Terry Eagleton on The Death of God (2015)

atheism is nothing like as easy as it looks it may be easy enough at an individual level but for whole societies for health civilizations to achieve this condition is has proved remarkably hard surprisingly hard to have a holy atheistic civilization in fact you could almost write the story of modernity of the modern period in terms of the rubble of failed surrogates for God that it contains all the way you know from reason Geist science art culture humanity nature the people the state the nation and Michael Jackson no sooner have it's extraordinary almost law of history than no sooner have you pitched God out the front door that he smuggled in the back door again in some thin guys but that's a problem because religion has traditionally played such a pivotal part in legitimating political regimes in other words religion is ideology you like that our rulers could hardly look with any kind of equanimity on the disappearance of God in the 19th century which is I think one of several reasons why they tried to fill his shoes there were the whole series of doomed attempts to fill God's shoes I say doomed because religion is remarkably hard act to follow whatever you think about it it in fact it's proved to be the single most tenacious persistent and during global deep-seated symbolic system that humanity has ever witnessed nothing else certainly not culture certainly not art has been able to hold a candle to it and one of the reasons for its staggering success I think is the way it can connect the everyday experience and habits and practices of billions upon billions of people with the most agustin perishable transcendent truths it's the most successful form of popular culture in history by far yet I wager you won't find it on a single cultural studies course either here or in the United States or elsewhere culture cult with two major meanings of culture it could mean of course in the narrower sense of the values and beliefs of a cultivated minority or in the wider as it were anthropological sense it can mean the way of life of a whole people and in that latter sense culture could now in that broad sense these days you could define culture a culture succinctly as what people are prepared to kill for or die for not many people are prepared to kill for Balzac and Beethoven's apart from a few can a weird number of people hiding out in caves somewhere you know to a shame to come out and face the rest of us but culture in the sense in the broader sense cultures language symbol kinship history community ethnicity belief most certainly is considered well worth giving up one's life for yeah and the point I'm trying to make is that there are these two separate meanings of culture but only religion has managed really to bring them fully together to unite these two meanings of culture if you like the aesthetic and the anthropological into a whole uniting priests and laity intellectual and populist idea and institution metaphysical speculation and everyday practice popular piety ritual and social reality in ways far beyond the capacity of any other symbolic system that we've ever known today the most successful substitute for religion is not culture but of course is sport not religion of the opium of the people is sport yes with its you know it's weekly liturgies its pantheon of saints or heroes it's symbolic solidarities you to rituals one of the most powerful surrogates but there was sort of irony about this which is this that after a whole series of botched and bungled attempts over the 19th and 20th centuries to send the Almighty packing and replace him with some suitably secularized version of himself that's what kept happening and I told I tell the story in a remarkably cheap and extraordinary attractive book called culture and the death of God I think available in within 10 yards probably after that series of bungle attempts to get shut of God European civilization at least in part finally succeeded ended in dispatching him to the outer darkness but that wasn't the famous moment of Nietzsche's death of God wasn't in the 19th century it was about a century later than that when capitalism had evolved into its so-called postmodern phase when capitalist society had changed to the point as in our own time when Nietzsche's ecstatic defiant clarion call about the death of God could now finally be heeded couldn't be at the time and it couldn't really be at the time because when as in the 19th century the middle class is still evolving still constructing itself still consolidating itself it's in need of some rather large narratives grand narrative science reason Geist progress humanity the Supreme Being and alike and it's only really when that class has come of age has passed it's revolutionary moment and has settled down to the business of making as much money as he can that it can then afford as it were to go faithless as it couldn't in an earlier phase and not only for to go faithless but but actually profit from that in certain ways because religion is a divisive and controversial there it's not good necessarily for social cohesion think of think of Northern Ireland and a consistency of self and belief of the kind that religion traditionally called for doesn't sit very well with the volatile mutable endlessly adaptive subject of advanced capitalism in fact post modern capitalism makes the disastrous mistake of imagining that conviction itself is both dogmatic and authoritarian yes you don't need conviction anymore and conviction is it likely to be fanatical conviction is what those guys those Muslims over there have we have reasoned beliefs yes begin with a rock a robust belief in goblins so the theory goes and you end up with the gulick yes extraordinary idea very much in currency in postmodern calculus something incipient lis authoritarian or autocratic about the very idea of conviction which of course is why young people these days say say like every four seconds you know because to say it's 9 o'clock sounds unpleasantly authoritarian da Matta whereas it's like 9 o'clock is suitably provisional open-ended open to revision and so on when he was recently asked whether he'd ever had any convictions Boris Johnson replied that he thought he'd once picked one up for a driving offense yes that's the kind of conviction one has now now obviously insert in some sense is the faithlessness of modernity of advanced capitalism is a signal gained in all kinds of it means for example that you know for example sexuality is essentially nobody's business but your own the purity police are not going to come breaking down the bedroom doors sexuality art and religion the three major components of what you might call the symbolic sphere of human activity are now privatized in modernity they're nobody's business but your own essentially you know there like sort of hobbies you know like being a being a Methodist or you know whatever is like a hobby or like you know breeding gerbils or collecting life-size averages of Homer Simpson or something else and of course in one sense that's an enormous liberation those areas have been liberated from state power state regulation but by the same token they don't matter that much anymore then nobody's business but your own you know as the man has the the which said when religion starts interfering with your everyday life it's time to give it up something separate like reading journals but I think the story is the point is that advanced or postmodern capitalism can afford to go relativist pragmatic anti foundational post metaphysical post theological even post historical in some ways as the same civilization couldn't do at an earlier phase say in Victorian Britain belief isn't what holds advanced capitalism together in any sense as it's what holes say the Lutheran Church or the Boy Scout movement together too much belief is neither necessary nor desirable for such an order it's politically dangerous because it's potentially divisive as I say and it's commercially superfluous as long as citizens roll out of bed and get into work and pay their taxes and refrain from beating up too many police officers it really they can really believe what they like and that would have been an astonishing idea for an ancient or medieval person or at least they put it this way the doctrine of liberalism is they can believe anything they like that doesn't interfere with that framework that doesn't undermine the framework of being free to believe what one likes in the eyes of Frederick Nietzsche who was in a way the grandfather of post-modernism truly noble spirits he has himself well in mind here refuse to be prisoners of their own collections you know instead they treat Yeats in fair inherited as fugate's that's very neat tuning this way instead they treat their own cherished opinions with a certain sort of cavalier detachment here they adopt and discard them at their will one's beliefs are rather more like one's manservants you know to be hired and fired as the fancy takes you than like the organs of one's body contrast that view a very sort of English patrician view of conviction with the philosopher Charles Taylor's point argument that belief is constitutive of selfhood to be a self to be a subject means believing being oriented in some significant kind of way it doesn't have to be large-scale belief it doesn't have to be absolute conviction the left-wing historian AJP Taylor was once asked at a fellowship interview at Walden College Oxford whether it was true that he had he had some extreme political views and he said he did but he held them moderately of course you know you may still need not least at points of political crisis to call upon certain rather grand a metaphysical ideals otherwise you don't really need to do that what Nietzsche I think was the first to see was not so much that God was dead that people weren't being grabbed by that idea any longer but that and this was really a ritual what had killed him wasn't some bunch of long-haired atheist lefties but the stout bourgeoisie itself it was the very god-fearing European middle classes who done got in why because they created a society a market society of commercial society which was just inherently faithless didn't need faith of that kind and now was it were the economic base was swingley ask you to this rather imposing metaphysical superstructure of God and truth and history and freedom which they'd inherited from the past but in decreasing Lee knew quite what to do with I think in time this would be thrown away the faithlessness of advanced capitalism is built into its routine structures it's not a matter of in what the individual may believe that the market would still be a ranked atheist even if all of its operators were born-again Christians the stout bourgeois is a believer in his in his church or in the bosom of his family but he's a ranked atheist in his counting-house or bank or office and as Nietzsche realize he's not in so many words it was he himself who was putting himself out of ideological business by discrediting through his own daily profane secular activity the very metaphysical legit emissions that he stood in need of to defend his own way of life God was dead but the problem was people couldn't really bring themselves to believe that he was there was a kind of cognitive dissonance if you like whereby they didn't they didn't really he was dead but they didn't really know no it was so and it was no way necessary to pretend that he was still alive to keep him on a kind of life-support machine not least because it was thought wrongly I think it was considered that morality provided the underpinnings of politics political order political stability and God in turn provided the underpinnings of morality so if you kicked the divine Basin way as it were the rest would come cluttering down I don't think that's true but that was widely believed so rather like Norman Bates in psycho the middle class consumed by guilt and movies foie and its own act of dayside was running around the place as it were frantically cleaning up the scene of the crime you remember the shower scene I mentioned this incidentally just to show you that I I know who Norma Bates was you know not just a remote and inhuman intellectual you know I'm a human being like you I even know who Rufus Wainwright is I think I do anyway um nature's own solution to this problem was harrasing lee radical so so for so much so that it couldn't be taken on in his own time though it's increasingly been taken on and it was I mean if the if the metaphysical superstructure is it were no longer worked to legitimate what you're profane activity because people didn't believe in God much any longer or in certain metaphysical ideas then nature really said paraphrasing him throw it away don't you see you don't need it anymore you think you need all this metaphysical stuff but you don't like a child with his or her blanket no thinks he needed but the most dramatic event that will happen when you finally drag it out of there Clemmy little pause is they'll see that they don't need it after all you know there can be free of it except that God is dead and take advantage of his absence Nietzsche says to to dance and to sing to manufacture your own values in in in in that void that he's left in the manner of the ubermensch of the Superman circle and this as I say was far too radical a proposal for his time where one grand narrative or another was still required but it becomes more feasible as capitalism evolves into its advanced or postmodern faith in fact I think slightly rashly one might describe postmodern first one post modernity as the first thoroughly atheistic civilization not in every quarter belief of course the various kind lives on religious beliefs it lives on to be sure but a society whose major as it were intellectual and cultural priorities have now been thoroughly secularized one which abandons foundations grand narratives transcendental signifier absolute values even in a certain sense subjectivity itself at least as it was once understood as coherent and consistent subjectivity so there's no longer they were a subject and belief might be feasibly attached because belief is a rather deep affair or can be and postmodernist the first refers to the notion of depth and what was the most the enormous irony then no sooner was that happening than two aircraft hit the World Trade Center and a whole new grand narrative this time of capitalism versus a certain version of Islam sprang into being at the very moment when the death of history the death of ideology the death of metaphysics was being law announced with a fanfare and I think there's a kind of interesting causal connection here because that sense that really all the grand things were over from now on it was just going to be business as usual with a few improvements as the postmodern post modernist famously said the future will be just like the present with more options that that was announced in the wake of the West's triumph in the Cold War she's really what it is giddy with a certain triumph allistic fantasy inspired by its victory feeling now that it was the only game in town that there was no significant other or enemy it could afford in its ideological complacency to declare all that old stuff over and done with yeah it no longer stood in need it thought of art and convictions grand narratives fundamental truths sizable doctrinal systems of any kind indeed they could be a positive obstacle to its pragmatic activities and anyway those things didn't fit very well into those it were the cultural climate of advanced listen and it's all very well for American politicians to talk about God and the family and this great nation of ours and our bow our brave men and women in uniform America is of course not only the most loyal most materialistic civilizations of the planet has ever witnessed but simultaneously one of the most metaphysical and that's the most interesting coupling and contradiction you know things that you can get away in states kinds of discourse you can get away with or indeed which are necessary for partitions to spout in the States but we're just you know just in you can't really get away with in the more cynical and hard-boiled Miglia of you know London and Paris where people just stare at their shoes and wait for it to stop as I do when shamba comes on the radio anyway yeah the irony there so whole series of ironies here but this particular irony is that no sooner had a kind of self-confident buoyantly atheistic civilization at least in part arrived on the scene one notice that was no longer anxiously in search of some placeholder or surrogate or stand-in for God that had been as I say at the beginning the tale of modernity and God might be dead or absent to asylum that there was a whacking great god-shaped hole still left in the center of reality and that inspired a kind of haunting anguish and nostalgia and sense of loss and homelessness which is all over modernism indeed quite a lot of modernist texts have some kind of blank or absence or silence right at their Center some truth which is eternally elusive which you can never drag out but which is still haunting you on the periphery of your vision post-modernism breaks with all that first notice it has don't as Richard Rorty says don't scratch where it doesn't itch yes nothing is lacking it's just a fantasy yes postmodern says everything is there as it should be and you know to that extent even the trace of God even the trace of the truth and foundations and reality which so rumour had it once existed even those traces can no longer be found and what happened and I say just at that moment historically God was back on the agenda with vengeance but not the same old God you know this time the God was not on the side of civilization he wasn't you know a blue blazer - or Ted golf playing God no kind of Arduino and light you know but a kind of ruffle alien dark-skinned God who belonged to them and no longer to us the Almighty it appeared it was not safely nailed down in his coffin after all he'd simply shifted a dress yeah migrating to the hills of Montana and the Suk's of the Arab world and despite his premature obituary notices that have been so smugly and assuredly delivered his fanclub was growing his growing daily not least in the evangelizing of Latin America fundamentalism I think has its source the good the good news about fundamentalism it's not much good news about it so we better better salvage what we can hear it has its source I think not in hatred but in in fear in anxiety a lot of hatred of course has its source fundamentally in fear there's a sense in which fear anxiety are more fundamental than hatred which is sort of good news in a certain way those who feel washed up and humiliated by the brave onward march of the transnational corporations of global capitalism and who might conclude the only way to draw attention to their undervalued existence is to blow off the heads of small children in the name of Allah or blow up play schools in Oklahoma City because let's not forget from mentalists are not simply over there they're also as it were behind the East Coast intellectuals in the United States in the Midwest and the south and so on what had happened then I think is that smaller weaker nations suffered under the West's new post Cold War triumphalism West now felt it had a certainly carte blanche to ride roughshod in its own material interests over them he was no longer stymied by the Soviet Union which no longer existed and that then unleashed a backlash among those weaker and more humiliated nations that were out of sync with capitalist modernity it unleashed a backlash in the form of radical Islam and that that mean meant again enormous with enormous irony of the closing down of one grand narrative if that's to say the announcement that since the Cold War you know a certain grand narrative over actually succeeded in springing another in in opening up another the war of capitalism and radical Islam it wasn't the first time that the Declaration of the end of history proved a little premature I mean Hegel for example was a fine way to start a sentence Hegel believed Hegel believes with enduring modesty that history had now culminated inside his own head but what did that do it only provoked a whole range of people you know Schopenhauer Nietzsche Kierkegaard Marx to react to that and to say oh no it hasn't and thus to pile on more history and to open up the grand narrative again that tends to happen attempts to close history down very often result in simply piling more on think of the revolutionary avant-gardes in art of the early 20th century in particular who wanted to wipe out everything that had come before to create a blank space in which they could create with utter innovativeness you know the act of trying to put a bomb under previous history is itself a historical act inevitably which then contributes to the very history that it's trying to annihilate it was a kind of contradiction in that a further irony in this whole string of ironies is that the West itself the liberal secular agnostic West was in itself in part responsible for bringing this liberal illiberal theocratic antagonist into existence even if in prosperous words in the tempest it still refuses to acknowledge this thing of darkness this raging fury on the threshold that one gets so often in tragedy it still refuses to acknowledge it has been in part its own repentance traditionally theologically is opening oneself up to the monstrosity that is oneself which also happens all the way from oedipus onwards the monster the recognition that the monsters are not alas other people but are much closer than that closes and breathing really and to be able to do that an enormous ly difficult act is an act of redemption is an act of salvation how the tragic it may be West hasn't been able to do that Prospero can at the end this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine the West hasn't been able to do that and an agnostic system that was designed among other things to ward off fanaticism and fundamentalism succeeded in the foreign adventures that flowed from it in actually stoking that fanaticism and fundamentalist you know again an enormous paradox of our times so if you like the West helped to spawn not only secularism but fundamentalism as well and most creditable feat of dialectics difficult trick to pull on to bring that to concretize that a little more and in the earlier decades of the 20th century before the war on terror the West the West rolled back for its own Imperial purposes various liberal nationalist left nationalist secularized forces in the Middle East or in the Muslim world as we know it's it's slaughtered half-a-million communists in Indonesia with the connivance of the CIA and so on and what did that do rolling back those largely progressive left nationalists secularized Muslim forces it created an enormous vacuum politically into which radical Islam could then okay we've tried that way against the West doesn't work we've tried to wait them doesn't work let's try this on for a change yeah jihad is to some extent it's not the whole story but to some extent the bastard offspring of the very civilization it wants to destroy what we have then what we end up with is a world divided almost down the middle between those who believe too much fundamentalists of various stripes whether Texan or Taliban and those who believe too little chief executives technocrats Robbie Williams other howlings of an inherently faithless social order and in the middle you have just a very few rare people like myself who believe neither too much nor too little who lean neither this way or that impeccably even-handed superbly disinterested but we're a dwindling breed but the point is not simply that as Yeats puts it you know the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity it's that each camp keeps helping to bring the other to reinforce the existence and values of the other it's a stalled dialectic between them as it were when it comes to belief however the West is now at a distinct disadvantage I think because in the post qohor years because just the moment as I say when it thought in its overconfidence it could get by on a sort of unholy melange of pragmatism and culturalism relativism anti foundationalism and so on it was brought face to face eyeball to eyeball with an absolutist foundationalist full-blooded lee metaphysical antagonist for whom those things were not problems at all look that they were would that they were but they're not so yeah okay let me just finish by saying that I think this is one reason not often touted for the so-called God debate yes because another irony I have to report is that just at the moment when postmodern West was in the process of junking large-sized beliefs that had sua served it supremely well in the past you know ideas of science Liberty progress spirit and so on just at that moment some Western ideologues felt the need to reach back into that previous history of the European middle-class and come up with a sort of off the peg version of enlightenment yes old-fashioned old-fashioned 19th century rationalists like who's that who's that atheist whose wife is in doctor who talking sorry yeah pray that's all I know about him actually I just know that his wife used to perform in Doctor Who old-fashioned 19th century rationalist like whatever his name is and my my old my old trotskyist comrade late comrade Christopher Hitchens may have all kinds of reasons some of them very good for arguing I think against religion but I think it's significant that we should be hearing once more a rather clapped out reach me down version of the Enlightenment language of recent science progress and so on just at the moment when it appeared in post-modernism that all of those grand ideas have been digital enormous irony suddenly resurrected and I think that has something to do with this political the global political situation because you need the West needs some rather more robust self justification self legitimation then you know postmodern ideology can provide it with and so it is that um the American death of God think of Sam Harris despite his apparent belief that his people are the most upright morally speaking who ever stalked the earth was prepared in the wake of 9/11 to consider a preemptive strike against the Muslim world which he said might result in the deaths of tens of millions of innocent civilians if it prevented them you said from developing nuclear weapons and Harris is a liberal Hallett Harris is a liberal god knows what is more right-wing colleagues are cooking up for us yes for the sake of clarity perhaps I just let me end by saying that uh when I refer to 9/11 I refer of course to the second nine not the first 911 and I sure you realize I don't refer to the World Trade Center not the 911 that happened almost exactly 30 years before when the American government and its agents violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile and its installed in its place an odious autocrat who went on to kill far more people than disappeared and were killed in the tragedy of the world said trade center but you won't hear much about that on Fox News thank you [Applause]

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Length: 35min 20sec (2120 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2017