Reason, Religion and Regretting Western Civilization

(image is a painting by Juan Sánchez Cotán referred to in Dalrymple's article)

Theodore Dalrymple is one of my favorite conservative writers. Here he, a nonbeliever himself, takes on the works of the "New Atheists" like Dennett, Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, Grayling, and Onfray. I find myself sympathetic to Dalrymple. Like him, I cannot believe in a personal God, and also like him I find a disturbing shallowness to the writings of neo-atheists.

Are Dalrymple and I simply too fastidious in our quarrels with our co-irreligionists? I think not.

First, I think the neo-atheists (shall I allow myself to use Dawkins' formulation, "brights"?) have a confused and sentimentalized view of "Reason."

Of course, men—that is to say, some men—have denied this truth ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.

David Hume once said, "Reason is, and always must be, only the slave of the passions." In doing a lot of thinking on the subject, I've concluded that reason is the congruence between our ends and our means for attaining them, that reason cannot of itself supply those ends, especially those ends that are categorically good in themselves.

Skepticism and doubt sit at one hand, but it's a very different and uncrafty hand that decrees the predominance of Reason as the ultimate goal and arbiter. Reasonableness, it seems to me, notices that reason has a lovely but limited dominion. This was once a paradox, but the time gives it proof.

I have not read the books in questions, though I have read many reviews and considerable postings by Hitchens and Harris, and I have read books by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. I think I have grasped their arguments through their own words.

Some of these people have a tin ear for religion and religiosity. I have a friend who uses the expression "imaginary friend" to refer to God, and who regards religion as "superstition." He and many atheists abstract religion into a few dimensions of belief or practice--explanation of the world--social hierarchy--fear of death--the herd morality--but never quite seem to have an imaginative and sympathetic view of the religious life. Like Dalrymple, I am a nonbeliever, but I am impressed by the ways that religion can cultivate the humane--the arts--ethics--devotion--gratitude.

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

Just this morning I walked into a conversation by my colleagues, a group of teachers decrying the inability of high school students to recognize Biblical allusions. One of the teachers was highly religious, one was an unbeliever, I am sure, and one seems to be a liberal Jew and the other I'm just not certain about. Yet all of us recognize that something vital is lost when young people are cut off from the literature of their ancestors. Many years ago I realized that to this extent I am a conservative, conserving a precious heritage that is, in great part, religious.

I have no patience with the "Celestial Teapot" or "imaginary friend" caricatures of religion. Sometimes religion makes people better than they would otherwise have been, and sometimes it makes them worse. I sometimes regret my lack of faith, but, though I doubt "Reason" find no lower-case reason that I can believe in a transcendent deity (an imaginary superbeing, as Woody Allen would say). Mr. Dalrymple and I are singing in the same choir. Actually, I did sing in an Anglican choir for a decade. I sang Bach and Palestrina and Vaughan Williams and Brahams and Rutter and Durufle. I could never recite the Creed, but when I sang, somehow, for the moment, I believed.