Jesus, Hitler and The Abolition of God

for the first five lectures of this series I've been tracking what would normally be seen as the prehistory of unbelief of doubt during the time before it came out into the open and dressed itself up in intellectual clothes and I've been doing that because I think that the emotional history of unbelief the reasons that people want to doubt or can't help themselves from doubting is more important than the intellectual the philosophical history and I think the best way to track that emotional history is to go back far enough that we can catch doubt in a state of undress and see what its contours really look like we finished last time with Spinoza who in the 1660s laid the intellectual foundations for modern rationalism but who I was arguing is also very much part of this emotional story and so today in this final lecture I want to add an epilogue to trace that emotional history from then till now now throughout the series we've been tracing two emotional streams of doubt streams that eventually mingled and reinforced each other on one side is the stream of anger the unbelief of suspicion and of defiance refusing to be taken in or ordered around by priests and their God that kind of unbelief was was eye catching but it only became dangerous once it began to assert an ethical framework of its own meanwhile the Protestant Reformation by choosing skepticism as its weapon and by fostering an intense Restless self reflectiveness made it difficult for many believers to attain the settled assured faith that they aspired to hence the surge in the second emotional stream of unbelief the stream of anxiety in which earnestly pious men and women found themselves beset with fears and uncertainties that they couldn't reason away because in the end they weren't based on reason instead some of these unwilling skeptics dealt with their own anxieties by turning their doubts into a tool using it to dig down in the hope of rebuilding their faith on a sounder footing and as their anxieties cut through one supposed certainty after another they were left in the end with only one certainty their commitment to their moral vision which increasingly seemed not just like the heart of what their religion should be but may be detachable from their religion they turned their moral intuition against the tradition that had taught it to their critiquing Christianity for its failure to embody the ethics of Jesus Christ and so the two streams come together the moral force of the unbelief of anger and the moral urgency of the unbelief of anxiety mix into a gathering flow of insistent ethically driven doubts and that begins carving christen domes old established landscape into something new now as the forest of explicitly anti religious arguments begins to spring up from the later 17th century onwards it can be sometimes difficult to see the wood for the trees let alone to trace the subterranean currents of emotion that continue to nourish them but those too intermingled streams of anger and anxiety both continue to flow so let's look at each of them in turn that oh I was making that quite yet there we go the unbelief remains angry is is unmistakable there's mockery perennial effective way of sidestepping difficult questions after all if you can make religion look ridiculous then you don't have to tackle the much harder question of proving that it's false or proving that something else is true and of course you reserve the invaluable ploy of covering your tracks by claiming that you were only joking and making religion look ridiculous sometimes it's so easy that it's irresistible it's no accident that the early enlightenment was a golden age of satire in which it was often not entirely clear quite what the author really means or believes the the spoof atheist tracks that students and provocateurs and gadfly's were producing word jokes they weren't meant to be taken seriously but you don't play jokes like that unless you think they're funny at the very least you want your audience to laugh rather than to be outraged and very likely you want them to wonder if only for a moment whether you're right of course spoofing religion has remained a constant theme of unbelief down to the present the most famous example is probably still Voltaire's dr. Pangloss with his metaphysical theology cosmology on no geology I think that convinces him that the world is as perfect as could be the modern eras most compelling literary meditation on unbelief Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov has a neat example of the genre the Deebo debauched father Fyodor admits blithely that he expects to be dragged down to hell with hooks when he dies and then I think hooks where do they get them what are they made of where do they forge them iron have they got some sort of factory down there you know in the monastery the monks probably believe there's a ceiling in Hell for instance now me I'm ready to believe in Hell only there shouldn't be a ceiling that would be as it were more refined more enlightened and it's a straight line from this sort of thing to our modern flowering of religious mockery I gave you a glimpse of beyond the fringe Alan Bennett's take a Pew sketch earlier monty python of course the incomparable father ted more merry absurdism and gentle ridicule than vicious satire but there are in these sorts of things occasional flashes of real anger and as ever the primary target of that anger isn't God himself it's his earthly representatives the bitterness about priests that we've been tracing since the Middle Ages remains alive and well and not everybody finds it funny Voltaire took the clergy as the real target of his anger the same mood is even plainer in Tom Payne's the age of reason this is the first authentic anti-christian bestseller it's a book that's said to have triggered Bible burning parties on both sides of the Atlantic Payne's fury is directed not at God but at churches which he calls human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit he says I don't believe in the Creed professed by the Jewish Church the Roman Church the Greek church the Turkish church the Protestant Church nor any Church I know of my own mind is my own church that's not a metaphysical position I'm in fact beneath it all pains substantial religious views are surprisingly conventional what that is as befits one of the heralds of the American Revolution is a declaration of independence and it's absolutely in line with the angry unbelief that we've seen over the preceding centuries a couple of notorious nineteenth-century examples tell the same story Thomas Huxley now best known as Darwin's bulldog and owner of a splendid pair of whiskers the myth of his triumph over the hapless bishop of Oxford in their debate over evolution in 1860 has someone grown in the telling but Huxley certainly more outspoken on religious matters than Charles Darwin himself he famously coined the term agnostic to describe the kind of scientific unbelief that he advocates but he's also very odd very English kind of unbeliever the opposite of agnosticism he says was not Christianity or religion as such but what he called Ecclesiastes ism or clericalism he despised bishop Wilberforce's title and his officiousness as much as he did his opinions and remarkably Huxley claimed that he was defending what he called the foundation of the Protestant Reformation by which he meant the conviction of the supremacy of private judgment in contrast to what he saw as the afaid and idolatrous soccer DOTA lism which had overtaken the Church of England in his own age and that's of course not at all what the first problem performers thought they were doing but Huxley did have a point he's deploying the same merciless skepticism that the reformers had weaponized and popularized and he's doing so against their traditional targets Huxley's much less respectable contemporary Mikhail Bakunin the Russian anarchist and revolutionary had strikingly similar concerns his essay God and the state written during the the revolutionary false dawn of the Paris Commune in 1871 boils with rage at every religious system ever invented he says their very nature and essence is the impoverishment enslavement and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity and so he turns his fury first of all to the slave masters who've perpetrated this crime whoever says revelation once says revealeth messiahs prophets priests legislators inspired by God all men owe them passive and unlimited obedience because against the Justice of God no terrestrial justice holds slaves of God men must also be slaves of church and state so the charge is not that the clergy are peddling foolish notions of an imaginary God it's that they are using those notes to subjugate exploit and oppress the people the critique is moral rather than philosophical it's absolutely in line with the classic Reformation critique of clerical power and the moral framework here is a straightforwardly Christian one these critics don't merely observe the church's oppress their people they believe that for the strong and the cunning to oppress the weak and simple is wrong an ethic which as Nietzsche observed with some distaste is distinctive to Christianity if they did turn their anger from the clergy to God himself they did so in the same vein so when Tom Paine attacked the Bible he did so not by mounting textual or historical criticisms of it but by declaring it morally unfit for purpose he says whenever we read the obscene stories the voluptuous debaucheries the cruel torturous executions the vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled it would be more consistent we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God it's a history of wickedness that served to corrupt and brutalize mankind this is like Richard Dawkins his famous claim that the God of the Old Testament is the most unpleasant character in all fiction it works by measuring the Bible against an agreed moral standard and finding it wanting that standard certainly in Payne's case being derived from the Christian tradition itself Paine finds the Bible blasphemous it defames God by portraying him as morally deficient you can see the same logic at work in one of the most common stumbling blocks for Christian belief in modern times the traditional doctrine of hell which for many people has triggered a moral intuition that God simply could not consign a part of his creation to eternal torment that's an intuition which doesn't refute the logic of traditional Christian theology it just bypasses and again at the apogee of this moral anger we find bakunin he recognizes that the problem of the clergy can't truly be separated from the problem of God because after all if they really were God's representatives then they'd be entitled to enslave humanity some writers would have sidestepped at this point into a logical argument there is no god but bakunin recognizes that that's that's not an entirely honest way to approach and so he confronts the issue head-on he says if God existed only in one way could he serve human liberty by ceasing to exist I reversed the phrase of Voltaire and say that if God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him now on the surface this is ridiculous this is wishful thinking taken to extremes bakunin syllogism he says if God is man is a slave now man can and must be free therefore God does not exist you know absurdly that derives a metaphysical claim from a political opinion you know he appears like a a new Knut I'm not just ordering the tide to turn he's ordering the entire sea to dry up but I deeper level this is good moral theology God is by definition good but the existence of a God is the human believes inherently oppressive and therefore evil therefore the concept of God is self-contradictory if you accept his premises the case is watertight once again amongst those premises though is a very particular moral framework which presumes that Liberty is an absolute good how far that framework is itself of Christian origin I don't think really matters very much the point is that this is how the unbelief of anger works it's when it's moral standards come into conflict with God that God has to be abolished alongside and intertwined with the unbelief of anger remains that of anxiety the agonized purists and wrestlers with doubt whom we met in the last two lectures have had countless successes down the centuries individuals who've not embraced the fierce certainties of dogmatic faith or angry unbelief people who are sometimes not so much just sitting on the fence has impaled on it sometimes these Agony's have been resolved into more or less settled belief or unbelief sometimes doubters have withdrawn exhausted from the fray and made some sort of peace with their uncertainties sometimes they've not been resolved at all many of these dramas are documented of course in a distinctively modern literary form uniquely well-suited to exploring characters in a turmoil the novel religious anxieties burned through the works of nineteenth-century novelists like James Hogg or George Eliot or again Dostoyevsky listen to the mother in The Brothers Karamazov who can't control her doubts about immortality she says I think all my life I've believed and then I die and suddenly there's nothing what will give me back my faith how can it be proved how can one be convinced Oh miserable me I'm the only one who can't bear it it's devastating devastating some people achieve unbelief others have it thrust upon them but as we saw last time those who suffer these anxieties aren't merely passive very often they try to defend or refound their faith holding on to its core while relinquishing what seems to them unnecessary or indefensible and this can make it hard to tell who is religions defender and who is its adversary Spinoza isn't the only iconic figure in the history of unbelief who in his own terms was a believer in a terrific book a couple of years back the historian Dominic a design argued convincingly I think that a whole series of supposedly skeptical philosophers were actually trying to purify Christianity rather than to destroy it Voltaire echoed Spinoza by rejecting miracles on the grounds that the universal theologian the true philosopher sees that it's contradictory for nature to act on particular or single views that's a religious conviction not an atheistic one Tom pains reason for attacking Christianity in the age of reason was that lest in the general rack of superstition of full systems of government and false theology we lose sight of morality of humanity and of the theology that is true so these thinkers haven't rejected theological ways of thinking nor are they unwilling to deal in their currency instead they've become persuaded that currency is devalued and that the guarantees of the churches that claim to stand behind it might no longer be sound and as any banker knows anxieties of that kind are intolerable whether or not they're well-founded so rather than trying to shore up faith in those old guarantors these speculators attempted a bolder gambit to rebase their religious currency entirely founding it on the gold standard of natural law and of morality rather than on the church's dubious claims to Authority and they believed that in doing this they're going back to Christianity's true heart trouble is some of the results of this rebasing don't look very much like traditional Christianity the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment era Immanuel Kant was a convinced adherent of the new gold standard his categorical imperative which codifies that it still underpins most of what the modern world thinks is self-evident moral common-sense Kant believed himself to be defending God but as ed Zane puts it can't build a built a fortress of conscience that swore a rescued God to silence and so created a system in which morality as swallow'd religion even Ludwig Feuerbach one of the 19th century's bitterest moral critics of religion belongs in this tradition as the very fact that he called his 1841 diatribe the essence of Christianity shows but by the time we get to this point Christianity has eaten itself and the culmination of this is of course in the brothers Kellerman self the most famous section of that book the idealistic Ivan lays out his very distinctive form of unbelief and at first glance it looks like the classic argument from suffering God couldn't permit suffering but suffering exists therefore there's no God but that's not what Ivan Kermit's off argues he doesn't deny God and in the end he even accepts that a higher good may come from suffering his problem is simply that his moral intuition gags at the idea if the suffering of children he says goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to by truth then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale of giving them peace and rest at last but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature that same child who is beating her chest with her little fist and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears would you agree to be the architect on such conditions that's not unbelief that's defiance his brother Alyosha murmurs that it's rebellion Ivan himself says it's not that I don't accept God Alyosha I just most respectfully returned him the ticket he finds the universe ethically unacceptable under God who made it this way is real enough Ivan simply wants nothing to do with him and yet the gold standard by which he and all these other moralists were measuring his religion and finding it wanting was Christian Ivan himself couldn't have made it clear because having declared this wish to return his ticket he launches into his parable of the Grand Inquisitor in which an Inquisitor who we are explicitly told does not believe in God the rates an incognito Jesus at great length for the foolish impracticality of his morals before finally condemning him to die Jesus remains silent throughout but at the end approaches the old man in silence and gently kisses him that is his whole answer so Ivan isn't clinging to Jesus's moral authority while rejecting churches and doctrines he is rejecting churches and doctrines because of and by means of Jesus's moral authority that may be the most memorable image of this clash between Jesus and Christianity but is hardly Dostoyevsky's idea we ended last time by noting spinosus extravagant praise for Jesus and in doing that he set a trend unbelievers singling Jesus Christ out for praise Voltaire treated Jesus with uncharacteristic reverence as an archetype of true natural religion Thomas Jefferson claimed to follow what he called the philosophy of Jesus and said that Jesus wouldn't recognize a single feature of the so-called Christianity erected in his name Tom Paine believed that not not only that the morality Jesus preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind but that it has not been exceeded by any these skeptics may not have revered him as the incarnate second person of the Trinity but they definitely see him as unique John Stuart Mill the robustly atheist father of 19th century liberalism believed that the authentic I do difficult to take that picture of him entirely seriously believed that the authentic sayings of Jesus of Nazareth weren't merely in harmony with the intellect and feelings of every good man and woman but that they almost constituted true humanity that they should be forgotten or cease to be operative on the human conscience while human beings remain cultivated or civilised may be pronounced once and for all impossible now maybe some of these sentiments are insincere if so they were bowing to a cultural fact for believers and unbelievers alike Jesus Christ was by far the most potent moral figure in Western culture radicals might question his divinity but only a scoundrel like Nietzsche would question his morality one raw index of this cultural power was the English fashion for literary biographies of Jesus started by John Seely Zeca Homer in 1865 over the next 40 years a staggering 5,000 different such lives of Jesus were published in English if the Victorian age was losing faith in Christianity it certainly wasn't losing interest in Christ one backhanded testimony to Jesus's cultural power is the persistence amongst a certain combative strain of atheism of a rather odd belief that Jesus of Nazareth never existed now historically speaking this claim is is not impossible but it's pretty implausible in effect it requires the existence of a large scale entirely successful and oddly pointless conspiracy in the first century but it's not and it never has been intended as a sober historical claim napoleon who is recorded as denying jesus' existence on several occasions was not a scholar of ancient history he simply had one of the modern eras most colossal egos and he resented kowtow to the moral authority of a dead Galilean hasn't the case was made more substantially by Karl Marx's scholarly mentor Bruno Bauer maybe the most serious historian ever to deny Jesus's existence and for him he does it because it fits with his long-standing anti-christian views and also with his anti-semitism which balked at putting a Jewish prophet at the heart of Western civilization in our own times Jesus denialism has found a more harmless home on the fringes of some atheist subcultures so books like like these don't disguise the fact that they are anti religious polemics or simple contrarian ism rather than scholarly historical studies what makes the determined pursuit of this argument interesting is not just that it's implausible but that it's logically unnecessary after all denials of Christianity don't become any weaker if you admit that Jesus Christ existed anymore than denials of life on Mars become weaker if you admit that Mars exists this fringe are following Napoleon by recognizing that Christianity's cultural power depends less on any philosophical or theological claims than on the moral authority attached to the figure of Jesus the more level-headed advocates of atheism preferred to avoid engaging with the figure of Jesus at all an unusual exception is the novelist Philip Pullman whose 2010 book The Good Man Jesus and the rascal Christ scoundrel Chrysler this is an engaging fictionalized separation of the the good ethical Jesus from his bad religious alter ego I think if this is the distinction that Spinoza would have recognized so even in our own times the moral authority of Jesus of Nazareth is a force to be reckoned with rather than critiquing or relativizing those morals Christianity's opponents generally feel obliged to avoid to co-opt him by claiming his ethical mantle or in extremists to abolish him so the Western world's wrestling match between belief and unbelief has been a long one both parties have made numerous premature declarations of victory or of defeat but this is a struggle whose course has repeatedly proved unpredictable and there is no knowing how things will turn out next even so since the mid 20th century something has changed and particularly in Europe and North America one authoritative commentator on the United States wrote in 1955 that religion has become part of the ethos of American life to such a degree that overt anti religion is all but inconceivable well that's not the case anymore Western society in the 1950s was certainly very secular as Christian commentators at the time lamented but Christianity continued to define its moral frameworks and so virtually everybody continued to claim a residual nominal identity as a Christian apart from the few who had ancestral ties to Judaism or to some other religion plainly in the last half century that default universal religious identity has gone for the first time substantial fast-growing minorities who deny having any religion at all have appeared even in the United States this is true of over a third of adults born since 1980 the minority of earnest and devout believers may or may not be shrinking that picture varies from place to place certainly in the United States that group remains large and assertive but the mass of nominal believers who formed the majority and most historically Christian societies for a century or more are rapidly shedding their skin above all this is a generational change it seems increasingly plain that the 1960s or sort of the long 60s are an inflection point that a new kind of secularism started to appear in Western culture why well I think the perspective we've taken in these lectures suggests some answers for start it's worth noticing what hasn't caused this secular surge angry unbelief has repeatedly over the past few centuries tried to confront or to suppress religion without much success the first avowedly anti-christian movement of modern times in the French Revolution served simply to stoke some of the revolutions staunchest opposition and in the end Napoleon came to terms with the church whose founder he claimed hadn't existed 20th century communist regimes have pursued official atheism with at best mixed results and in some cases like Poland or China quite the opposite even in open societies campaigning strident atheism has been no more obviously successful than campaigning strident movements for religious renewal in 1925 a group of combative New York atheists formed the American Association for the Advancement of atheism with the aim of mounting what they called a direct frontal assault on religion generated a good deal of excitement and publicity a number of local chapters but the assaults doesn't result in any kind of breakthrough within a decade this society has wound up like the so called village atheists who stereotypically outraged 19th century America like the Hellfire clubs which so offended moralists in 18th century England like The Libertines who supposedly thronged 16th century Paris like the steady stream of blasphemers who passed through medieval church courts these people are shocking but they're not threatening they're part of the moral equilibrium of a Christian society Christianity has endured a great many direct frontal assaults in the past few centuries they've not proved very effective if anything the period since the 1950s has been distinguished by the relative absence of a substantial coordinate anti-religious campaigns nor does the post sixties secular turn reflect any kind of contemporaneous collapse in the intellectual case for religion most modern atheists are happy to present themselves as heirs to the Enlightenment critique of religion or of the 19th century's debates about science not much about this case is substantially new depart from a psychological and neurological dimension if anything I think we need to recognize that the the classic materialist arguments against Christianity have weakened over the past century a century ago an educated layperson in Europe or North America might have been expected to believe that the universe is infinitely old and entirely deterministic that the different races of humanity are fundamentally different from one another that the process of evolution is governed by some kind of progressive life force that the New Testament is a collection of myths created some centuries after the events that it claims to describe and that the Old Testament is a mere collage of stories shared by peoples from across the ancient Near East all of those beliefs were the conventional wisdom of the age in the early 20th century all of them are of course inimical to traditional Christianity and none of them stood the test of time in other words if Christianity has disintegrated intellectually then it happened a long time ago it certainly didn't happen in the nineteen sixties so if religions neither collapsed nor been crushed what has happened to it historians of the sixties describe a series of tectonic social changes individualism feminism pluralism so forth but the most recent study about one of the most trenchant of these historians goes further Kalen Browns remarkable 2017 book becoming a theist is an oral history of modern unbelief it's based on in-depth interviews with 85 adult a Thea across Europe and North America I think it's impossible to read his account and denied that religiosity in the Western world has undergone a fundamental shift during his interviewees lifetimes the accounts of these 85 people are as varied as the people themselves but Brown observes that they share a remarkably consistent ethical code this code has two key elements as he summarized it first of all is the the so-called golden rule of treating others as you would like to be treated which is of course a Christian imperative but as Brown correctly points out by no means exclusively sir and then there's a linked set of principles about human equality and bodily and sexual autonomy including the right to die Brown calls this ethical framework humanism a term which he says relatively few of his interviewees volunteered but all of them were happy to embrace when he offered them the chance to define themselves that way and what makes this interesting is that Brown says his interview he's claimed without exception that they were humanists before they discovered the term humanism was neither a philosophy nor an ideology that they learned or read about and then adopted there was no max of conversion training induction a humanist condition precedes being a self-conscious humanist so this isn't a manifesto that they've embraced much less a program imposed on us those of them who had grown up in religious settings had embraced this ethic before they'd broken with their religion and when the breaking point did come it was often either because of a conflict between their religious than their humanist ethics or because their humanist ethics made their religions seem redundant the implication is that in the West since the mid 20th century growing numbers of once religious people have adopted an ethic which was independent of their religion and in some tension with it and so they either drifted away from or consciously rejected that religion and this account centered on ethics of course meshes with the story that we've been tracing since the 17th century so the question is where does this ubiquitous ethic come from if Browns humanists didn't even consciously adopt it how did they reach such a consistently shared position now Brown who is of course himself a proud humanist suggests that it makes for the research is necessary but that these ideas may arise from within human experience not from from any outside source indeed that reason alone may construct humanism essentially that this is a default universal set of human values to which any human being will eventually return if left to themselves it's an appealing idea unfortunately it's nonsense modern humanism I'm afraid just as a historical fact is no in no sense an expression of universally shared human values it's ethical markers so gender and racial equality sexual freedom a strong doctrine of individual human rights a sharp distinction between the human and the nonhuman realms in long historical perspective these are very unusual beliefs indeed and sand on a terribly firm logical base anybody who's ever tried philosophically to prove that there are such a thing as human rights rather than simply asserting it knows this the fact that these ethical values appear intuitively obvious to kallen Brown and indeed also to me is not an answer it is in fact the problem but he does observe that the dominance of these values in Western culture can be dated to 1945 in particular to the notion of human rights which emerged from the Second World War and I think this is the vital clue the Second World War and in particular the Nazi genocide was the defining moral event of our age the event which reset our cultures notions of good and evil by the early 20th century Christianity's only undisputed role in Western society its resin d'etre was to define morality and this is precisely what it failed to do in the Second World War in the modern era is the most intense moral test failed and not only in the sense that many churches and Christians were to a degree complicit with Nazism and fascism but in the widest sense that the global crisis revealed that Christianity's moral priorities were wrong it now seemed plain self-evident that cruelty discrimination and murder were evil in a way that fornication and blasphemy and impiety were not and as the post-war generations digested these lessons they turned the war into the Western world's foundation myth cultural conservatives will sometimes lament that modern Western societies lack shared sacred narratives but but this is not really true in the same way that Victorian publishers endlessly retold the life of Jesus so post war films novels and other media endlessly retold and retell the Second World War it is the story that we keep returning to have you ever heard any snatch of audio recording repeated more often than Chamberlain's broadcast on the 9th or the 3rd September 1939 announcing the beginning of the war the phrases of Churchill's speeches have sunk into our collective memories they grip us like words of Scripture the struggle against Nazism is the final reference point for every moral or political argument its history retains an unparalleled grip on our imagination because it is our Paradise Lost it's our ages defining battle with evil once the most potent moral figure in Western culture was Jesus Christ believer or unbeliever you took your ethical bearings from him or you profess to to question his morals was to expose yourself as a monster but now the most potent moral figure in Western culture is Adolf Hitler it is as monstrous to praise him as it would once have been to disparage Jesus he has become the fixed reference point by which we define evil Ken Livingstone might have thought that after a lifetime of courting controversy there was nothing that he could say which would damage him but it turned out that there was one thing the humanist ethic which Brown summarises is almost a precisely inverted image of Nazism in the 17th century arguments tended to end at the point when somebody called somebody else an atheist that's the moment at which the discussion hits a brick wall and nothing more can be said in our own times as Godwin's law famously notes the final the absolute the conversation ending insult is to call someone a Nazi it's not an accident it's not a sign of intellectual laziness it's because Nazism is an absolute standard it's the point where argument ends because whether or not it is good or evil is not something that's up for debate or again while Christian imagery crosses crucifixes have lost much of their potency in our culture there is no visual image which now packs as a visceral and emotional punch as a swastika the plainest evidence that Nazism has crossed the barrier separating historical events from timeless truths is the way that it's permeated the modern ages most popular myths many people it's in Congress or even a little embarrassing that the best-selling work of fiction of the whole 20th century is an excessively long unapologetically archaic and sometimes self-indulgent fairy tale written by a philologist who was a very traditional Catholic and whose most devoted readers were and remained teenage boys but even if you share that the now receding literary disdain for Tolkien's Lord of the Rings there is no gainsaying its cultural importance Tolkien himself had no patience for allegory as a literary form he vigorously denied that he'd written one but if his War of the Ring doesn't mirror the Second World War which was raging as he wrote it it certainly refracted talking was an early and staunch opponent of Nazism in general and Nazi racial ideology in particular he seems to have felt the Nazi appropriation of his beloved Nordic mythology as a personal affront but while he never doubted the righteousness of the Allied cause he was also a veteran of the Battle of the song and he knew that this war was like any other war an ultimately evil job so he told his son in 1944 when he was on active service and he used his own developing myth to explain what he meant not only as he said that there are a great many orcs on our side but that we are attempting to conquer sauer on with the rain and we shall it seems succeed but the penalty as you will know is to breed more sour odds now make what you like if that's the political judgment as a cultural prophecy it's uncannily prescient Western culture has been breeding new Sirhan's with increasing enthusiasm ever since the figure of the Dark Lord has stalked through the most persistent and popular mythologies of the post-war era from Star Wars is Darth Vader to Harry Potter's Lord Voldemort the debt that these as at's hitler's Oh to their real-world archetype is sometimes implied sometimes openly acknowledged I think it's always playing these are the myths on which generations of children in the post-christian West have been raised transposing the brutal lessons of the Second World War into timeless morality tales this is the lesson that our culture is determined to teach itself and eager repeatedly to relearn that this is what true evil looks like even though of course in reality evil rarely appears in such an ambiguous dress and while the Christian ethical sensibility which Tolkien embodied still underpins these myths they have like the culture in which they've thrived left that original taproot behind them and this I think is where the emotional history of unbelief currently stands in what used to be christened maybe we still believe that God is good but we believe with more fervor and conviction that Nazism is evil in post-war humanism the centuries-old Christian moral revolt against Christianity has finally kicked over the traces and renounced its residual connection to Christian ethics or at least it's tried to since this humanism has emerged by processes of intuition not of conscious reasoning since its history is as it must inevitably be an emotional history it can't rid itself of its ancestry quite so easily it's become almost commonplace to point out that humanism continues to be shaped by Christian ethical norms in this sense the old struggle between belief and unbelief isn't over it's just entered a new phase but a new phase it is breaking our moral currencies last links to the old gold standard of Christian ethics is unprecedented now maybe gold standards are in the end no more rational than any other kind of coin but underwriting our moral currency with the anti-nazi narrative instead of with Christianity is should we say an experiment it is not clear how well or how long that narrative will be able to bear the burden which we've asked it to carry if you're going to choose a historical reference point for absolute evil then Nazism is certainly hard to beat but as the Second World War falls off the edge of living memory will the old stories and convictions retain their power are the moral myths that we've distilled from them as heavy as they are capable of nourishing and enduring ethical Sensibility well the lessons that we've learned from them continue to seem intuitively and self-evidently true I think the stirrings of authoritarian nationalism around the world suggest maybe not the readiness of some of those nationalists to make and claim pop culture myths for themselves is a warning that myth making is a game that every side can play if the common coin of our shared morals comes into increasing question with contested histories and myths being reduced to scraps of paper then we'll have little to underpin our collective ethics except intuition unless of course another shared experience with luck one less terrible than the Second World War provides renewed values against which our currency can be rebased two things I think are clear first of all Western Christendom isn't about to snap back into place the contemporary humanist surge isn't a blip or an anomaly it's a continuation of moral forces that have been at work within the Christian world for centuries believers who are hoping that it's just going to go away or I'm afraid deluding themselves and indeed they're in some danger of being tempted by authoritarian nationalist voices that wants to unlearn the moral lessons of the Second World War under the modern era to prioritize group identities over ethics the way that some central European politicians are using the term Christian to justify rejecting Muslim refugees is a case in point that kind of thing isn't just ethically backward it's also even in zone terms self-defeating and culture slough doff this kind of seductive compromised religion for a reason and if necessary would probably do it again in the meantime religions that dig their heels in to oppose the new moral environment risk taking on the role of medieval blasphemers they validate a majority culture by offering it's exactly the kind of predictable opposition that it craves the religions that prosper in this environment will be the ones that work with the grain of humanist ethics while finding ways to offer something that humors and can't because one other thing is also clear that the humanists urge is not a stable new reality either the intuitions which have made it possible aren't going to flow peacefully steadily and indefinitely our culture's moral frameworks have shifted before and they're going to do it again and when they do our beliefs will follow them believers and unbelievers alike share an interest in how that story ends thank you [Applause] you

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Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, jesus, divinity, religion, christianity, GOD, abolition, atheism, Secularism, Renaissance, Tom Paine, Bakunin, Humanism, anti-Nazism, nazism, morals, ethics, The Age of Reason, Thomas Huxley, kant, voltaire, Tolkien

Id: EBrrsqhAXQI

Length: 51min 44sec (3104 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019