Chapter 11 History, Culture, and Faith
Chapter 11
History, Culture, and Faith
The great English essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830) once penned some words that are both witty and disturbing. “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”1 We seem to have an inbuilt realization that things are not what they ought to be. We feel the pain of the tension between what we observe and that for which we hope. Why is there so much wrong with the world?
The New Atheism has an easy answer: religion. Get rid of religion, and the world would be a better place. “Religion poisons everything” is a rhetorically charged message, which appeals to a certain type of middle-class liberal rationalist. The faults of the world are to be laid at the door of backward-looking superstitions which hold the world back from its rational and scientific destiny. Eliminate religion and the world will be a better place. Religion has led only to violence, intellectual dishonesty, oppression, and social division.
The New Atheism vigorously asserts the fundamental moral and intellectual autonomy of humanity. Human beings are intelligent and rational beings, who can shake off superstitious beliefs and exult in the triumph of reason and science. But where do these beliefs come from? If there is no God, it follows that religion is the creation of human beings. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins excoriate what they see as the delusional, irrational, and immoral lies of religion. Yet from their atheist perspective, these ideas were invented by human beings—the same human beings whom they exalt as models of rationality and morality. Hitchens appeals to human rationality and morality in making his case for atheism; yet that same rationality and morality gave rise to religious ideas and values which he regards as degenerate, pathological, and oppressive. If there is no God, then the same human nature that invented science (which Dawkins likes) also invented religion (which he does not). This does not bode well for atheism’s belief in the fundamental goodness and rationality of humanity.
Religion is therefore the serpent in the rationalist garden of Eden, the seducer of otherwise reasonable people. The contradictions and failures of recent “enlightened” human history—which include the awkward arrival of Nazism and Stalinism, not to mention weapons of mass destruction—are put down, somewhat implausibly, to the resurgence of religion. Not even the rhetorical skills of the greatest New Atheists have been able to weave Stalinism into their narrative of the obstinate persistence of religious belief. The real problem for secular rationalists is that having made human beings the “measure of all things” (Alexander Pope), they find themselves embarrassed by the wide range of beliefs which human beings have chosen to hold—most notably, a widespread belief in God.
If belief in God is a human invention, and if the alleged crimes committed in the name of religion are thus of human origin, then humanity appears to be rather less rational than the New Atheists’ worldview allows. The New Atheism criticizes religion as the enemy of humanity, hoping that nobody will notice that their own theory holds it to be a human creation. If religion is evil, as the lazy and loose rhetoric of the New Atheism insists, does not this imply that its creators are also evil? What if human nature is flawed?
It is a thought that cuts to the core of the almost dogmatic belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature that is characteristic of recent atheistic writings. The Enlightenment had a thoroughly optimistic view of human nature: we are good people, who do good things. Or do we? From a Christian perspective, human nature is frail, easily led astray, and prone to sin. Tennyson’s famous words in his great poem Guinevere often seem hopelessly optimistic and idealistic: “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” Does this bear any relationship to the realities of actual human experience?
In a letter of 1887, Lord Acton famously observed that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” From this, he drew the conclusion that “great men are almost always bad men.” It is an idea that has become part of the settled assumptions that govern our thinking about public office and the risks of concentrating too much power in too few hands. The British prime minister William Pitt made a similar comment a century earlier, perhaps drawing on his own experiences in government: “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.” The idea, here focused so pointedly, is that an essentially benign human nature is corrupted by power. The natural goodness of humanity is placed under such severe stress by the temptations and privileges of power that it mostly proves incapable of resisting the shadowy side of this poisoned chalice.
Yet this idea of power corrupting innocent, well-meaning people is only one way of looking at this matter. There is an ancient Anglo-Saxon proverb, preserved in a collection in Durham Cathedral, which offers a more disturbing way of considering the influence of power on human nature. A literal translation of this proverb would be: “Man does as he is when he can do want he wants.”2 In plain English, it means: “We show what we are really like when we can do what we really want.” In other words, when all constraints are removed, when there is no accountability or limitations, we behave according to our true natures rather than according to what we think others might expect of us. When we are absolutely free, we are absolutely true to our natures. The possession of absolute power thus allows us to behave as we really are.
It is a very troubling thought. Power, on this reading of things, does not tend to corrupt. It tends to expose—to bring out what is already there, but which is suppressed through the force of social convention or the need to conform to customs and expectations. On this view, power is a mirror of the soul, a diagnostic tool which reveals what we are really like. What is most disturbing of all is that we may not realize our true natures until we are put in a situation when those limits are finally removed. Readers of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) will recognize the point immediately. We might long to be good and to do good, yet we often seem to end up in a very different place.
This is why Hazlitt’s words, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, demand careful engagement. How can we make sense of the vast gulf “between what things are and what they ought to be”? Human history is littered with bright hopes and dismal failures; with technological inventions that could have ended war and suffering, yet which seem to end up being used to promote them; with dreams that turn to nightmares. How are we to make sense of this enigma? What is it about human nature that seems to destroy paradise? What “big picture” of human nature helps us make sense of the worrying patterns of history?
To begin with, let us consider how we might make sense of the progress of history and the distinctive features of human culture. A number of controlling narratives have been proposed to make sense of these. One of them, favoured by the New Atheism, is that of the progressive improvement of the human condition through the erosion of religious superstition, and the emancipation of humanity from all taboos and arbitrary limits. It has become much more difficult to sustain this meta-narrative in the West recently, as the manifest failings of Western liberalism have become increasingly clear. Indeed, it is significant that this meta-narrative is one of the chief targets of Terry Eagleton’s recent withering critique of the New Atheism.
Eagleton describes the “dream of untrammeled human progress” as a “bright-eyed superstition,”3 a fairy tale which lacks any rigorous or defensible evidential base. “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.” In the end, it turned out that the Enlightenment articulated ideals that could neither be justified intellectually nor achieved practically.4 It is thus somewhat perplexing that Christopher Hitchens ends his polemic against religion with a simplistic plea for a return to the Enlightenment, especially the form it took in the eighteenth century.5 Peter Atkins, another dogmatic atheist, argues that “atheism, and its justification through science, is the apotheosis of the Enlightenment.”6 This sounds depressingly like the kind of propaganda developed by the League of Militant Atheists in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, which called on Soviet citizens to embrace a progressive, scientific, and atheistic worldview.7 Yet we are surely called to question such fictions about both human individuals and society—including the myth of a lost golden age of science and reason. Why does Hitchens not confront the many recent critics of the Enlightenment, who accuse it of fostering oppression and intolerance—precisely the charges that Hitchens directs against religion?
The New Atheism often accuses those who believe in God of holding on to “unevidenced beliefs,” in contrast to the rigorously proven factual statements of enlightened atheists. Yet what of the New Atheists’ own belief in human progress? Eagleton dismisses this myth as a demonstrably false pastiche, a luminous example of “blind faith.”8 What rational soul would sign up to such a secular myth, which is obliged to treat such human-created catastrophes as Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and apartheid as “a few local hiccups” which in no way discredit or disrupt the steady upward progress of history? The difference between Christianity and the New Atheism seems to lie in their choice of “unevidenced beliefs” and “controlling myths” (in the New Atheists’ language). Neither can be proved; this, however, does not prevent us from making an adjudication as to which appears to be the more reliable and compelling.
So what of a Christian reading of culture and history? It lies beyond the scope of this book to develop even the outline of a Christian philosophy of history; what I can briefly do, however, is to note some themes of such a way of looking at history and culture and explore how they map onto what we actually observe. Two controlling themes here are the ideas of humanity in the first place as created in the “image of God,” and in the second place as sinful. While theologians and religious communities differ in the relative emphasis placed upon these two elements of a Christian understanding of human nature, they are nevertheless twin poles around which any try to make sense of the enigmas and puzzles of how we behave, as individuals and in society.
We find ourselves excited and inspired by the vision of God, which draws us upward; we find ourselves pulled down by the frailty and fallenness of human nature. It is a familiar dilemma, famously articulated by Paul: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom. 7:19). From a Christian perspective, it is clear that we must at one and the same time recognize a greater destiny or capacity in humanity than most political systems or philosophies allow, and a corresponding capacity to fail to achieve such aspirations. Christian theology gives us a critical lens through which to view the complex motivations and mixed agendas of human beings. We bear God’s image, yet we are sinful. We are capable of good, just as we are capable of evil.
Christian theology gives us a critical lens through which to view the complex motivations and mixed agendas of human beings. We bear God’s image, yet we are sinful. We are capable of good, just as we are capable of evil.
This way of thinking allows us to frame the complex picture we see of human culture and history, characterized by aspirations to greatness and goodness on the one hand, and oppression and violence on the other. Many have commented on the profound ambiguity of history and the havoc which it wreaks for naive theories of the goodness of humanity. Terry Eagleton is one of a series of commentators to point out the darker side of contemporary human culture (“corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy”) and history (“the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”).
As a species, humanity may indeed have the capacity for good; this seems matched, however, by a capacity for evil. A recognition of this profound ambiguity is essential if we are to avoid political and social utopianism, based on naive, ideologically driven, non-empirical value judgements about human nature. As J. R. R. Tolkien, later to achieve fame for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, wrote so presciently in 1931, on the eve of the rise of Nazism, a naive view of humanity leads to political utopianism, in which “progress” potentially leads to catastrophe.
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
Erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends.9
Nobody yet knew of the depths of depravity and cruelty that would be created by the rise of Nazism and Stalinism in the 1930s. Yet Tolkien rightly and perceptively saw something that most Enlightenment writers failed to see: everything rests on the moral character of human beings. Technological developments can be used to cure or to kill. Sadly, the choice is made by human beings, and the choices they make can be disastrous. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings explores these themes with a perception and insight sadly absent from some recent atheist manifestos.
Scientific advance has placed into our hands new technologies and techniques: thus we can do things today that our ancestors could only have dreamed of. Yet this progress raises some real problems. A medical advance that helps us understand how the human body works might lead to new cures; yet it could also lead to a weapon of mass destruction, designed to use this knowledge of human physiology to destroy populations.
Now let me make it clear that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with science. The problem concerns how we, as human beings, choose to use it. How trustworthy are we? Why do we do bad things with inventions that could lead to good outcomes? Why do we keep turning ploughshares into swords?10 Thoughts like this led the German social philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–69) to raise some awkward questions about faith in human progress. For Adorno, the “progress” in question was from the sling to the atom bomb.
To explore this point, we shall look at an episode in the career of one of America’s greatest scientists, Louis Frederick Fieser (1899–1977), who became professor of chemistry at Harvard University in 1930. He was noted for developing, along with his wife, Mary Peters Fieser (1909–97), the artificial synthesis of a series of important naturally occurring compounds, including vitamin K, necessary for blood coagulation.11 Fieser’s brilliant synthetic procedures made medically important chemicals much cheaper and more widely available, with highly beneficial outcomes for patient care. In this respect, Fieser can be seen as embodying all that is good about science: working for the advancement of humanity.
Fieser also headed a team at Harvard which invented another chemical product during the period 1942–43, which many scientists today prefer to pass over in embarrassed silence. The U.S. Army urgently needed a chemical weapon suitable for burning tracts of jungle and eliminating troops in foxholes in the Pacific war theatre. Fieser and his team developed the mixture of chemicals now known as “napalm,” which was deliberately designed to use fire as an effective and destructive weapon of war. Napalm, once ignited, could not be extinguished; it took the form of a gel, which stuck to human bodies and could not be removed; and it rapidly exhausted oxygen, causing death by suffocation if not through burns. It was an ideal weapon in the Pacific theatre of war. Yet its use was not restricted to eliminating troops hidden in foxholes or jungles. On the night of 9–10 March 1945, the U.S. Air Force dropped 1,700 tons of napalm bombs on the city of Tokyo, causing massive loss of civilian life. It is thought that 100,000 people died that night—an immediate loss of life greater than that caused initially by either of the atom bombs dropped a few months later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Justification could be offered for what Fieser did. After all, the United States was engaged in total warfare at the time.12 The extension of the war might arguably have led to even greater loss of life. Yet when all is said and done, the development of napalm is a reminder that science can be used to kill and destroy humanity, as much as to heal and extend human life. It is a sobering thought, one that does much to undermine the shallow optimism of those who simplistically and naively exalt science as the saviour of humanity.
Again, I emphasize that I make no criticism of scientific progress. My concern is what we, as morally flawed human beings, do with that progress. Who, for example, can overlook the awkward fact that the engine that drives scientific advance is sometimes military—the desire to have better weapons? This was a major concern for Sir Joseph Rotblat (1908–2005), the only physicist to leave the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb on the grounds of conscience, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.13 In his acceptance speech, “Remember Your Humanity,” Rotblat highlighted the moral ambiguity of humanity and its implications for scientific progress. Rotblat restated his concerns further in 1999:
To a large extent the nuclear arms race was driven by scientists. They kept on designing new types of weapons, not because of any credible requirement—arsenals a hundred times smaller would have sufficed for any conceivable deterrence purpose—but mainly to satisfy their inflated egos, or for the intense exhilaration experienced in exploring new technical concepts.14
My concern here is not to debate the ethics of napalm or nuclear weapons, but to highlight the need for a critical perspective which avoids idealization of any area of professional or political life. A realistic view of human nature is essential to make sense of the failures and foibles evident in the world of politics, business, science, and economics. In no way should the darker side of human nature and undertakings deter us from becoming involved in these areas and working to make things better. Realism about human nature is the precondition for sustained action in these contexts. Otherwise the outcome is delusional or utopian.
The Christian faith thus offers an interpretative lens through which we see human nature as it really is. It helps us make sense of things; but it also helps us avoid naive estimations of human ideals and capacities. Like a skilled physician, Christianity offers a diagnosis of the human situation—not in order to pass judgement and then pass on, but to identify what must be done to transform the situation. Identification of the malady is the essential precondition for a cure. The Christian interpretative lens allows us to work out what is wrong with humanity, before we move on to deal with the solution—a solution articulated in the Christian doctrine of redemption, to which we shall return.
Our attention now turns to another aspect of human nature: the pursuit of things that really matter to us. Though we may be flawed, we have a vision of excellence and fulfilment which makes us yearn to transcend our human limitations. So where do these ideals come from? And where do they lead us? In what follows, we shall consider the deeply evocative human quest for our heart’s desire.