An Encomium for Richard Holloway
I admire Richard Holloway for his courage. Here is a religious man who, from 1986-2000, was Bishop of Edinburgh; a man of virtue concerned with his neighbor, with social justice, and with the common good; and, not the least, a contemplative man who somewhere along the way lost his faith but not his desire for transcendence. I don’t know when his doubts became so substantial that they compelled him to leave the Anglican Church, but I imagine that the decision came only after the crisis had become too acute to ignore and too great to bear.
What brought on this crisis, one that emerged, no doubt, over the course of many years only to reach critical mass in the past decade, was the feeling that traditional religion had lost its grip on the modern world together with the sense that the general account offered by evolution could no longer be denied.
The loss of traditional religion is still movingly recorded in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” a poem with which Holloway is all too familiar. Here, the speaker describes his experience of walking into a church and of finding that this hallowed space, a space that had once been suffused with life, meaning, and community, has since been abandoned. And what does he do? He goes through the motions, taking off his hat, signing the guest book, and intoning “Here endeth” too loudly. Is this a museum, a tomb, a ruin? And what does he wonder? Only how we’ll get on after the rituals that in previous epochs had bound us together have ceased to be practiced. He sees that this life-world has lost its sense; that the people have gone elsewhere (but where have they gone?); that the church, for millennia a symbol of communion and love, is now but a relic of another world, one dimly remembered yet still vaguely felt.
And that is the thing, really: the poem speaks to us because it inhabits a certain post-religious sensibility, marking off the death of traditional religion but also the absence of some serviceable replacement. There is honesty in this (if one can describe a poem as being “honest”) since the poem voices the question rising up from a life need. Accordingly, “Church Going” is inoculated against “bland nihilism,” a matter-of-fact ethos of a later generation where the question—whither has fled?—no longer arises, at least not with the urgency it once did.
I admire Holloway first, therefore, because he is attuned to the melancholy of our time but also to the hope for something more, something else. Throughout his writings, he acknowledges that something deep has gone missing but that we can’t go home again. For even if we abandon traditional religion, “we have not necessarily abandoned the religious quest,” he says in Looking in the Distance, “not if we think of it as the name we give to humanity’s preoccupation with its own meaning or lack of meaning.”
Here we are in exile for once we grant the general truths of evolution, we realize that there is no going back. Darwin’s revolution, we know, amounted to replacing a providential order with an interminable process of adaptation to contingencies, pressures, and circumstances. Under this new dispensation, human beings do not fit into a hierarchy of being. Rather, they are natural organisms in many respects like any others, participating in a world filled with remarkable complexity as well as ineradicable transience. In consequence, we have no pre-given purpose, no all-encompassing framework with which to make sense of our lives, no shared structure that gives weight to our life projects.
On the one hand, the feeling of secularism resembles that of spring: both lighten our metaphysical load. We modern secularists needn’t worry that our lives do not conform to an alien ideal. As Hegel beautifully put it, unhappy consciousness was always a temptation resulting from positing an ideal that went beyond our human capacities. However much we strive to approach the essential, however steadfast we remain in our endeavors, still the distance between the real and the ideal shall remain. But, thankfully, no more of that.
On the other hand, it seems that it’s difficult to get comfortable in our post-metaphysical seats no matter how hard we try. During the morning well before dawn, we might fall into nihilistic despair, a mood Holloway describes as flowing from a “sense of bafflement at the massive indifference of the universe.” How puzzling, Holloway remarks, that we’re conscious beings surrounded on all sides by an unconscious universe. To be sure, we have no trouble understanding how we came about—Antonio Damasio, among others, has given us a naturalistic account of the emergence of phenomenal and introspective consciousness out of embodied life—but we are still no closer to explaining why we’re here. Unless, that is, we assign the “why” question to another epoch and seek to assure ourselves that such an inquiry betokens an error in judgment or, to be more precise, an illusion harking back to premodernity.
And if it doesn’t? And if we still take nihilism seriously, working to quiet our despair not by diagnosing our condition as megalomania but by engaging in rational inquiry? Then what ensues is a perilous antinomy between traditional faith (God imbues the world with meaning) and existentialism (crudely put, meaning is constructed). But while the idea of a providential order has collapsed, the existential slogan that “we make life meaningful” seems more like a catch-all marketing slogan than like rigorous speculative philosophy.
“Traditional religion has collapsed? Hardly!,” replies the theist pointing to sociological studies indicating an uptick in self-identified religious observers in the developing and developed world. What’s more, eclectic, “postmodern” religions are springing up every day in American suburbs near you and in exurbs around the corner. A latter-day Dr. Johnson, the theist kicks the stone in front of him and, foot now throbbing, blurts out, “I refute it thus!”
Not exactly. Traditional religion lives on because it promises to fulfill what Hegel calls “objective spirit”: the identification of a subject with an institution. In Hegel’s account, I am positively free insofar as I can see myself as embodied in institutional life, embodied, for instance, within the walls of the church, in its practices, and through its forms of charity. Indeed, in his First Encyclical God is Love (Deus Caritas Est), Pope Benedict echoes this line of thought, arguing that the spirit of the Catholic Church is caritas. (To be sure, this line of thought of necessity throws up the doubt that the Church is not, or has not always been, an instrument of caritas in practice.) God’s love thereby finds expression in the giving of alms to the needy, and who among us has never been needy? Especially in Latin American countries where tradition is still an integral part of everyday life, we should expect to see Catholicism remain a living force for some time to come.
However, this does not belie the fact that the spirit of traditional religion is slowly dying. Alienation from institutional life seems to be an undeniable fact about the modern world. Perhaps this is the natural result of the spirit of Protestantism. For once Reformers rejected the authority of the Church and once our relation to God became a matter of the heart, it was only a matter of time—the slow drift of time—before the divine itself was put into question. In this story, sociality gave way to interiority which, after the Darwinian revolution, gave rise to nihilism. The God hypothesis, finally, becomes unnecessary. Unable thus to regard our potentialities as being actualized in and through traditional institutions—the bourgeois family which has yet to accommodate the plurality of sexual practices, educational establishments which feed on individual achievement and which seek to foster “self-esteem,” and, above all, the church whose messages seem somehow written for those that came before us—we muddle on. Some experiment with new forms of mystical and religious practices such as Cafh, New Ageism, and ecological pantheism while others like Holloway admit with stirring honesty to being lost in the wilderness.
On other side of the antinomy lies existentialism, which, I’m about to argue, is just as spiritually unsatisfying. In “Navigating Past Nihilism,” Sean Kelly claims that we need no more than pluralism in order to flourish. He writes approvingly (Hegel would have said “tragically”) that the modern world is filled with “many distinct and incommensurate good ways of life.” There is thus no single summum bonum toward which we strive. Rather, there are many to choose from and plenty, he implies, that are choiceworthy. It is this latter implication that sounds suspect.
Robert Nozick’s distinction between value and meaning sheds some light on the problem with Kelly’s pluralistic solution. In The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, Nozick claims that “[v]alue involves something’s being integrated within its own boundaries, while meaning involves its having some connection beyond these boundaries.” If I value a painting, then I must be attending to whatever salient features bring a certain unity to the work. And if I find meaning in my participation in a neighborhood cause, then I must be making a connection with some larger whole that is beyond me but of which I am a part. Crucially, Nozick goes one step further, arguing that value and meaning are “coordinate notions”: “[m]eaning can be gained by linking with something of value.” (To up the ante, I would add the word “only” after gained.)
Here, Nozick has put his finger on something, and that something is the “wastrel problem.” I may take my relationship to some larger entity to be a meaningful one, but what if that object to which I am attached is not something of intrinsic value? I may, after all, be deluded or self-deceived. Suppose I were expending time, effort, and care on behalf of a particular cause yet suppose that cause turned out to be not at all worthwhile. Then wouldn’t I be wasting my life? Indeed, how do we know that we’re not also wasting ours?
I don’t see how the pluralism Kelly defends can immunize us from living in a society whose shelves are well-stocked with real and make-believe wastrels. “But perhaps that’s simply the price we pay for living in a pluralistic society. Give people freedom. Tell them that there’s only one constraint on their doing what they want: that they don’t go out and harm their neighbors. If they don’t live meaningful lives, what of it? That’s their business, not mine.”
This libertarian reply, whether caricatured or accurate I can’t say for sure, is shocking inasmuch as it assumes that there is no such thing as society. The essence of our being is to be an individual. Yet if in an atomistic, pluralistic society we can all be wastrels, unsure exactly what end we should aim at, then how are we not slipping even deeper into nihilism? Or have we simply managed to forget the problem of nihilism entirely as we go about pursuing our enlightened or not so enlightened self-interest?
My provisional conclusion is that we need a telos that directs and organizes our ideas, actions, and life plans, yet, in a secular age, we seem to have no idea where to look for it. What then?
We need to be careful lest we confuse being virtuous with finding meaning. New Atheists are right to say that we needn’t resort to religious absolutism in order to be good. Of course, one can lead a life of virtue, a life of kindness, thoughtfulness, and tolerance, without grounding one’s virtues in religious principles or practices. I would even go further and say that all morality is of its very nature “godless”: it is without god, not of or about god, that is to say, not pertaining to the category of god. But the person who fulfills all her duties may still be paralyzed by early morning despair. Unlike positivists who insist that the question of meaning is unintelligible and that we’d do well to swear off the problem of meaning altogether, Holloway seeks to preserve some spiritual orientation in human life. But this dimension is scarcely more than a mode of vague, indistinct intuiting. Sensing that there is an absence of the divine when he “looks in the distance,” he feels not “neutral agnosticism” but “committed unknowing.”
This, I think, is the stuff of tragedy with cognition claiming not to know conflicting with passion’s demand that there be something. And this tragic conflict would help explain why Holloway resorts to poetry and why he speaks in terms of moods. His early morning mood, nihilistic despair, is followed by a predawn wistfulness, which will lead to others in turn. The first mood accompanies the claim of absolute absence, the second alludes to an absence that could have once been but now is not. Both moods describe poetic experiences where giving expression to a feeling is not all that matters, yet—for all that and at least for the time being—it is all that can be hoped for.
All this makes life into something of a gamble. Living well thus requires honesty and humility in order to persevere as well as courage and constancy in order to be strong enough to look on in wonder and in horror. This is also something I admire about Holloway.
About the Author
Andrew Taggart is a writer and philosophical counselor based in New York. His essays are archived at his website.
What a moving and emotional examination of meaning. Soul-piercing even in its poetic summation; I sympathize with the author.
It is a singular tragedy of modern life that we are often raised to find meaning where we are told or told to go find it for ourselves without any guidance and so rarely given an education in philosophy at an early age so as to learn from our predecessors without being nudged one way in particular. Either we are told to find meaning in devotion to God or we are left adrift without a compass and sooner or later we come to question the very purpose and direction of our lives.
Secular humanism should be taught in schools alongside other world religions and philosophies.
Thanks, Miles, for your kind note.
In closing, you recommend teaching secular humanism alongside world religion. I couldn’t agree with you more. The more basic problem, though, is that few courses raising questions of value and meaning are being taught in public education. So far as I’m aware, most are formal and procedural: how to solve geometry problems, how to write certain kinds of essays, and so on. We need these, but as humans we also need something more. Courses that require us to examine value-laden claims would therefore be all to the good.
One component of many versions of secular humanism that I always find missing *is* a good secular metaphysics: philosophers of the likes of DM Amstrong and M Bunge have been creating this for years and pointlng out why it is necessary. Of course, people (constrained by and constraining society – the atomic individual is a myth, which a secular metaphysics would show) should be fee to figure out the details of that on their own, but I do feel unless there are well-articulated alternatives to *all* the components of traditional world views, secularization will be a long haul. Needless to say, however, I regard this as necessary but not sufficient: some degree of affluence and freedom from want is necessary, which is another place where the atomistic “philosophical anthropologies” go wrong.
I couldn’t agree with you more, philosopher-animal.
1. Hegel was the first greater diagnostician of atomism. Thatcher, who famously quipped that “there’s no such thing as society,” apparently hadn’t read Hegel. Here is a place where we need to think long and hard about what Hegel called “objective spirit,” something I touch briefly on in the piece.
In some of Alain de Botton’s essays (I’m thinking of those that have appeared in Standpoint Magazine), you can find some talk of secular churches, so to speak, and the like. I know that Dreyfus and Kelly, in their recently released book All Things Shining, write about the experience of “whooshing” (their word, not mine), a communal sense spectators may have at some sporting events they attend. Yet I doubt, once we’ve had our morning coffee, that the rest of us will find sporting events to be a reasonable replacement for the objective spirit of religion…
More generally, I doubt that in the modern secular world we’ve even begun to come up with a workable solution to this problem, and I worry about the fact that many in the “post-religious” camp don’t even take the problem seriously.
2. True, objective spirit is only a necessary ingredient, not a sufficient. One could do worse than take (and this is just one fruitful line of inquiry) an Aristotelian approach to human flourishing: certain things need to be met in order to *make possible* human flourishing. In this vein, Nussbaum and Sen have recently argued that a Capabilities Approach could be the bedrock of a vital economy.
“and that is the problem of living in a post-religious, post-traditional society. We lack the social glue–the social institutions, the multitude of free associations, the deeply rooted […]”
But when was it ever different? It has always been the responsibility of the individual to do the hard work of trying to figure it all out. As Richard Holloway has possibly found by now, the traditional cultural/religious framework while being comforting to many is actually an impediment. It creates baggage that must be painfully carried and only reluctantly discarded while creating unnecessary obstacles to spiritual progress.
And the prisoner often loves the security of the cell, misses it when it has gone and tries to replace it with another security. Of course this results only in disappointment because there is not, never has been and will never be any true security for body, mind or spirit in this world….
Hi sailor1031. Let me address your “who needs religion?” view, one that’s probably shared among many Butterflies and Wheels readers.
My thinking owes much to Hegel. Hegel helps us see that there is a “middle way” between external criticism and internal support. The external critical point of view (the one I see you taking) involves showing how someone’s ideas or beliefs fail to meet some external standard. There are times when it makes sense to adopt this point of view, but often it comes across as preachy and self-righteous. You might recall all those times when your father dispensed his advice without being asked for it. He may be right, he may be wrong, but I doubt you were asking for a panacea.
Contrast this standpoint with the internal support vantage point. As the name implies, someone who occupies this position is one of the tribe and so is an apologist for whatever cause the tribe espouses. He or she is what the ancient skeptics referred to, in very general terms, as a “dogmatist”: someone who has tied-down views that he or she is not willing to change.
Hegel helps us see past the “onesidedness” of both point of views. He asks the question, “What do those, say, who believe in traditional religion get or hope to get from participating in this way of life? What reason to they have for coming to it in the first place? How might it, at least in some sense and at least to some extent, fulfill some of their aspirations or life needs, making them feel rooted in social life?” I take it (or so I argue in the article on Holloway) that traditional religion has been pretty good at fulfilling the life need of “objective spirit,” i.e., of helping previous generations find meaning in and through an institution that seems to embody the spirit of a people.
The problem, as I see it, is that that solution is no longer workable in the modern world, is no longer available to us. If this is right *and yet* if we still feel the need to find meaning in certain institutions, then we’ll have to come up with another solution that will work for us moderns: perhaps we’ll need something like “secular churches.” Perhaps. Frankly, I’m really not sure.
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I take your point Andrew. Churches provide a community of like-minded locals with which to socialize and among whom one can find good friends. Freethinkers organizations and UU fellowships are pretty much secular churches already; perhaps they’ll do.
I have to say that, leaving aside the philosophical aspect of this which I don’t feel qualified to comment on, that your take on religion as having once provided a source of emotional and social comfort is rather romanticised. I suspect that the elements of fear and coercion were at least as strong and in places where religion still holds sway that certainly seems to be the case. People have always had to struggle with the brutal reality of existence and its transient and possibly meaningless nature, revealed religion wasn’t meant to offer them comfort but the prospect of salvation. What about the pagan classical world ? little evidence there of the role you have attributed to religion in society which seems very Christo-centric and modernist. I also don’t see any problem with the libertarian approach you describe as atomised, most people can get by by quite happily with the social structures they find or make around them without any need for some church-lite substitute.
Thanks, Thomavis, for your reply. I appreciate your willingness to take the essay seriously.
What’s more, you make 3 excellent objections. I’ll respond to each in turn.
1. You claim that my conception of religion is “rather romanticised” and that there are other elements within religion that are much less savory. I would agree with the second part but not with the first. That’s because I’m not committed to the view that religion is solely a manifestation of “objective spirit.” Of course, it’s a mixed bag. I’m only committed to the thought that traditionally religion has been a manifestation of “objective spirit” (apart, I admit, from all the other immoral and generally dodgy things as well). But if this is true, then it follows that my view of religion is not “romanticised” but, I hope, honest and clear-eyed.
2. You’re puzzled by my myopic treatment of Christianity. Why not also refer to the pagan religions? Why my fixation, maybe even obsession with the Church? The short answer is a Nietzschean one: We, as Westerners, are products of a Christian tradition and this for better or, as Nietzsche thought, for worse. To say this is not to say that you or I are card-carrying Christians. I suspect you aren’t, and I know that I’m not. But it is to say that Christian ideas “course through us.” My buried major premise, then, is that Christian ideas are, in some vague sense, our ideas (though they didn’t have to be as if by metaphysical necessity, in historical terms they cannot not be), and my implicit methodology is a historical of ideas approach.
3. You argue that libertarianism of the kind I criticize may be enough for most people; after all, people get along “quite happily” in this way. Well, as a friend of mine wrote recently, there’s happiness and then there’s happiness. Libertarianism has a good deal to say about how to maximize our preferences, but I’m not sure it has much to say about what J.S. Mill saw as higher notions of pleasure. The pleasure of feeling at one with the social world–a feeling that some may call “soppy” or overly sentimental, but I think they’re wrong–is the kind of pleasure that I don’t think the free market cultivates. Getting along is one thing; flourishing is quite another.
Thanks for your reply Andrew, some interesting points there which I’d like to mull over and come back to ( a bit late in the evening now ). You’re correct that I’m not a Christian, though I used to be which is partly why the question interests me.
But the West is not heir only to Christianity; it is also the heir – through literature – of Classical paganism, and since the Renaissance the tension between the two has been profound (as it was in the Ancient World until Christianity triumphed): it runs through Milton’s poetry, for example. Milton loved Classical literature and myth – there’s no doubt about that, for it breathes in his verse – but felt he had to reject it in the name of Christianity. Erasmus, Hobbes, Gibbon, Hume, Rubens’s mythical paintings, what is regarded as the first opera, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo… I wonder if you should make so much of Christianity.
Tim Harris :
Yes that’s pretty much what I wanted to say in my promised but undelivered reply to Andrew. You have put it more succinctly than I would have done.
Regarding Andrew’s point about the need for a social dimension to life that transcends our normal everyday pleasures, I really don’t see any such need as it assumes some kind of zero sum game in which individual freedom and social connection are mutually incompatible. I don’t believe that to be the case.
Gee.
I’m really impressed by your confidence, all you guys who post here.
And your intellects – wow!
But does it ever occur to you that you are making assumptions about another person, whom many of us happen to know and you don’t ?
That’s a bizarre comment. What is meant by “us”? How would anyone commenting here know what one “vf” means by “us”? How would anyone commenting here know to think anything about “vf” and vf’s “us”?
The question could (I assume) be put more clearly as “does it ever occur to you that you are making assumptions about another person whom some people know?” But of course in that form its absurdity becomes obvious.
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