Religion for Atheists

II

Community

(illustration credit 2.1)

i. Meeting Strangers

1.

One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighbourliness which has been replaced by ruthless anonymity, a state where people pursue contact with one another primarily for restricted, individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love.

Some of our nostalgia centres around our reluctance to give charitably to others in distress, but we are as likely to be concerned with pettier symptoms of social separation, our failure to say hello to one another in the street, for instance, or to help elderly neighbours with the shopping. Living in gargantuan cities, we tend to be imprisoned within tribal ghettos based on education, class and profession and may come to view the rest of humanity as an enemy rather than as a sympathetic collective we would aspire to join. It can be extraordinary and odd to start an impromptu conversation with an unknown person in a public space. Once we are past the age of thirty, it is even somewhat surprising to make a new friend.

In attempting to understand what could have eroded our sense of community, an important role has traditionally been accorded to the privatization of religious belief that occurred in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. Historians have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbours at around the same time as we ceased communally to honour our gods. This begs the question of what religions might have done, prior to that time, to enhance the spirit of community, and, more practically, whether secular society could ever recover this spirit without relying on the theological superstructure with which it was once entwined. Could it be possible to reclaim a sense of community without having to base it on religious foundations?

(illustration credit 2.2)

2.

If we examine the causes of modern alienation in more detail, some of our sense of loneliness comes down to sheer numbers. The billions of people who live on the planet make the idea of talking to a stranger more threatening than it was in sparser days, because sociability seems to bear an inverse relationship to the density of population. We generally talk gladly to people only once we also have the option of avoiding them altogether. Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a hundred kilometres of desolate sand has the psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, though at heart no less well meaning or generous, must — in order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity — give no sign of even noticing the millions of humans who are eating, sleeping, arguing, copulating and dying only centimetres away from them on all sides.

Then, too, there is the matter of how we are introduced. The public spaces in which we typically encounter others — the commuter trains, the jostling pavements, the airport concourses — conspire to project a demeaning picture of our identities, which undermines our capacity to hold on to the idea that every person is necessarily the centre of a complex and precious individuality. It can be hard to stay hopeful about human nature after a walk down Oxford Street or a transfer at O’Hare.

We used to feel more connected to our neighbours in part because they were also often our colleagues. Home was not always an anonymous dormitory to be reached late and left early. Neighbours became well acquainted not so much because they were adept conversationalists, but because they had to bring in the hay or put up the school roof together, such projects naturally and surreptitiously helping to foster connections. However, capitalism has little patience for local production and cottage industry. It may even prefer it if we have no contact with our neighbours at all, lest they detain us on our way to the office or discourage us from completing an online acquisition.

In the past, we got to know others because we had no option but to ask them for help — and were ourselves asked for help in turn. Charity was an integral part of premodern life. It was impossible to avoid moments when we would have to request money from a near-stranger or to hand it out to a vagabond beggar in a world without a health-care system, unemployment insurance, public housing or consumer banking. The approach on the street of a sick, frail, confused or homeless person did not immediately inspire passers-by to look away and assume that a government agency would take care of the problem.

We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of our income for the communal good. But we do this almost without realizing it, through the anonymous agency of the taxation system; and if we think about it at all, it is likely to be with resentment that our money is being used to support unnecessary bureaucracies or to buy missiles. We seldom feel a connection to those less fortunate members of the polity for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin. Neither recipient nor donor feels the need to say ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you’. Our donations are never framed — as they were in the Christian era — as the lifeblood of an intricate tangle of mutually interdependent relationships, with practical benefits for the recipient and spiritual ones for the donor.

Locked away in our private cocoons, our chief way of imagining what other people are like has become the media, and as a consequence, we naturally expect that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles — which reinforces our impulse to trust only those few individuals who have been vetted for us by pre-existing family and class networks. On those rare occasions when circumstances (snowstorms, lightning strikes) succeed in rupturing our hermetic bubbles and throw us in with people we don’t know, we tend to marvel that our fellow citizens have shown surprisingly little interest in slicing us in half or molesting our children and may even be surprisingly good-natured and ready to help.

Solitary though we may have become, we haven’t of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love which sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a life-long and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general.

Dreams of meeting one person who will spare us any need for other people. (illustration credit 2.3)

Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centred around the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is ‘What do you do?’, our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned by the peanuts. In these competitive, pseudo-communal gatherings, only a few of our attributes count as currency with which to buy the goodwill of strangers. What matters above all is what is on our business cards, and those who have opted to spend their lives looking after children, writing poetry or nurturing orchards will be left in no doubt that they have run contrary to the dominant mores of the powerful and deserve to be marginalized accordingly.

Given this level of discrimination, it is no surprise that many of us choose to throw ourselves with a vengeance into our careers. Focusing on work to the exclusion of almost everything else is a plausible enough strategy in a world which accepts workplace achievements as the main tokens with which we can secure not just the financial means to survive physically, but also the attention that we require to thrive psychologically.

3.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two of the prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.

A Catholic Mass is not, to be sure, the ideal habitat for an atheist. Much of the dialogue is either offensive to reason or simply incomprehensible. It goes on for a long time and rarely overrides a temptation to fall asleep. Nevertheless, the ceremony is replete with elements which subtly strengthen congregants’ bonds of affection, and which atheists would do well to study and on occasion learn to appropriate for reuse in the secular realm.

Catholicism starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their parameters there will reign values utterly unlike those which hold sway in the world beyond, in the offices, gyms and living rooms of the city. All buildings give their owners opportunities to recondition visitors’ expectations and to lay down rules of conduct specific to them. The art gallery legitimates the practice of peering silently at a canvas, the nightclub of swaying one’s hands to a musical score. And a church, with its massive timber doors and 300 stone angels carved around its porch, gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane. We are promised that here (in the words of the Mass’s initial greeting) ‘the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ belong to all who have assembled. The Church lends its enormous prestige, accrued through age, learning and architectural grandeur, to our shy desire to open ourselves to someone new.

(illustration credit 2.4)

The composition of the congregation feels significant. Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values. The Mass actively breaks down the economic and status subgroups within which we normally operate, casting us into a wider sea of humanity.

In this secular age, we often assume that a love of family and a sense of community must be synonymous. When modern politicians speak of their wish to repair society, it is the family they hail as the quintessential symbol of community. But Christianity is wiser and less sentimental in this regard, for it acknowledges that an attachment to family may in fact narrow the circle of our affections, distracting us from the greater challenge of apprehending our connection with all of mankind; of learning to love kith as well as kin.

With similarly communal ends in mind, the Church asks us to leave behind all attachments to earthly status. It is the inner values of love and charity rather than the outer attributes of power and money that are now venerated. Among Christianity’s greatest achievements has been its capacity, without the use of any coercion beyond the gentlest of theological arguments, to persuade monarchs and magnates to kneel down and abase themselves before the statue of a carpenter, and to wash the feet of peasants, street sweepers and dispatch drivers.

The Church does more, however, than merely declare that worldly success doesn’t matter: in a variety of ways, it enables us to imagine that we could be happy without it. Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, the Church establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to class and titles. It seems to know that we strive to be powerful chiefly because we are afraid of what will happen to us without high rank: we risk being stripped of dignity, being patronized, lacking friends and having to spend our days in coarse and dispiriting surroundings.

It is the genius of the Mass to correct each of these fears in turn. The building in which it is performed is almost always sumptuous. Though it is technically devoted to celebrating the equality of man, it generally surpasses palaces in its beauty. The company is also enticing. We develop a desire to be famous and powerful when being ‘like everyone else’ seems a distressing fate, when the norm is mediocre and depressing. High status then becomes a tool to separate us from a group we resent and are scared of. However, as the congregants in a cathedral start to sing Gloria in Excelsis, we tend to feel that the crowd is nothing like the one we encountered in the shopping malls or the degraded transport hubs outside. Strangers gaze up at the vaulted, star-studded ceiling, rehearse in unison the words

‘Lord,

come, live in your people

and strengthen them by your grace’

and leave us thinking that humanity may not be such a wretched thing after all.

(illustration credit 2.5)

As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community which imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.

If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and (even more meaningfully) of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us, when we can acknowledge them, closer to our need for one another.

In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride — or superbia, in Augustine’s Latin formulation — takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we dare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The Mass encourages this sloughing off of pride. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert — all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition. We have no reason left to dissemble or lie in a building dedicated to honouring the terror and weakness of a man who was nothing like the usual heroes of antiquity, nothing like the fierce soldiers of Rome’s army or the plutocrats of its Senate, and yet who was nevertheless worthy of being crowned the highest of men, the king of kings.

(illustration credit 2.6)

4.

If we have managed to remain awake to (and for) the lessons of the Mass, it should by its close have succeeded in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes. It should also have given us a few ideas which we could use to mend some of the endemic fractures of the modern world.

One of the first of these ideas relates to the benefit of taking people into a distinct venue which ought itself to be attractive enough to evoke enthusiasm for the notion of a group. It should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favour of a joyful immersion in a collective spirit — an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern community centres, whose appearance paradoxically serves to confirm the inadvisability of joining anything communal.

Secondly, the Mass embodies a lesson about the importance of putting forward rules to direct people in their interactions with one another. The liturgical complexity of a missal — the directive way in which this book of instructions for the celebration of a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points — speaks to an essential aspect of human nature which benefits from being guided in how to behave with others. To ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.

An artificial construct can nevertheless open the door to sincere feelings: rules for how to conduct a Mass, Latin and English instructions from the Roman Missal, 1962. (illustration credit 2.7)

A final lesson to be taken away from the Mass is closely connected with its history. Before it was a service, before the congregants sat in seats facing an altar behind which a priest held up a wafer and a cup of wine, the Mass was a meal. What we now know as the Eucharist began as an occasion when early Christian communities put aside their work and domestic obligations and gathered together around a table (usually laden with wine, lamb and loaves of unleavened bread) in order to commemorate the Last Supper. There they would talk, pray and renew their commitments to Christ and to one another. Like the Jews with their Sabbath meal, Christians understood that it is when we satiate our bodily hunger that we are often readiest to direct our minds to the needs of others. In honour of the most important Christian virtue, these gatherings hence became known as agape (meaning ‘love’ in Greek) feasts and were regularly held by Christian communities in the period between Jesus’s death and the Council of Laodicea in AD 364. It was only complaints about the excessive exuberance of some of these meals that eventually led the early Church to the regrettable decision to ban agape feasts and suggest that the faithful should eat at home with their families instead — and only thereafter gather for the spiritual banquet that we know today as the Eucharist.

Before it was a service, the Mass was a meal. (illustration credit 2.8)

5.

It feels relevant to talk of meals because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company — cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants — but what is significant is the almost universal lack of venues that help us to transform strangers into friends.

While contemporary restaurants pay lip service to the notion of companionability, they provide us with only its most inadequate simulacrum. The number of people who nightly patronize restaurants implies that these places must be refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanisms by which to introduce patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which people chronically segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. The focus is on the food and the decor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections. In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself — the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes — has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.

Patrons will tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city, restaurants are adept at gathering people into the same space and yet lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

The food was not the most important thing: Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Last Supper, 1311. (illustration credit 2.9)

6.

With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant, true to the most profound insights of the Eucharist.

Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangements, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart, and kith favoured over kin. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of occupying the same space, guests would — as in a church — be signalling their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal — something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt — disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.

Many religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of food are propitious to moral education. It is as if the imminent prospect of something to eat seduces our normally resistant selves into showing some of the same generosity to others as the table has shown to us. These religions also know enough about our sensory, non-intellectual dimensions to be aware that we cannot be kept on a virtuous track simply through the medium of words. They know that at a meal they will have a captive audience who are likely to accept a trade-off between ideas and nourishment — and so they turn meals into disguised ethical lessons. They stop us just before we have a first sip of wine and offer us a thought that can be swilled down with the liquid like a tablet. They make us listen to a homily in the gratified interval between two courses. And they use specific types of food and drink to represent abstract concepts, telling Christians, for example, that bread stands for the sacred body of Christ, informing Jews that the Passover dish of crushed apples and nuts is the mortar used by their enslaved predecessors to build the warehouses of Egypt and teaching Zen Buddhists that their cups of slowly brewing tea are tokens of the transitory nature of happiness in a floating world.

Taking their seats at an Agape Restaurant, guests would find in front of them guidebooks somewhat reminiscent of the Jewish Haggadah or the Catholic missal, laying out the rules for how to behave at the meal. No one would be left alone to find their way to an interesting conversation with another, any more than it would be expected of participants at a Jewish Passover meal or in the Christian Eucharist that they might manage independently to alight on the salient aspects of the history of the tribes of Israel or achieve a sense of communion with God.

An Agape Restaurant, a secular descendant of the Eucharist and of the tradition of Christian communal dining. (illustration credit 2.10)

The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions which the youngest child present is assigned by the Haggadah to ask during the Passover ceremony (‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’, ‘Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?’ and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of superbia (‘What do you do?’, ‘Where do your children go to school?’) and towards a more sincere revelation of themselves (‘What do you regret?’, ‘Whom can you not forgive?’, ‘What do you fear?’). The liturgy would, as in the Mass, inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures.

One would be privy to accounts of fear, guilt, rage, melancholy, unrequited love and infidelity that would generate an impression of our collective insanity and endearing fragility. Our conversations would free us from some of our more distorted fantasies about others’ lives, by revealing the extent to which, behind our well-defended façades, most of us are going a little out of our minds — and so have reason to stretch out a hand to our equally tortured neighbours.

For new participants, the formality of the dinner-time liturgy would no doubt at first seem peculiar. Yet they would gradually appreciate the debt that authentic emotion owes to well-judged rules of conduct. After all, it is hardly natural to kneel down with a group of people on a stone floor, to gaze towards an altar and to intone together:

‘Lord,

we pray for your people who believe in you.

May they enjoy the gift of your love,

share it with others,

and spread it everywhere.

We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord.

Amen’

— and yet the faithful who attend a Mass do not hold such structured commands against their religion; instead, they welcome them for generating a level of spiritual intensity that would be impossible to summon up in a more casual context.

We benefit from having books that tell us how to behave at meals. Here, a Haggadah from Barcelona (c. 1350), an instruction manual for a precisely choreographed Passover meal, designed to convey a lesson in Jewish history while reanimating a sense of community. (illustration credit 2.11)

Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, the bipolar with the balanced, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to gain status by accessing so-called elite circles.

The notion that we could mend some of the tatters in the modern social fabric through an initiative as modest as a communal meal will seem offensive to those with greater trust in the power of legislative and political solutions to cure society’s ills. Yet these restaurants would not be an alternative to traditional political methods. They would be a prior step taken to humanize one another in our imaginations, in order that we would then more naturally engage with our communities and, unbidden, cede some of our impulses towards the egoism, racism, aggression, fear and guilt which lie at the root of so many of the issues with which traditional politics is concerned.

A Passover meal: social mechanisms are at work here that are as useful and complex as those in a parliament or a law court. (illustration credit 2.12)

Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have all made significant contributions to mainstream politics, but their relevance to the problems of community are arguably never greater than when they depart from the modern political script and remind us that there is also value to be had in standing in a hall with a hundred acquaintances and singing a hymn together or in ceremoniously washing a stranger’s feet or in sitting at a table with neighbours and partaking of lamb stew and conversation, the kinds of rituals which, as much as the deliberations inside parliaments and law courts, are what help to hold our fractious and fragile societies together.

Dressed in traditional white, Israeli Jews walk down a traffic-free road in Jerusalem on their way to attend synagogue on the Day of Atonement. (illustration credit 2.13)

ii. Apologies

1.

The effort of religions to inspire a sense of community does not stop at introducing us to one other. Religions have also been clever at solving some of what goes wrong inside groups once they are formed.

It has been the particular insight of Judaism to focus on anger: how easy it is to feel it, how hard it is to express it and how frightening and awkward it is to appease it in others. We can see this especially clearly in the Jewish Day of Atonement, one of the most psychologically effective mechanisms ever devised for the resolution of social conflict.

Falling on the tenth day of Tishrei, shortly after the beginning of the Jewish new year, the Day of Atonement (or Yom Kippur) is a solemn and critical event in the Hebrew calendar. Leviticus instructs that on this date, Jews must set aside their usual domestic and commercial activities and mentally review their actions over the preceding year, identifying all those whom they have hurt or behaved unjustly towards. Together in synagogue, they must repeat in prayer:

‘We have sinned, we have acted treacherously,

we have robbed, we have spoken slander.

We have acted perversely, we have acted wickedly,

we have acted presumptuously, we have been violent,

we have framed lies.’

They must then seek out those whom they have frustrated, angered, discarded casually or otherwise betrayed and offer them their fullest contrition. This is God’s will, and a rare opportunity for blanket forgiveness. ‘All the people are in fault,’ says the evening prayer, and so ‘may all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst’.

It was no one’s idea in particular to say sorry: Yom Kippur service, Budapest synagogue. (illustration credit 2.14)

On this holy day, Jews are advised to contact their colleagues, sit down with their parents and children and send letters to acquaintances, lovers and ex-friends overseas, and to catalogue their relevant moments of sin. In turn, those to whom they apologize are urged to recognize the sincerity and effort which the offender has invested in asking for their forgiveness. Rather than let annoyance and bitterness towards their petitioner well up in them once more, they must be ready to draw a line under past incidents, aware that their own lives have surely also not been free of fault.

God enjoys a privileged role in this cycle of apology: he is the only perfect being and therefore the only one to whom the need to apologize is alien. As for everyone else, imperfection is embedded in human nature and therefore so too must be the will to contrition. Asking others for forgiveness with courage and honesty signals an understanding of, and respect for, the difference between the human and the divine.

The Day of Atonement has the immense advantage of making the idea of saying sorry look like it came from somewhere else, the initiative of neither the perpetrator nor the victim. It is the day itself that is making us sit here and talk about the peculiar incident six months ago when you lied and I blustered and you accused me of insincerity and I made you cry, an incident that neither of us can quite forget but that we can’t quite mention either and which has been slowly corroding the trust and love we once had for each other. It is the day that has given us the opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to stop talking of our usual business and to reopen a case we pretended to have put out of our minds. We are not satisfying ourselves, we are obeying the rules.

2.

The prescriptions of the Day of Atonement bring comfort to both parties to an injury. As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appalls our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we have given to the unkind remark or the forgotten birthday, when we should long ago have become serene and impervious to such needles. Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so. Our reserve may also have a financial edge. Those who caused us injury are liable to have authority over us — they own the business and decide on the contracts — and it is this imbalance of power that is keeping us quiet, yet not for that matter saving us from bitterness and suppressed rage.

Alternatively, when we are the ones who have caused someone else pain and yet failed to offer apology, it was perhaps because acting badly made us feel intolerably guilty. We can be so sorry that we find ourselves incapable of saying sorry. We run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them, not because we aren’t bothered by what we did, but because what we did makes us feel uncomfortable with an unmanageable intensity. Our victims hence have to suffer not only the original hurt, but also the subsequent coldness we display towards them on account of our tormented consciences.

3.

All this the Day of Atonement will help to correct. A period in which human error is proclaimed as a general truth makes it easier to confess to specific infractions. It is more bearable to own up to our follies when the highest authority has told us that we are all childishly yet forgivably demented to begin with.

So cathartic is the Day of Atonement, it seems a pity that there should be only one of them a year. A secular world could without fear of excess adopt its own version to mark the start of every quarter.

iii. Our Hatred of Community

1.

It would be naive to suppose that the only reason we fail to create strong communities is because we are too shy to say hello to others. Some of our social alienation comes down to the many facets of our nature that have no interest whatsoever in communal values, sides that are bored or revolted by fidelity, self-sacrifice and empathy and which instead incline with abandon towards narcissism, jealousy, spite, promiscuity and wanton aggression.

Religions know full well about these tendencies and recognize that if communities are to function, they must be dealt with, but by being artfully purged and exorcized rather than simply repressed. Religions therefore present us with an array of rituals, many of them oddly elaborate at first glance, whose function is to safely discharge what is vicious, destructive or nihilistic in our natures. These rituals don’t of course advertise their brief, for to do so would bring a degree of self-consciousness that might make participants flee from them in horror, but their longevity and popularity prove that something vital has been achieved through them.

The best communal rituals effectively mediate between the needs of the individual and those of the group. Expressed freely, certain of our impulses would irreparably fracture our societies. Yet if they were simply repressed with equal force, they would end up challenging the sanity of individuals. The ritual hence conciliates self and others. It is a controlled and often aesthetically moving purgation. It demarcates a space in which our egocentric demands can be honoured and at the same time tamed, in order that the longer-term harmony and survival of the group can be negotiated and assured.

2.

We see some of this at work in the Jewish rituals attendant on the death of a beloved family member. Here the danger is that the mourner will be so overwhelmed with grief that he will cease to assume his responsibilities vis-à-vis the community. The group is therefore given instructions to allow the bereaved fulsome opportunity to express his sadness and yet it also applies a gentle and ever-increasing pressure to make sure that he eventually gets back to the business of living.

In the seven days of shiva that follow the funeral, there is allowance for a period of cataclysmic confusion, then a more restrained thirty-day period (shloshim) in which one is absolved from many group responsibilities, followed by a whole twelve months (shneim asar chodesh) in which the memory of the deceased is commemorated in a mourner’s prayer during synagogue services. But at the end of the year, after the unveiling of the headstone (matzevah), further prayers, another service and a gathering at home, the claims of life and the community are definitively reasserted.

3.

Funerals aside, most religious communal rituals display outward cheer. They take place in halls with mountains of food, dancing, exchanges of gifts, toasts and an atmosphere of levity. But beneath the gaiety, there is often also a kernel of sadness in the people at the centre of the ritual, for they are likely to be surrendering a particular advantage for the sake of the community as a whole. The ritual is in truth a form of compensation, a transformational moment when depletion can be digested and sweetened.

How can sadness be expressed without becoming all-consuming? The impulse might be to give up on life and the community altogether. The unveiling of a Jewish headstone a year after a father’s death. (illustration credit 2.15)

It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realizing that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.

The Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony is another ostensibly joyful ritual which endeavours to assuage inner tensions. Although apparently concerned with celebrating the moment when a Jewish boy enters adulthood, it is as much focused on trying to reconcile his parents to his evolving maturity. The parents are liable to be nursing complex regrets that the nurturing period which began with their son’s birth is drawing to a close and — especially in the case of the father — that they will soon have to grapple with their own decline and with a sense of envy and resentment at being equalled and superseded by a new generation. On the day of the ceremony, mother and father are heartily congratulated on the eloquence and accomplishment of their child even as they are also gently encouraged to begin to let him go.

Religions are wise in not expecting us to deal with all of our emotions on our own. They know how confusing and humiliating it can be to have to admit to despair, lust, envy or egomania. They understand the difficulty we have in finding a way to tell our mother unaided that we are furious with her or our child that we envy him or our prospective spouse that the idea of marriage alarms as much as it delights us. They hence give us special days under the cover of which our pestiferous feelings can be processed. They give us lines to recite and songs to sing while they carry us across the treacherous regions of our psyches.

Would we ever need ritual festivities if there wasn’t also something to be sad about? A Bar Mitzvah ceremony, New York State. (illustration credit 2.16)

In essence, religions understand that to belong to a community is both very desirable and not very easy. In this respect, they are greatly more sophisticated than those secular political theorists who write lyrically about the loss of a sense of community, while refusing to acknowledge the inherently dark aspects of social life. Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit. In their most sophisticated moments, religions accept the debt that goodness, faith and sweetness owe to their opposites.

4.

Medieval Christianity certainly understood this dichotomy. For most of the year, it preached solemnity, order, restraint, fellowship, earnestness, a love of God and sexual decorum, and then on New Year’s Eve it opened the locks on the collective psyche and unleashed the festum fatuorum, the Feast of Fools. For four days, the world was turned on its head: members of the clergy would play dice on top of the altar, bray like donkeys instead of saying ‘Amen’, engage in drinking competitions in the nave, fart in accompaniment to the Ave Maria and deliver spoof sermons based on parodies of the gospels (the Gospel according to the Chicken’s Arse, the Gospel according to Luke’s Toenail). After drinking tankards of ale, they would hold their holy books upside down, address prayers to vegetables and urinate out of bell towers. They ‘married’ donkeys, tied giant woollen penises to their tunics and endeavoured to have sex with anyone of either gender who would have them.

To stay sane, we may need an occasional moment to deliver a sermon according to Luke’s Toenail. A nineteenth-century illustration of the medieval Feast of Fools. (illustration credit 2.17)

But none of this was considered just a joke. It was sacred, a parodia sacra, designed to ensure that all the rest of the year things would remain the right way up. In 1445, the Paris Faculty of Theology explained to the bishops of France that the Feast of Fools was a necessary event in the Christian calendar, ‘in order that foolishness, which is our second nature and is inherent in man, can freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, and this is why we permit folly on certain days: so that we may in the end return with greater zeal to the service of God.’

The moral we should draw is that if we want well-functioning communities, we cannot be naive about our nature. We must fully accept the depths of our destructive, antisocial feelings. We shouldn’t banish feasting and debauchery to the margins, to be mopped up by the police and frowned upon by commentators. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful. We should be allowed to talk gibberish, fasten woollen penises to our coats and set out into the night to party and copulate randomly and joyfully with strangers, and then return the next morning to our partners, who will themselves have been off doing something similar, both sides knowing that it was nothing personal, that it was the Feast of Fools that made them do it.

5.

We learn from religion not only about the charms of community. We learn also that a good community accepts just how much there is in us that doesn’t really want community — or at least can’t tolerate it in its ordered forms all the time. If we have our feasts of love, we must also have our feasts of fools.

Yearly moment of release at the Agape Restaurant. (illustration credit 2.18)