History is a nightmare, generally speaking, and the effect of religion, where its authority has been claimed, has been horrific as well as benign. Even in saying this, however, we are judging history in terms religion has supplied. The proof of this is that, in the twentieth century, “scientific” policies of extermination, undertaken in the case of Stalin to purge society of parasitic or degenerate or recalcitrant elements, and in the case of Hitler to purge it of the weak or defective or, racially speaking, marginally human, have taken horror to new extremes. Their scale and relentlessness have been owed to the disarming of moral response by theories authorized by the word “science,” which, quite inappropriately, has been used as if it meant “truth.” Surely it is fair to say that science is to the “science” that inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the “Christianity” that inspired Crusades. In both cases the human genius for finding pretexts seized upon the most prestigious institution of the culture and appropriated a great part of its language and resources and legitimacy. In the case of religion, the best and the worst of it have been discredited together. In the case of science, neither has been discredited. The failure in both instances to distinguish best from worst means that both science and religion are effectively lost to us in terms of disciplining or enlarging our thinking.
These are not the worst consequences, however. The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now.
“Worship” means the assigning or acknowledging of worth. Language, in its wisdom, understands this to be a function of creative, imaginative behavior. The suffix “-ship” is kin to the word “shape.” It is no wonder that the major arts in virtually every civilization have centered around religion. Darwin, always eager to find analogues and therefore inferred origins for human behavior among the animals, said that, to a dog, his master is a god. But this is to speak of religion as if it were mere credulous awe in the face of an apparently greater power and wisdom, as if there were only natural religion, only the Watchmaker. The relationship between creation and discovery — as Greek sculpture, for example, might be said to have discovered the human form, or mathematics might be said to have discovered the universe — is wholly disallowed in this comparison.
Religion is inconceivable because it draws on the human mind in ways for which nature, as understood by Darwinists, offers no way of accounting. Collaboratively, people articulate perceptions of value and meaning and worth, which are perhaps right and wrong, that is, profoundly insightful, or else self-interested or delusional, at about the rate of the best science. We tend to forget the long respect paid to the Piltdown man, a hoax whose plausibility arose from the fact that it seemed to confirm Darwinist evolutionary theory. We forget that it is only fairly recently that the continents have been known to drift. Until very recently the biomass of the sea at middle and great depths has been fantastically underestimated, and the mass and impact of microbial life in the earth has been virtually unreckoned. We know almost nothing about the biology of the air, that great medium of migration for infectious agents, among other things. The wonderful Big Bang is beset with problems. In other words, our best information about the planet has been full of enormous lacunae, and is, and will be. Every grand venture at understanding is hypothesis, not so different from metaphysics. Daniel Dennett attributes the brilliance of J. S. Bach to the fortuitous accumulation of favorable adaptations in his nervous system. Bach, of all people, is not to be imagined without a distinctive, highly elaborated conception of God, and life in a culture that invoked the idea of God by means of music. That is why his work is profound, rather than merely very clever. And it is profound. It is not about illusion, it is not about superstition or denial or human vainglory or the peculiarities of one sensorium.
We try now to establish value in economic terms, lacking better, and this has no doubt contributed to the bluntly mercenary character of contemporary culture. But economic value is extraordinarily slippery. Buying cheap and selling dear is the essence of profit making. The consumer is forever investing in ephemera, cars or watches that are made into symbols of prosperity, and are therefore desirable because they are expensive. So people spend a great deal of money for the advantages of being perceived to have spent a great deal of money. These advantages are diminished continuously by the change of styles either toward or away from the thing they have bought, which make it either commonplace or passé.
Or manufacture is taken from a setting in which adults work for reasonable wages and there are meaningful protections of the environment, and moved into a setting where children work for meager wages and the environment is desolated. This creates poverty among workers in both settings and destroys the wealth that is represented in a wholesome environment — toxins in the air or the water are great destroyers of wealth. So economic value is created at the cost of the economic value of workers who are made unable to figure as consumers, and of resources that are made unsuitable for any use. A few people may get rich, but the transaction altogether is a loss, perhaps a staggering loss. A global economy organized on these principles will be full of poor, sick, dispirited people, and shoddy goods, since they will be cheapened to suit the dwindling prosperity of the workforce, who are also the buying public. An objective accounting of value would find disaster here. Humane limits to the exploitation of people would solve the problem, but they would also interfere with competition, which is the great law of nature, supposedly, and which therefore functions as a value, because “science” has supplanted religion.
How much misery and premature death (most of it out of sight, granted) do we agree to when we accept this new economic order? Is it in any way an advance on colonialism? Do we imagine, as the colonialists sometimes did, that we are bringing benefits of civilization to the far reaches of the world? Are we not in fact decivilizing ourselves as we decivilize them? Why is there no outcry? Is it because we have cast off the delusion of human sanctity? I think we should study our silence for insight into other momentous silences in recent history.
This is not the worst of it. Now that the mystery of motive is solved — there are only self-seeking and aggression, and the illusions that conceal them from us — there is no place left for the soul, or even the self. Moral behavior has little real meaning, and inwardness, in the traditional sense, is not necessary or possible. We use analysts and therapists to discover the content of our experience. Equivalent trauma is assumed to produce more or less equivalent manifestations in every case, so there is little use for the mind, the orderer and reconciler, the artist of the interior world. Whatever it has made will only be pulled apart. The old mystery of subjectivity is dispelled; individuality is a pointless complication of a very straightforward organic life. Our hypertrophic brain, that prodigal indulgence, that house of many mansions, with its stores, and competences, and all its deep terrors and very rich pleasures, which was so long believed to be the essence of our lives, and a claim on one another’s sympathy and courtesy and attention, is going the way of every part of collective life that was addressed to it — religion, art, dignity, graciousness. Philosophy, ethics, politics, properly so called. It is a thing that bears reflecting upon, how much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam.