Simply to See?
October 1, 2018                    



Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 192 pp., $25.



By George Scialabba



Our hominid ancestors first appeared around five million years ago. Symbol use began 150,000 years ago. The first of the major religions began 5,000 years ago. What are we to make of this? Did humans have souls before 5,000 years ago? If not, then how did they acquire them? If so, then why didn't God reveal Him-/Her-/Itself throughout 99.9 percent of humanity's life span? What was He/She/It thinking?

God's puzzling silence didn't end with the advent of religion. The God of the Old Testament was fairly communicative, and the gods of the Hindu pantheon made frequent appearances, at least for a while. But ever since Jesus ascended to heaven (or, if you prefer, since the angel Gabriel finished dictating to Muhammad), transmissions have ceased. Why? Doesn't She know that we need much more than ancient scriptures to attest the supernatural? The infidel Tom Paine scoffed that "a revelation which is to be received as true ought to be written on the sun." The devout Cardinal Newman agreed but thought it had been: "The Visible Church was, at least to her children, the light of the world, as conspicuous as the sun in the heavens, and the Creed was written on her forehead." Unfortunately, the Church's radiance has dimmed somewhat since then. Why, as many unbelievers have asked, can't God write "YES, I EXIST" across the night sky in mile-high flaming letters visible (to each viewer in her own language, of course) everywhere on earth, each night for a week, once a year? Is that too much to ask of an omnipotent, infinitely loving Being?

This inexplicable divine reticence has always made life difficult for theists. Sportingly, John Gray proposes to make life difficult for atheists as well. Gray is professor emeritus of European thought at the London School of Economics, a prolific author (Seven Types of Atheism is his 22nd book), and a columnist for The New Statesman. He was briefly a Thatcherite, then became a critic of free-market fundamentalism, then (briefly, again) a New Labourite, but was harshly critical of (and acutely prescient about) the 2003 Iraq war. Since around 2003 he has turned from political theory and current affairs to a more philosophical, even prophetic, vein, producing numerous short books that take a very long - and glum - view of Western intellectual history.

A similar argument runs through all these later books, including Seven Types of Atheism. The secular, progressive, rationalist ideologies of the West are so much "spilt theology." The belief that humankind will eventually achieve lasting peace and happiness merely recapitulates Christianity's salvation history, in which the People of God will be redeemed at the end of days. The expectation that science, or more generally knowledge, will transform the human condition is a form of Gnosticism, the esoteric doctrine that the world is ruled by an evil demiurge, whom only those in possession of secret, saving knowledge can defeat. Very few, mostly marginal figures, in either East or West, have achieved genuine detachment and disenchantment. Most atheists have "searched for a surrogate deity to fill the hole left by the God that has departed." A wiser few have "stepped out of monotheism altogether and in doing so found freedom and fulfilment."

The Enlightenment, Ursprung of modernity, is Gray's particular bete noire, its immense prestige largely undeserved. Its intention to fashion a science of man issued in racist pseudo-science. Its ambition to inaugurate the rule of reason resulted in bloody fanaticism. Its pretensions to exemplify the free, critical spirit were mocked by the philosophes' innumerable unconscious borrowings from Christian doctrine and practice. Contemporary piety toward the Enlightenment rests on a misunderstanding that ought to have been dispelled 75 years ago by Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (still "the best book on the Enlightenment," in Gray's opinion).  According to Becker: "In spite of their rationalism and their humane sympathies, in spite of their aversion to hocus-pocus and enthusiasm, in spite of their eager skepticism, their engaging cynicism, their brave youthful blasphemies and talk of hanging the last king in the entrails of the last priest - in spite of it all, there is more of Christian philosophy in the writings of the philosophes than has yet been dreamed of in our histories. ... The philosophes demolished the Heavenly City of St Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials." Becker at least admired the philosophes; Gray is not half so indulgent: "Racism and anti-Semitism are not incidental defects in Enlightenment thinking. They flow from some of the Enlightenment's central beliefs."


Seven Types of Atheism does not attempt a rigorous or exhaustive taxonomy. It is mainly a convenient format for organizing Gray's likes and (mainly) dislikes. The first category, "The New Atheists," leads one to expect some engagement with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. But Gray's contempt for these contemporary would-be philosophes is such that he can barely bring himself to refer to them: they are "mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment." Instead he sets out some intellectual scaffolding. Science cannot dispel religion, not only because there is no scientific worldview, only a method of inquiry; but also because religion is not a set of hypotheses but rather anything - myths, rituals, even illusions - that makes sense of our passage through life. "There is no such thing as 'the atheist worldview.' Atheism simply excludes the idea that the world is the work of a creator-God, which is not found in most religions." "Religion is universal, whereas monotheism is a local cult." "Humanity evolved to survive, not to find the truth." Gray is much given to such lapidary pronouncements, perhaps because he is an ardent admirer of Schopenhauer and Santayana.

Secular humanists, Gray's next category, only think they have left religion behind. The history of Christianity is shot through with millenarian movements promising the end of history. After the Reformation, the apocalypticism was dropped in favor of gradual progress, and the Heavenly City was replaced as a goal by a secular utopia to be attained through human effort. But in a larger perspective, what Christianity and secular humanism share is more important than their differences. No other religious tradition - Jewish, Greek, Indian, Chinese - envisions history as linear rather than cyclical or conceives of humanity as a unitary collective subject. The very idea of utopia - a place where everyone is happy - could not have occurred to people who took for granted that individuals have irreconcilable desires and ideals, and that conflict is therefore ineliminable. Western universalism, Gray scoffs, is very provincial indeed.

Mill, Marx, and Bertrand Russell were secular humanists: alike, for all their differences, in their "vast hopes for social transformation." More surprisingly, Nietzsche qualifies too:


Nietzsche was an incurably Christian thinker. Like the Christians he despised, he regarded the human animal as a species in need of redemption. Without God, humankind faced "nihilism" - a life without meaning. But nihilism could be avoided if humans willed into being the meaning God had once secured. Only a few would ever be capable of this feat. It was these exceptional individuals - the supermen lauded in Thus Spake Zarathustra - who would redeem humanity from a senseless existence. Nietzsche's Ubermensch played a Christ-like role.



One would like to hear Nietzsche's thoughts about that.

Evolution had no sooner vanquished Christian theology than outcroppings of "evolutionary theology" began appearing. Gray rebukes Darwin, who wrote: "As natural selection works solely for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress to perfection." Natural selection does not work solely for the good of each being, as Darwin acknowledged often enough elsewhere. But the impulse to identify evolution with progress has proved hard to resist, as has the temptation to lend evolution a hand with eugenics. "Evolutionary humanism" had some inhuman corollaries in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, Julian Huxley, and H.G. Wells.

A sub-set of science-based atheists are the "transhumanists," who think not merely that can humans do without God but that we are destined to become gods. Ray Kurzweil is the most confident contemporary exponent of transhumanism. Yuval Noah Harari is more ambivalent. But earlier prophecies of "men like gods" are numerous: Wells (who coined the phrase), the illustrious scientist J.D. Bernal, who imagined humans becoming creatures of pure light, Arthur C. Clarke (whose Childhood's End foresees a similar end for humanity), and even Trotsky, who predicted that, after the Revolution, "the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise." For Gray, all this is, as usual, vieux jeu. "At bottom, the transhumanist movement is a modern variant of the dream of transcending contingency that possessed mystics in ancient times. Gnostics and disciples of Plato longed to be absorbed in a timeless Absolute, a refuge from the ugly conflicts of the human world."

Not all modern atheists are unwitting Christians. Some are unwitting Gnostics. In that ancient mystery religion, the earth was created by a malevolent demiurge, while a transcendent God dwells, inaccessible, in a realm of light, unknowable except by those who receive a special, secret revelation. "A mix of Christian notions of redemption with a Gnostic belief in the salvific power of knowledge has propelled the project of salvation through politics." The baneful lure of esoteric knowledge - ideology - is responsible for the modern political religions: Jacobinism, Positivism, Bolshevism, Nazism, Maoism. That each of these movements was irrational, intolerant, authoritarian, and apocalyptic - hence religious, on one view of religion - no one can dispute. Whether, given the absence from all of them of a malevolent demiurge and a transcendent God, it is useful to call them "Gnostic," is less certain. 

Most of Gray's subjects are rationalists, who thought their way (or so they believed) out of religion. But there are also passionate or existential atheists, rebels who cannot forgive God for the horrors of the world or the miseries of their own natures. The dark prince of these "misotheists" (God-haters) is the Marquis de Sade. Finding himself beset by impulses to cruelty and sexual domination, he ascribed them to Nature, which, after the 18th-century French fashion, he deified. Sade's distinction, however, is to have disenchanted Nature, which until then had been almost universally reverenced but which he saw as a cesspool of violent and lustful drives. Of course, Gray points out, "Sade was mistaken when he imagined he had left monotheism behind. Instead he changed one unforgiveable deity for another."

More appealing misotheists include Ivan Karamazov, who "handed back his ticket" to heaven because an Almighty God allows innocent children to suffer, and William Empson, whose classic Seven Types of Ambiguity suggested the title of Gray's book. Empson, a literary critic, derived from studying Paradise Lost an intense revulsion against Christianity. "The Christian God the Father, the God of Tertullian, Augustine, and Aquinas, is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man." Nevertheless, Gray finds Empson, too, insufficiently emancipated. "By invoking an idea of metaphysical evil, Empson showed he remained wedded to a Christian worldview. ... Struggling with this insuperable difficulty, Empson ended up embracing something like Gnosticism. The God that ruled the world in Christianity was in truth the Devil."

At this point the reader, especially if she has encountered similar arguments in Gray's previous books, may find a question arising in her mind: So what? Why does it matter that Bolshevism and Nazism both have certain structural and psychological resemblances to Christianity? Such resemblances do not really affect our final judgment of those phenomena. If Paul had not been converted, Gray writes, Christianity would have died out, polytheism would have remained the religion of the Roman Empire, and monotheism, and therefore millenarianism, would never have entered world history. It is a fascinating counterfactual speculation, but we cannot, alas, uninvent monotheism. Does it matter that Voltaire and Hume were racists? So was nearly everyone in 18th-century Europe, after all, and the respects in which Voltaire and Hume were original were wholly benign. Kant and Mill "believed that a universal moral law could be grounded in reason," giving rise to an "evangelical liberalism" which has led modern Western governments, "possessed by chimerical visions of universal human rights," to disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya "in order to promote a liberal way of life in societies that have never known it." Leaving aside the fact that these interventions had nothing whatever to do with promoting a liberal way of life, while the Western governments in question (especially our own) cared not a fig for universal human rights, does all this really call into question Kant's and Mill's theories or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

In a devastating critique of Becker's Heavenly City, Peter Gay coined the phrase "the fallacy of spurious persistence" to name a tendency to claim false or exaggerated continuities. When Auguste Comte issued a "Positivist Catechism," the continuity with Roman Catholicism was clear. That Mill's liberalism "aimed to replace monotheism even as it continued monotheistic thinking in another guise" is much less plausible. "If you want to understand modern politics," Gray writes, "you must set aside the idea that secular and religious movements are opposites." Secular and religious people may beg to differ, but Gray knows better.

At last, just as many readers will have begun to wonder if any Western thinkers ever succeeded in freeing themselves from monotheism, millenarianism, and Gnosticism, Gray introduces us to his favorite atheists: the anti-progressives and the mystics. George Santayana was a philosopher of amiable imperturbability. He wrote fluently but entirely unsystematically and without the slightest concession to the interests of academic philosophers, so he is largely forgotten. He produced countless exquisite sentences like this: "A mind enlightened by skepticism and cured of noisy dogma, a mind discounting all reports and freed from all tormenting anxiety about its own fortunes and existence, finds in the wilderness of essence a very sweet and marvelous solitude." Gray praises him as "an atheist who loved religion," which is half-serious - exactly as Santayana was about everything.

Joseph Conrad was as fatalistic and disillusioned as Santayana, but without Santayana's light-heartedness and sense of mischief. If Santayana was an Epicurean, Conrad was a Stoic, certain that Fate would eventually come for each individual and that all that mattered was how she met it. Gray quotes Conrad's famous letter to Bertrand Russell: "I have never been able to find in any man's book or any man's talk anything to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world." Conrad thought reason grossly overrated; competence and courage will see one through. Santayana played with ideas; Conrad mistrusted them, sure that some fool would get hold of them and wreak havoc.

Schopenhauer, whom Gray exalts above Hegel and Nietzsche, was a "mystical atheist." His philosophy of the will furnished Freud with many mordant apothegms. He studied Indian philosophy, which supported his belief that selfhood was an illusion, and that destroying this illusion was the only possible salvation. Curiously, Schopenhauer lived a far more sensual and worldly life than that ideal of salvation might suggest.

Spinoza, on the other hand, was notably unworldly. Gray calls him and Lev Shestov, a 20th-century Russian existentialist, "negative theologians," since both of them predicated a God about nothing could be said. Spinoza was a pantheist, but not in the same sense as most of his predecessors of that description. He did not conceive of countless individual gods dwelling in every separate object, but rather of a single God diffused through and in fact identical with the Universe. He was also an early specimen of that recurring paradox (which is not really a paradox): the philosophical determinist who is also a passionate champion of freedom.

Gray is at his best in these sketches of writers he admires, as well as in the many similar sketches scattered through his previous books: Varlam Shalamov, Stanislas Lem, J.G. Ballard (Straw Dogs); Freud, Joseph Roth, Norman Lewis, T.E. Hulme, Llewelyn Powys (The Silence of Animals); Leopardi, T. F. Powys, Philip K. Dick (The Soul of the Marionette); among others. They earn Gray's highest praise: "Not looking for cosmic meaning, they were content with the world as they found it." Addressing readers directly (at the end of Straw Dogs), Gray asks us to do likewise: "Other animals do not need a purpose in life. ... Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"

With considerable respect for Gray (and for Conrad, Santayana, et al), I would answer no. As long as so much of what we see is unnecessary suffering, we cannot be content with the world as we find it. Of course we should keep Gray's cautions well in mind. The catastrophic revolutionary ideologies of the past were ersatz religions. Scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Moral and political progress are always subject to reversal. Humans are animals; human nature is riven with conflicts; reason is a frail reed. But even if we can't set the cosmos right, we can't leave our corner of it the way it is. Whatever else may be an illusion, other people's suffering is not.




George Scialabba's most recent book is Slouching Toward Utopia. His writing is archived at