LIVING WITH HOPE?, rev. of Ronald Aronson, Living Without God

Ophelia Benson, , Vol. XII, No. 3, Whole Number 47; posted June 13, 2009

What on earth happened to secularism in the US over the past few decades? Ronald Aronson points out in the first few pages of Living Without God that a couple of generations ago secularists were confident and on the offensive, and that times have changed. ‘Today, the public display of belief in God has become the default assumption of American society.’ What happened?

One thing that happened, Aronson notes, is that the whole picture has been badly exaggerated. The polls tell us that ‘virtually everyone in America’ is religious, but then what of the one in four who declare themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’ or the one in four who are atheist, agnostic, or unwilling to say? Aronson finds that many US surveys overcount believers and undercount everyone else, via the wording of questions and the limited choices offered, and that in addition many believers are also secularists who are getting tired of in-your-face religion.

It would be possible to blame religion for all this, but Aronson considers that a bad habit which ‘avoids looking inward and confronting the secular loss of vision.’ What is called for now, Aronson argues, is to free secularism from ‘false hopes’; to live comfortably without God requires ‘rethinking the secular worldview after the eclipse of modern optimism.’ This necessitates asking unflinching questions.

Why, despite movement after movement on behalf of justice, is life still so unfair? Is there reason to hope that any of this can be improved? What is the meaning and direction of human life, without God and after Progress?

In the rest of the book, however, it becomes apparent that although Aronson is asking questions about life after Progress, he is very far from abandoning belief in progress. In other words he sees the question as being about the end of delusional optimism about the inevitability and especially the uninterruptedness of progress, but not at all about the end of belief in reform, amelioration, improvement. On the contrary, the book is saturated in ideas about amelioration, and a good thing too. Aronson is not quite as disenchanted with the idea of progress as that last question might suggest.

John Stuart Mill asked himself similar questions one day in the autumn of 1826, when he was in a depressed mood, as he reported in the Autobiography.

I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world…[I]t occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

Mill recovered. Poetry helped, especially that of Coleridge and Wordsworth; so did feeling and ‘enthusiasm’ (an emotion that was anathema to his father); and Mill went on being a reformer of the world, thus showing that the conclusion loses force once the mood is past. Our hopes for a better world will never all be attained, there will always be work to do, because there is always room for improvement.

Aronson’s chapters on social justice, responsibility, and choosing to know help to back this up: they are moral and aspirational throughout, thus showing that the only answer to the horrors of the 20^th century is, not to abandon the idea of reform and progress, but to do a better job of it.

We get to those chapters by way of a moving consideration of gratitude. What do we do with generalized gratitude – for nature, life, the world – when we do not believe there is anyone to thank? Aronson starts from a Wordsworthian moment in a clearing on a spring day, which evoked ‘a vague feeling more like gratitude than anything else but not toward any being or person I could recognize.’ The absence of giving thanks in secular culture, he observes, ‘deprives those who live without God of much of life’s coherence and meaning.’

He notes the meaning to be found in the interdependence of nature, including the chastened sort of meaning in Darwin’s discovery of the role of competition, failure and death in making us what we are. The thing we are, of course, is pre-eminently social, and part of secular gratitude rests on awareness of the vast array of social networks we depend on, including the ones that created the Pinckney Recreation Area where Aronson was walking that spring day, those that prompted and enabled his grandparents to emigrate from Ukraine and Galicia, ‘our food from Peru and Mexico and Australia and a dozen regions of the United States; our clothing from Albania, Macau, and Mauritius, Honduras, Poland, and Sri Lanka; our household objects from China, Vietnam, South Africa, and Kenya.’

This thought leads to that of inequality, and whether the resultant guilt and resentment may overwhelm gratitude. Aronson argues that in fact this sense of our connectedness, ‘without seeing ourselves as God’s children,’ can lead us to find ‘new, adult ways of sensing our unity not only with each other, but also with the cosmos, nature, history, and the social and economic worlds of other people.’ He expands this theme in two chapters on responsibility.

‘The World on our Shoulders’ looks at social justice and racism, equality and responsibility, Nazism and the war in Iraq, ending with an acknowledgement of the burden of collective responsibility and the temptation to hand the burden over to a God. It is a burden, says Aronson, but there is another aspect to it: ‘Seeing the extent to which we do indeed affect our world frees us to consider ways, however small, we may change it.’ Quite so – it frees us to be reformers of the world, in however small a way.

The chapter on ‘Choosing to Know’ strikes a somewhat more pessimistic note, at least at the beginning. It resonates with a long line of books about American credulity, disdain for intellectualism, and ignorance – Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World, Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things, and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason to name a few. Aronson’s tone however is more sympathetic than irritated, more an attempt at rescue than a jeremiad. It saddens him to see one of his adult students, a single mother eager for knowledge, impeded by lack of time and torn between ‘a growing understanding of science and how to ascertain truth’ and religion, central to ‘her sense of community and identity, and an anchor in her life.’ In this way the chapter has more in common with Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity than with polemics against dumbing down.

Despite the sympathy, however, Aronson is unequivocal about the fact that ignorance and credulity are a choice. He makes this plain in the opening paragraph:

Almost half of all Americans reject evolution, and they do so not after close study and careful consideration, but because of their religious faith. These believers, unlike liberal Christians, most Jews, and the Catholic Church, still insist on claiming that the book of Genesis is a literal account of the origin of the universe, the earth, plants, animals, and humans. They refuse to study evolution, or do so in order to refute it. In so doing, they reject a decisive aspect of the world they live in and a key part of its knowledge. Amazingly, in the country that has long been among the world’s most highly-educated and science-minded, where the importance of education is dinned into everyone’s heads morning, noon, and night, where more than one in four adults has graduated from college, these citizens choose to be ignorant.

Reject; insist; refuse; choose. This is wilful behaviour, and actively, determinedly, even perversely wilful at that. People have access to reliable evidence-based knowledge, and they insist on rejecting it and substituting evidence-free stories instead. This is defiance – rebellion – revolution – but not of the right kind. As Sartre put it, ‘to be ignorant is to choose to ignore; it is to look away from what there is to know.’ It is bad faith.

The final chapter is about hope, but the note Aronson strikes in it is sombre, at times bordering on despair. He manages some qualified optimism at first, in a moving evocation of a walk on Detroit’s new Riverwalk, with glimpses of a memorial to the underground railroad and the Michigan Labor Legacy Monument, ‘a graceful and soaring sculpture commemorating the vital role of Detroit’s once-mighty labor movement in the city’s, state’s, and nation’s history.’ But that ‘once-mighty’ of course signposts some of the reasons for the melancholy, elegiac tone – Detroit’s labor movement is no longer mighty (and its prospects are a great deal worse now than they were when Aronson wrote), nor is the labor movement in general. Some kinds of social and political hope are very difficult to sustain at present, as Aronson points out.

[E]vents and trends in the twentieth century, and so far in the twenty-first, have remarkably changed the ways humans live with their hopes.

First, it no longer makes any sense to expectantly anticipate the advent of the peaceable kingdom, a better world on its way – or even that our children’s or grandchildren’s lives are likely to be better than our own…No historical logic is making the world better…

In the face of such events, keeping on sometimes has become plugging on, without much enthusiasm.

This is an understandable feeling – but Aronson perhaps doesn’t make enough of the liberating potential of living without God.

God is always double, of course: both the kindly sympathetic protector and ally, and also the angry punitive judge. People who are superlatively skilled at shaping their beliefs according to their wishes may be able to believe their God is always the loving ally and never the punitive judge – but most people aren’t that skilled. The price of believing in an all-powerful all-knowing deity who permits earthquakes and hurricanes and epidemics to kill and maim people by the millions – is fear: not just fear that bad things will happen, which is inescapable, but fear of an angry God.

God is always double in this way, and so escape from this God is always double too, and the liberation is no small thing. One gets a sense of this from conversations with believers. Aronson discusses such conversations at one point:

To appreciate our problem, atheists, agnostics, and skeptics need only recall the hesitations and stammering of their most recent personal conversations with anyone who is religious…Our own point of view, once so robust and filled with energy, is diffident and measured, able to respond to religious enthusiasm only with our denial of God followed by our own uncertainties. In contrast to our principled tentativeness, our religious friends affirm their belief in the coherence of the universe and the world, their deep sense of belonging to it and to a human community, their refusal to be stymied by the limits of their knowledge…and perhaps above all their sense of hope about the future. Even if we would reject these beliefs as unfounded and irrational, we have to be struck by their force.

I have to say, that has not been my experience. I don’t envy their force, because I don’t find force allied to wrong-headedness enviable, and I certainly don’t envy their coherence, because coherence is just what is lacking. On the contrary, what I see is lamentably contorted reasoning that protects the putative benevolent God at the cost of accepting horrors. To put it succinctly, believers have no good explanation for the fact that a benevolent God allows immense suffering in humans and animals, and their failed attempts at explanation strike non-believers as simply collusion with evil. This is why the value of the liberation is no small thing. A God who allowed the suffering of billions of sentient humans and animals going on every second of every day would be a hideous tyrant, and living without that tyrant is a pearl of great price.

We have many reasons for worry and sorrow and even despair, but believing in a supernatural bully who causes or allows massive suffering is not one of them. This is nothing to sneeze at.