Free The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson Page B

vessels,” even poetry is a Darwinian exercise of insidious competition; and his suggestion that a great writer’s aim is to create “heterocosms,” alternative but accessible worlds, open to us all.
    We might have considered the sociologist Robert Bellah’s notion (echoing Descartes) of “civil religion”: that citizens, whatever their confession, venerate in a secular way such entities as national anthems, national flags, war victims, foundation myths, inaugurations and coronations, the funerals of great political figures; and espouse such unifying concepts as, in America, for example, the Constitution (and its various amendments) andwhat he calls “manifest destiny.” Or we might have considered Richard Sennett, who as a onetime musical prodigy turned sociologist has brought a kind of poetry into his discipline by examining aspects of the secular world that stand outside most traditional sociological categories: respect, craftsmanship, the rituals and pleasures of cooperation—and above all the way we get on with fellow citizens who are “alien” to us. He has examined, in secular detail, how we confront Karl Barth’s abstract idea of the “other,” and in doing so identifies this as a major predicament of our time and seeks practical ways to confront it.
    Or again, we might have looked at the American lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s secular theory of the origins of rights: namely, that rights do not come from God, or nature, or logic but from our piecemeal experience of injustice—rights come from wrongs; we are always more likely to agree on what wrongs exist than what a perfect system of justice would be. 2 Or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience , where he identifies the aim of life as a tussle between anxiety and boredom, the way out being autotelic activities, activities that are enjoyable in themselves, not for any larger purpose, because there is no larger purpose. On this account, there are four kinds of pleasurable activities— agon , where competition is the main dimension; alea , activities of chance, ilix , activities that alter normal perception; and mimicry , dance, theatre, the arts in general. When you close in on “flow,” however, it appears as yet another word for happiness-fulfillment (though perhaps more precise than other accounts), echoing phenomenology above all other approaches, and indeed the author does refer back to Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Bergson, Rilke and Whitehead all had an understanding of life as “flow.”
    All these and more could have been added to the mix. But if this exercise has been worth doing, one reason is that it has revealed overlaps between the ideas of many of the figures discussed. Some overlaps have been more obvious than others, but the very fact that they exist surely tells us something, gives us a starting point when trying to work things out for ourselves.
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    One place to start is with James Wood’s paraphrase of Thomas Mann, “the idea of one overbearing truth is exhausted.” Mann and Wood meant these words in a special way, but they apply more generally, too. The overallintellectual trajectory of the long twentieth century, of modernism and postmodernism, has been to reinforce the argument that there is not—there cannot be—any privileged viewpoint from which to look out upon the world. This has serious consequences for religion, and it doesn’t stop there. During the past 130 years many of the dominant political ideas (colonialism, imperialism, communism, fascism), the great psychological ideas (the unconscious, personality) and the great philosophical ideas (Hegelianism, positivism, Marxism) have been exploded too, to be replaced not by other grand “isms” but by much smaller, less ambitious, more pragmatic notions.
    We are concentrating on religion because God has been—and for many still is—the greatest and most overbearing idea there is or has ever been. But in