The Mystery of Being Human: God, Freedom and the NHS

– Preface –

The very virtues of the essay form may count against it. Brevity is seen as the mark of slightness and variety translates into lack of sustained purpose. The genre is, it seems, one of chamber pieces, even bagatelles, while truly serious writers aim at symphonies and operas: the fat novel, the weighty treatise, the book-length biography.

We can, of course, turn this on its head. Brevity, after all, is worn as a badge of honour by short story writers and lyric poets who are praised for packing much into small spaces. As for variety, we admire books of verse where death, a butterfly, an air-blue gown, and a rose-red sunset occupy successive pages, populated by perhaps a dozen lines offset from the chatter of the garrulous world by a moat of silence signified by wide margins. Collections of short fictions that introduce us to new characters, places, and stories at intervals of only a few pages win praise for the versatility and breadth of sympathy of the author. The essay, a genre with porous boundaries, equally at ease with argument, story-telling and reportage, with careful analysis and lyrical celebration, should surely not be ashamed of itself.

Collections of essays may also seem rather too obviously collected, rounding up items that have in common only the fact that they issued from the same writer and are (perhaps) looking for a second home. They are ‘occasional’ and the occasion may have passed. There is a more interesting truth hereabouts. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg spoke of his own philosophy as being ‘a doctrine of scattered occasions’. A brilliant scientist and free-ranging thinker, he gathered his philosophical thoughts in scrapbooks, and they never amounted to a system. He felt that there was something irreducibly multiple, fragmented, episodic, accidental in the thoughts of even the most focussed thinker. Lichtenberg was greatly admired by Ludwig Wittgenstein and would doubtless have approved of the latter’s description of his own unfinished posthumous Philosophical Investigations as ‘an album of sketches’.

Indeed, we might go on to the front foot and argue that length – or lack of it – respects the attention span of the reader or, if that too can be turned on its head, the reading span. The essay is a mind-portable form. The apparent unity and sustained flow of the novel, the big biography, or the treatise is not replicated in the experience of their readers. Reading is scattered through readings. A novel is dipped into on the toilet, on a tube train between stops, on the edge of sleep, in a doctor’s surgery when the news of a blood test is awaited. Its characters’ lives have to negotiate the torrent of experiences that is the reader’s life.

Among my publications is a 1,000-page trilogy on human consciousness, and a forthcoming treatise Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience at approximately eight hundred pages betrays that I am not a consistent advocate of the short form. But I am aware that the apparent unity and coherence of even the most tightly argued work, however scrupulous, rigorous, and comprehensive in its intention, is more appearance than reality. The boundaries are the result of decisions that are external to the matter; and within those boundaries there are gaps, elisions, and disconnections. The essay, which bears its provisional nature and incompleteness on its sleeve, is therefore more honest in this regard. It is an antidote to the fantasy of gathering the world up in one sustained glance: it respects the irreducible variousness of things, and the incompleteness of thought. The latter is intrinsically centrifugal, expressed in the tension between the processes of reflection, which have no natural boundaries, and its publishable products that have a clear beginning and end.

In short, the essay is an appropriate form for the humanism that I have been seeking to express for several decades often at great length. The pieces that follow are for the most part philosophical but they are relatively unbuttoned, though the philosophical novice may sometimes find them demanding. While larger ideas dominate over small observations, there is no pretence to a definitive treatment of the topics they address. The wonderfully witty philosopher J. L. Austin offered a footnote to one of the last papers he gave before his premature death:

I dreamed a line that would make a motto for a sober philosophy: ‘Neither a be-all nor an end-all be’.

It is in the spirit of this sentiment that these philosophical essays are offered to the reader. And, what is more, there is a hidden nerve of association connecting the pieces, so the occasions of their non-doctrine are not entirely scattered.

This is hinted at in the opening essay, ‘Humanity: Neither God’s Work nor a Piece of Nature’, which is the closest I can manage to a mission statement: namely, to try to characterise a secular humanism that, while distancing itself from religious belief, does not merely dismiss something that (for good or ill) has been central to our humanity. Nor does it subscribe to a naturalism that sees us as ultimately explicable by biological science. The essay – and, less explicitly, its successors – is a non-strident Prologue to a humanism that celebrates the infinite complexity of beings who are unique in unique ways; who are offset from nature as well as a part of it; and who are able to wake out of themselves and their organic condition, even to the point of believing in God and Eternity. Consistent with its non-stridency is what I hope is a balanced view of the impact on humanity of religious belief.

This approach to our humanity is explored in ‘On Being Thanked by a Paper Bag’ which reflects on the irreducible complexity of human consciousness, prompted by the everyday experience referred to in the title. A belief in our freedom – the cornerstone of human dignity – is defended in the third essay ‘How on Earth Can We Be Free?’

Freedom is, however, shaped and constrained by our circumstances. For this reason, the piece that follows, ‘Lord Howe’s Wicked Dream: A Report from an Undeveloping Country’ is not as out of place as it may seem in a book of largely philosophical essays. Illness makes it more difficult to philosophise and death makes it impossible. Anyone who is interested in sharing philosophical ideas with their fellow citizens should take an interest in their health. This is particularly true if, as in my own case, he spent most of his adult life working as a doctor. The essay exposes a recent assault on an institution, the NHS, and the values that have created and sustained it. Behind this is a wider regression towards barbarity. It is expressed in policies that have no electoral mandate, eating away at the foundations of the postwar settlement driven by an institutionally corrupt political class. Their spokespersons sound as if butter would not melt in their mouths, as they gas the hopes of the poorest and most vulnerable.

If there is a link between the polemic of this fourth essay and the argument of its successor – ‘All Is Number: Mathematics, Reality and the Madness of Max Tegmark’ – it is in the analogy between the reduction of values to prices in neo-liberal economics and of quality to quantities in physical science and the increasingly prevalent idea that the universe and the human world boils down to numbers.

In accordance with the humanist spirit of the opening essay, the final piece considers the significance that the ideas of God and Eternity may have for an infidel. It is motivated by the belief that escaping from religion is only the beginning, not the end, of a quest for deeper understanding of what we are. Humanity, after all, is a work in progress and truly humanist thought – that begins with questions and ends with questions – should reflect this.

1

– Humanity: Neither God’s Work nor a Piece of Nature –

Ihave called myself an atheist since I was a teenager. In recent years, however, I have noticed a tendency, particularly when on the podium, to describe myself as ‘a secular humanist’. This still sometimes seems to be a borrowed coat that is many sizes too large for my day-to-day existence. Religious believers probably feel the same when they classify the self that runs for buses, supports Manchester United, and waits impatiently to be served at the bar, as ‘Catholic’ or ‘Anglican’ or whatever.

My preference has to do with something believers point out with a regularity that I am inclined to call monotonous: namely, that ‘atheism’ is a negative term, a position defined merely by that which it opposes, like a vacuum by its non-vacuous surroundings. Being a ‘Not-ist’ doesn’t sound very fulfilling and most certainly does little justice to the philosophical sentiments that infuse the life and thought of the rich god-free stream of humanism.

More importantly, much atheist thought is, usually unintentionally, anti-humanist. It would be unfair and distracting to single out individual thinkers; sufficient to note that some of the most prominent theocides not only virulently reject the contribution that religious belief has made to the development of human culture but also espouse a naturalistic, and hence impoverished, understanding of humanity. The latter has been insufficiently noticed but it is a particular bugbear of mine. I’ll come to this presently, but first a glance at the more conventional case that humanists mount against religion: a look at the dark side.

It may seem scarcely necessary to preach an antisermon on the frequently malign role religion has played in human affairs. If I add my footprints to this well-trodden territory, it is because I would not wish you to think that I underestimate the importance of those things that rouse the passion of some of the most prominent contemporary atheists. I am as conscious as they of how religion has been used to justify atrocious behaviour in private and public life, from the domestic sphere to international politics, from the abuse of children to wars of conquest. You don’t have to have much knowledge of history to be aware of the abominations inflicted on human beings in its name: unspeakably bloody confessional wars – including the current conflicts in the Middle East that are setting Sunni against Shia and Islam against Christianity and everybody against everyone else; sectarian cruelty and injustice; the crushing of the life chances of women (and the destructive obsession that priests have with what goes into and comes out of the female pelvis, expressed in female genital mutilation and the control of fertility); and a cynical and opportunistic alignment with temporal powers in maintaining an unjust status quo that benefits the few at the top of the heap and keeps the many at the bottom.

With admirable exceptions, organised religion is intrinsically conservative, putting power behind the rich and powerful and only its rhetoric behind the poor and powerless. Even where churches and mosques and temples have not directly sponsored savagery, they have often found it prudent to remain silent and to avert their gaze when it is happening. God’s representative in the Vatican did not make too much of a fuss over the Holocaust. The Holy See also chose not to see in Croatia where, out of ecclesiastical self-interest, that vilest of war criminals Ante Pavelic was supported when he was in power and protected when he fell. In Rwanda in 1994, the Catholic hierarchy eagerly joined in the slaughter and their churches were auxiliary killing fields. In many cases, wickedness is normalised by the authority of priests and unquestioning obedience demanded of believers, justifying the extermination of unbelievers, or those whose very existence, because they worship the wrong gods or the right God in the wrong way, must be an offence to the Almighty.

Even the gentlest of divine beings, Jesus Christ, warned that those who did not help Him would be cursed and sent into ‘eternal fire’ (Matthew 25:41); and the Gospel’s bringer of peace and joy on a humble donkey could turn into a better mounted mass killer in the Book of Revelation. Doctrines in which Peace, Love, Mercy and Forgiveness are prominent are not infrequently promulgated with the aid of the sword, boiling oil, and the hangman’s noose.

God’s commitment to savagery pops up in the most surprising places. At a recent concert in a local church, the choir (made up of perfectly normal and seemingly decent individuals), lustily proclaimed – to Handel’s gorgeous music – that The Lord would ‘judge among the heathen, he shall fill the place with dead bodies: he shall wound the heads over many countries’ (Psalm 110.) Religiously justified wickedness, it appears, is not merely episodic and accidental but systemic.

Even allowing for the fact that people are perfectly capable of treating each other badly, and being egocentric, aggressive or cruel, without the assistance of religious belief, it is arguable that doctrinal loyalties amplify tribal antipathies. They furnish transcendental justification for unimaginable nastiness, enabling the victims, being heathens, infidels, followers of false gods, or whatever, to be seen as deserving of their horrible fate.

For some critics of religion, its propensity to foment or exacerbate conflict goes to its very heart. This is the burden of the French philosophe Denis Diderot’s anguished fable:

A man had been betrayed by his children, his wife and his friends. Treacherous partners had destroyed his fortune and made him destitute. Filled with hatred and deep contempt for the human race, he left society and took refuge in a solitary cavern. There, pressing his fists into his eyes, and planning revenge proportionate to his bitterness, he said: ‘Monsters! What shall I do to punish their acts of injustice and make them as wretched as they deserve? Ah, were it but possible … to put into their heads an illusion, which they would think more important than their own lives, on which they could never agree with each other …’ At that moment, he rushed out of the cavern crying ‘God! God!’ Countless echoes all around him repeated ‘God! God!’ The terrifying name was carried from pole to pole and everywhere it was heard with astonishment. Men at first fell down to worship, then they rose, asked questions, argued, became embittered, cursed one another, hated one another, and cut one another’s throats. Thus was the deadly wish of the hater of mankind fulfilled. For such has been the past history, and such is the future of a being who is as important as he is incomprehensible.

– Additions aux Pensées Philosophiques, 1770

The potential for religious violence within cultures is proportionate to the passion with which the convictions are held, the extent to which the religions are institutionalised, and the degree to which those institutions not only draw authority, but also power, from the domestic, civic, and political worlds in which they are located. A dogmatic religion expressed in a theocracy is the almost perfect recipe for human unhappiness. Beheading, behanding, and the generous use of the lash for apostasy, for the crime of resisting marital rape, for minor acts of theft, are imaginable only where religions dominate the spaces that should be occupied by civil society.

Behind the role of religions as an organiser and amplifier of earthly spite, vindictiveness, and hatred, there is, some have argued, a deeper source of the evils it has facilitated. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS, has been described as a death cult – which it most certainly is – but it is scarcely unique in this respect. The cult of death is implicit in many, perhaps all, religions. The devaluation of ordinary life is a correlative of the over-valuation of a putative life on the far side of death. This has wider consequences even than the slaughter of the innocents – or the retributive extermination of those deemed guilty, to keep the cycle of violence in motion: it may inhibit improvements that will make life this side of the grave more bearable for the hungry,