may have been, they helped to establish and enforce the consistent standards of ritual and performance that the faithful came to expect from the Church, and that all of us have in turn come to expect from corporations.

The advantages of an institutional delivery of soul-related needs: Father Chris Vipers listens to a confession at St Lawrence’s Church, Feltham, England, 2010. (illustration credit 10.5)

It is a singularly regrettable feature of the modern world that while some of the most trivial of our requirements (for shampoo and moisturizers, for example, as well as pasta sauce and sunglasses) are met by superlatively managed brands, our essential needs are left in the disorganized and unpredictable care of lone actors. For a telling illustration of the practical effects of branding and the quality control it is typically accompanied by, we need only compare the fragmented, highly variable field of psychotherapy with the elegantly discharged ritual of confession within the Catholic faith. Confession, well regimented in its every particular since the latter part of the fourteenth century, thanks to a stream of papal edicts and Vatican-issued manuals, is an epitome of the sort of reliable global service industry that would become the norm for consumer goods only in the mid-twentieth century. Everything from the positioning of the confessional box to the tone of voice used by the priest is governed by explicit rules, designed to assure all Catholics from Melbourne to Anchorage that their expectations for a redemptive examination of their soul will be met. No such provisions apply to our closest secular equivalent. Psychotherapy as currently practised lacks any consistency of setting or even any benchmarks for such apparently small yet critical details as the wording of the message on the therapist’s answering machine, his or her dress code and the appearance of the consulting room. Patients are left to endure a run of local quirks, from encounters with their therapists’ pets or children to gurgling pipework and bric-a-brac furnishings.

An imaginary branded chain of psychotherapists. Why should only phones and shampoos benefit from coherent retail identities? (illustration credit 10.6)

4.

After successfully defining their identity, many corporations have gone on to engage in what business writers refer to as ‘brand extension’, the process whereby a company revered for its approach in one commercial sector carries over its values into another. Companies that began by making suits, for example, have realized that their values could just as effectively be applied to the design of belts and sunglasses, from which point it was only a short leap to imagine translation into furniture, then restaurants, apartments and eventually whole holiday resorts. These companies have wisely recognized that their customers’ allegiance is to an ethos rather than to a single product, and that the beauty and goodness that were first distinguished in a tie could be no less present in a chair leg, an entrée or a sun lounger.

Inertia or unnecessary modesty has to date, however, prevented the most vigorous of modern companies from extending their brands across the full range of human requirements and, most cogently for the purposes of the present discussion, from applying their expertise to the apex of Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs. Corporations have instead chosen to set up shop along the base of this pyramid, making minor improvements to services and products designed to help us to sleep, eat, be safe or move while leaving unaddressed our desire to self-actualize, learn, love and inwardly grow. It is a failing of historic proportions, for instance, that BMW’s concern for rigour and precision has ended so conclusively at the bumpers of its cars rather than stretching to the founding of a school or of a political party, or that Giorgio Armani’s eponymous corporation has determinedly skirted the possibility of running a therapy unit or a liberal arts college.

Intellectual movements have likewise, and just as regrettably, shunned attempts at brand extension. They have failed to imagine that their ideas could generate complementary, analogous services and products in the material realm, and become more vivid to us for having physical equivalents.

What makes religions so distinctive is that they have dared to assert coherent brand identities across a diverse range of areas, from the strictly intellectual and theological to the aesthetic, sartorial and culinary. Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have all succeeded in relating larger ideas about the salvation of mankind to such subordinate material activities as managing weekend retreats, radio stations, restaurants, museums, lecture halls and clothing lines.

Because we are embodied creatures — sensory animals as well as rational beings — we stand to be lastingly influenced by concepts only when they come at us through a variety of channels. As religions seem alone in properly understanding, we cannot be adequately marked by ideas unless, in addition to being delivered through books, lectures and newspapers, they are also echoed in what we wear, eat, sing, decorate our houses with and bathe in.

Brand extension: Mr Giorgio Armani and Mr Mohamed Alabbar, Chairman of Emaar Properties, at the opening of the Armani Hotel Dubai, March 2010. (illustration credit 10.7)

5.

One way of describing the activities of companies and religions is as forms of commodification — the process whereby haphazardly available, ill-defined goods are transformed into named, recognizable, well-stocked and well-presented entities.

We are familiar enough with this process as it is carried out by corporations trading in material things: time and again, companies have scoured the globe in search of previously scarce consumer items and brought regularity to the supply of tea and paprika, kiwis and papaya, sparkling water and jojoba oil. Religions have demonstrated comparable abilities in the spiritual realm, managing, through the use of ritual, to rescue moments and feelings that under other circumstances might have been overlooked or forgotten, but which have instead — thanks to a religious version of commodification — acquired ennobling names and fixed dates in calendars.

We have almost all had the experience of gazing at the night sky in September, when the alignment of the planets makes the full moon look especially bright and close by. We may briefly have pondered its majesty and the challenge it poses to our normal, earth-centric perspective. But those of us who are neither astronomers nor astronauts are unlikely to have formalized our lunar observation in any way, or indeed to have given it much further thought beyond a few minutes of contemplation.

For Zen Buddhists in Japan, however, the ritual known as tsukimi has thoroughly commodified the business of moon-watching. Every year, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, followers gather at nightfall around specially constructed cone-shaped viewing platforms, where for several hours prayers are read aloud which use the moon as a springboard for reflections on Zen ideas of impermanence. Candles are lit and white rice dumplings called tsukimi dango are prepared and shared out among strangers in an atmosphere at once companionable and serene. A feeling is thereby supported by a ceremony, by architecture, by good company and by food — and so lent a secure place in every Japanese Zen Buddhist’s life.

Fixing appointments to appreciate the moon: a viewing platform used for tsukimi celebrations, Katsura Imperial Villa, Kyoto. (illustration credit 10.8)

Religions bring scale, consistency and outer-directed force to what might otherwise always remain small, random, private moments. They give substance to our inner dimensions — precisely those parts of us which Romanticism prefers to leave unregulated, for fear of hampering our chances of authenticity. They don’t solely relegate our feelings to volumes of poetry or essays, knowing that books are in the end hushed objects in a noisy world. When it is springtime, Judaism takes hold of us with a force that Wordsworth or Keats never employed: at the first blossoming of trees, the faithful are told to gather outdoors with a rabbi and together recite the birkat ilanot, a ritual prayer from the Talmud honouring the hand that made the blossom:

‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe,

Who did not leave a single thing lacking in His world,

Filling it with the finest creatures and trees,

So as to give pleasure to all of mankind.’

(Talmud, Berakhot, 33:2)

Though the modern world encourages us to feel things spontaneously and at our own pace, religions are wiser in putting dates in our diaries: here, the Jewish festival of Birkat Ilanot. (illustration credit 10.9)

We need institutions to foster and protect those emotions to which we are sincerely inclined but which, without a supporting structure and a system of active reminders, we will be too distracted and undisciplined to make time for.

The secular, Romantic world sees in commodification only loss, of diversity, quality and spontaneity. But at its finest the process enables fragile, rare but important aspects of existence to be more easily identified and more dependably shared. Those of us who hold no religious or supernatural beliefs still require regular, ritualized encounters with concepts such as friendship, community, gratitude and transcendence. We cannot rely on being able to make our way to them on our own. We need institutions that can remind us that we need them and present them to us in appealing wrappings — thus ensuring the nourishment of the most forgetful and un-self-aware sides of our souls.

6.

Plato’s hope that philosophers might be kings, and kings philosophers, was to be partially realized many hundreds of years after he expressed it in the Republic, when in AD 313, thanks to the efforts of Emperor Constantine, Jesus took up his position at the head of a gigantic state-sponsored Christian Church and thereby became the first quasi-philosophical ruler to succeed in propagating his beliefs with institutional support. A similar combination of power and thought can be found in all the major religions, alliances which we can admire and learn from without necessarily subscribing to any of their ideologies. The question we face now is how to ally the very many good ideas which currently slumber in the recesses of intellectual life with those organizational tools, many of them religious in origin, which stand the best chance of giving them due impact in the world.

ii: Auguste Comte

1.

This book is not the first to attempt to reconcile an antipathy towards the supernatural side of religion with an admiration for certain of its ideas and practices; nor is it the first to be interested in a practical rather than a merely theoretical effect. Out of the many efforts in this line, the most determined was undertaken in the nineteenth century by the visionary, eccentric and only intermittently sane French sociologist Auguste Comte.

Comte’s ideas proceeded from a characteristically blunt observation that in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, children and those suffering the final stages of incurable diseases. At the same time, Comte recognized, as many of his contemporaries did not, that a secular society devoted solely to the accumulation of wealth, scientific discovery, popular entertainment and romantic love — a society lacking in any sources of ethical instruction, consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity — would fall prey to untenable social maladies.

Comte’s solution was neither to cling blindly to sacred traditions nor to cast them collectively and belligerently aside, but rather to identify their more relevant and rational aspects and put them to use. The resulting programme, the outcome of decades’ worth of thought and the summit of Comte’s intellectual achievement, was a new religion, a religion for atheists or, as Comte termed it, a Religion of Humanity, an original creed expressly tailored to the specific emotional and intellectual demands of modern man, rather than to the needs of the inhabitants of Judaea at the dawn of the Christian era or of northern India four centuries before that.

Comte presented his new religion in two volumes, the Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion and the Theory of the Future of Man. He was convinced that humanity was still at the beginning of its history and that all kinds of innovation — however bold and far-fetched they might initially sound — were possible in the religious field, just as in the scientific one. There was no need to stay loyal to beliefs dating from a time when humans had barely learned how to fashion a wheel, let alone build a steam engine. As Comte pointed out, no one intent on starting a new religion from scratch in the modern era would dream of proposing anything as hoary and improbable as the rituals and precepts bequeathed to us by our ancestors. The age he lived in, he asserted, afforded him a historic opportunity to edit out the absurdities of the past and to create a new version of religion which could be embraced because it was appealing and useful, rather than be clung to because it induced fear and represented itself as the only passport to a better life.

Comte was a keen historian of the faiths and his new religion turned out to be made up largely from some of the best bits of the old ones. He drew most heavily from Catholicism, which he judged to be abhorrent in the majority of its beliefs yet nonetheless well stocked with valuable insights about morality, art and ritual — and also essayed occasional forays into the theology of Judaism, Buddhism and Islam.

Rather than complain about the shortcomings of existing religions, it may sometimes be better just to invent a new one: Auguste Comte, 1798–1857. (illustration credit 10.10)

Comte sought above all else to correct the dangers to which he felt modern atheists were exposed. He believed that capitalism had aggravated people’s competitive, individualistic impulses and distanced them from their communities, their traditions and their sympathies with nature. He criticized the nascent mass media for coarsening sensibilities and closing off chances for self-reflection, seclusion and original thought. In the same breath, he blamed the cult of Romanticism for putting too much strain on the conventional family and for promoting a falsely egoistic understanding of love. He lamented the arbitrary way in which, as soon as people felt they could no longer credit Jesus’s status as a divine being, they also had to forgo all the wisdom promulgated by Christianity. Comte at first hoped that secular schools and universities could become the new educators of the soul, imparting ethical lessons rather than mere information to their students, but he came to realize that capitalism would in the end always favour a skilled, obedient and unintrospective workforce over an inquisitive and emotionally balanced one.

Comte’s overall scheme for his religion began with a plan for an enormous new priesthood, which would employ 100,000 people in France alone. Despite the shared title, these priests were to be very different from those of the Catholic Church: they would be married, well integrated into the community and entirely secular, combining the skills of philosophers, writers and what we would now call psychotherapists. Their mission was to nurture the capacities for happiness and the moral sense of their fellow citizens. They would engage in therapeutic conversations with those plagued by problems at work or in love, deliver secular sermons and write jargon-free philosophical texts on the art of living. Along the way, this new priesthood would provide steady employment for the sort of people (among whose ranks Comte counted himself) who possessed a strong desire to help others and cultural and aesthetic interests, but who had been stymied by an inability to find work in universities and were thus forced to eke out an insecure living by writing for newspapers or peddling books to an indifferent public.

Because Comte appreciated the role that architecture had once played in bolstering the claims of the faiths, he proposed the construction of a network of secular churches — or, as he called them, churches for humanity. These would be paid for by bankers, for in his estimation the emergent banking class contained an unusually high proportion of individuals who were not only extremely wealthy but also intelligent, interested in ideas and capable of being swayed towards goodness. In a gesture of gratitude, the exterior façades of these secular churches would feature prominent busts of their banker-donors, while inside, large halls would be decorated with portraits of the pantheon of the new religion’s secular saints, including Cicero, Pericles, Shakespeare and Goethe, all singled out by the founder for their capacity to inspire and reassure us. Above a west-facing stage, inscribed in large gold letters, an aphorism would sum up Comte’s belief in intellectual self-help: ‘Connais-toi pour t’ameliorer’ (‘Know yourself to improve yourself’). Priests would deliver daily talks on such subjects as the importance of being kind to one’s spouse, patient with one’s colleagues, earnest in one’s work and compassionate towards the less fortunate. Churches would become the locus for a continuous round of festivals of Comte’s own inventive design: in the springtime there would be a celebration in honour of wives and mothers, in the summer, one to mark the momentous contribution of the iron industry to human progress and in the winter a third to offer thanks to domestic and farm animals like dogs, pigs and chickens.

Comte knew that the traditional faiths had cemented their authority by providing their adherents with daily or even hourly schedules of whom or what they ought to think about, rotas which were typically pegged to the commemoration of a holy figure or supernatural incident. So in the religion of humanity, every month would be officially devoted to a specific field of endeavour — from marriage and parenthood to art, science, agriculture and carpentry — and every day within that month to an individual who had made a significant contribution to a field. In November, the month of craft, the 12th, for example, would be the day of Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the industrial cotton-spinning mill, and the 22nd of Bernard Palissy, the French Renaissance potter, a model of endurance who famously tried for sixteen fruitless years to reproduce the glaze on Chinese porcelain.

2.

Regrettably, Comte’s unusual, complex, sometimes deranged but always thought-provoking project was derailed by a host of practical obstacles. Its author was denounced by both atheists and believers, ignored by the general public and mocked by the newspapers. Towards the end of his life, despairing and frail, he took to writing long and somewhat threatening letters in defence of his religion to monarchs and industrialists across Europe — including Louis Napoleon, Queen Victoria, the Crown Prince of Denmark, the Emperor of Austria, 300 bankers and the head of the Paris sewage system — few of whom even bothered to reply, much less offered their financial support. Without seeing any of his ideas realized, Comte died at the age of fifty-nine, on 5 September 1857, or, according to his own calendar, in the month of philosophy, on the day honouring the achievements of the French astronomer Nicolas Lacaille, who in the eighteenth century had identified more than 10,000 stars in the southern hemisphere and now has a crater named after him on the dark side of the moon.

3.

Notwithstanding its many oddities, Comte’s religion is hard to dismiss out of hand, for it identified important fields in atheistic society that continue to lie fallow and to invite cultivation and showed a pioneering interest in generating institutional support for ideas. His ability to sympathize with the ambitions of traditional religions, to study their methods and to adapt them to the needs of the modern world reflected a level of creativity, tolerance and inventiveness to which few later critics of religion have been capable of rising.

Comte’s greatest conceptual error was to label his scheme a religion. Those who have given up on faith rarely feel indulgent towards this emotive word, nor are most adult, independent-minded atheists much attracted to the idea of joining a cult. That Comte was not particularly sensitive to such subtleties was made clear when he began to refer to himself as ‘the Great Priest’, a pronouncement which must at a stroke have wiped out his appeal among the more balanced members of his audience.

Comte’s legacy, nevertheless, was his recognition that secular society requires its own institutions, ones that could take the place of religions by addressing human needs which fall outside the existing remits of politics, the family, culture and the workplace. His challenge to us lies in his suggestion that good ideas will not be able to flourish if they are always left inside books. In order to thrive, they must be supported by institutions of a kind that only religions have so far known how to build.

While no churches for the Religion of Humanity were ever built in Comte’s lifetime, several decades after his death a group of Brazilian enthusiasts (one of them, as Comte himself had predicted, a wealthy banker) came together to fund the first such institution in Paris. They initially planned to erect a large edifice in the Place de la Bastille, but after reviewing the scope of their funds, they settled instead on adapting an apartment on the first floor of a building in the Marais. They hired an artist about whom history has subsequently been silent to paint portraits of the founder’s secular saints and, at the front of the converted living room, an imposing neo-altarpiece of a woman and child, representing Humanity holding the Future in her arms. (illustration credit 10.11)

Comte’s secular saints included Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Descartes and the physiologist Bichat. (illustration credit 10.12)

iii. Conclusion

1.

A central problem with any attempt to rethink some of the needs left unmet by the ebbing of religion is novelty.

Whereas we are for the most part well disposed to embrace the new in technology, when it comes to social practices, we are as deeply devoted to sticking with what we know. We are reassured by traditional ways of handling education, relationships, leisure time, ceremonies and manners. We are especially resistant to innovations which can be pegged to the thought of one person alone. To have the best chance of being taken up, ideas should seem like the product of common sense or collective wisdom rather than an innovation put forward by any single individual. What would likely be seen as a bold innovation in software can too easily, in the social sphere, come across as a cult of personality.

It is to the benefit of most religions that they have been around for many centuries, a characteristic which appeals strongly to our fondness for what we are accustomed to. We naturally defer to practices that we would reject as extraordinary if they were newly suggested to us. A few millennia can do wonders to render a fanciful idea respectable. A ritual pilgrimage to the shrine of St Anthony may be inherently no less strange, and perhaps even more irrational, than a pilgrimage around an orbital motorway, but the shrine in Padua enjoys at least one great advantage over the M25 in having been in place since the middle of the thirteenth century.

2.

Fortunately for the concepts examined here, none are new. They have existed for most of human history, only to be over-hastily sacrificed a few hundred years ago on the altar of Reason and unfairly forgotten by secular minds repelled by religious doctrines.

It has been the purpose of this book to identify some of the lessons we might retrieve from religions: how to generate feelings of community, how to promote kindness, how to cancel out the current bias towards commercial values in advertising, how to select and make use of secular saints, how to rethink the strategies of universities and our approach to cultural education, how to redesign hotels and spas, how better to acknowledge our own childlike needs, how to surrender some of our counterproductive optimism, how to achieve perspective through the sublime and the transcendent, how to reorganize museums, how to use architecture to enshrine values — and, finally, how to coalesce the scattered efforts of individuals interested in the care of souls and organize them under the aegis of institutions.

3.

It has already been conceded that a book cannot achieve very much on its own. It can, however, be a place to lay down ambitions and begin to sketch out some intellectual as well as practical trajectories. The essence of the argument presented here is that many of the problems of the modern soul can successfully be addressed by solutions put forward by religions, once these solutions have been dislodged from the supernatural structure within which they were first conceived. The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.