The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online

Nothingness? Don’t let’s exaggerate. A god or ideals are not necessary to discover supreme values. We only have to go for three days without eating anything for a crumb to become our supreme god: it is needs that are at the basis of our values, of the sense and order of our lives.” And “Atomic bombs? Some centuries ago, we died before we were thirty—plagues, poverty, witches, Hell, Purgatory, tortures. . . . Haven’t your conquests gone to your head? Have you forgotten what we were yesterday?”
    Yesterday is important to Miłosz. For him, the poet was and is set apart in that poets presuppose the existence of an ideal reader, “and the poetic act both anticipates the future and speeds its coming.” In that future, he thought, we would see a return to history as a source of identity and transcendence, using that word in a specific sense. “Daring to make a prediction, I expect, perhaps quite soon, in the twenty-first century, a radical turning away from the Weltanschauung marked principally by biology, and this will result from a newly acquired historical consciousness. Instead of presenting man through those traits that link him to higher forms of the evolutionary chain, other of his aspects will be stressed: the exceptionality, strangeness, and loneliness of that creature mysterious to itself, a being incessantly transcending its own limits. Humanity will be increasingly turning back to itself, increasingly contemplating its entirepast, searching for a key to its own enigma. . . . A one-dimensional man wants to acquire new dimensions by putting on the masks and dress, the manners of feeling and thinking of other epochs.” 6
    At pains to show that poetry is at the forefront (another reason for hope, another form of hope), he asserts that what is new is that our future will not be determined by jets as the means of transport, or by a decrease in infant mortality, important as those things may be. “It is determined by humanity’s emergence as a new elemental force; until now humanity had been divided into castes distinguished by dress, mentality, and mores.” This transformation is causing the disappearance of certain mythic notions, “widespread in the last century, about the specific and presumably eternal features of the peasant, worker and intellectual. Humanity as an elemental force, the result of technology and mass education, means that man is opening up to science and art on an unprecedented scale.” 7 Is the disappearance of religion in our lives any different from the disappearance of some of those other nineteenth-century myths, embodied in imperialism, racial superiority and colonialism? he asks. No one mourns their passing and no one foresees their return.
    OUR ACHIEVEMENTS AND OUR LIMITS
    Miłosz is saying that the best way to understand humanity is historically, that the way man has historically transcended his limitations is the only form of transcendence available, and that we should not ignore the many ways in which, throughout history, life has gotten better—more fulfilling and, yes, more meaningful—for countless ordinary people, in more or less ordinary ways. Only by understanding humanity’s historical achievements and limits can we hope to extend—transcend—those limits in our lifetime by our own achievements. And it is in the nature of things, he insists, that “reflection by a well-stocked mind” offers the best hope of recording and describing those limits and achievements—“the poetic act both anticipates the future and speeds its coming.”
    We are fortunate in having at least two sets of reflections by well-stocked minds that address our subject. These are Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and George Steiner’s Real Presences (1989) and Grammars of Creation (2001).
    Murdoch trained as a philosopher, and as a novelist she was particularly “exercised” by art. These two she brought together in Metaphysics , arguing that “moral