I haven’t read Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everybody Should Be Religious, and I don’t intend to. I’m sure there’s much in it that overlaps with what I’ve been writing here, as well as significant differences, neither of which are particularly interesting to me. I’m more interested in George Packer’s review of it this morning in the Atlantic because it represents the attitude common if not the conventional default among liberal intellectuals—
At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.
This strives to sound brave and dignified, and I’m sure it’s sincerely believed, but it sounds to me like conventional, intellectual cant. It’s what most secular liberals “believe” without much pressure to believe anything else. Sure, he’s done his due diligence, read his Kierkegaard and whatnot, and he finds no need to take his “leap” into faith.
But I think K’s leap of faith is generally misundertood as are the purposes of the traditional proofs for the existence of God. No one can persuade you to have faith. Faith is a gift, which means that it’s not something you reason yourself to. There’s something fundamentally irrational, or, more accurately, supra-rational about it. It’s something if you experience it, turns your world upside down, and then the question becomes whether you choose to live with the implications, i.e., to live in the world in a upside down kind of way.
So Faith and Belief are not the same thing. Belief can be reaonable in a way faith cannot be. And so my reading of the Kierkegaardian leap is to understand it in light of the Kantian antinomies. Kant was the great philosopher of the powers and limits of Reason, but he didn’t think that reason was the only way you get to truth. So, for instance, he said that reason alone cannot prove that humans have freedom or whether they are determined. Perfectly reasonable cases, he said, can be made for either, and neither case disproves the other. So you’re faced with a choice, an either/or. You must choose, take a leap, so to say, in ‘believing’ either that you are free or that you are not without there being any rational certainty that you are either. Believing is not the same as rational certainty, and it’s not the same as faith. But it’s not un-reasonable.
But, you might ask, isn’t the leap itself the enactment of freedom? Good point. And in a way that is the point. Unfreedom is our condition until we choose it, not because we’re rational, but because freedom, in order to be freedom, has to be enacted. If you are truly free, you choose freedom. And that cannot make any “sense” to someone who has not chosen it. Those who are truly free have no doubts about it. What you believe or don’t has consequences.
And the same thing is true about God—his existence cannot be rationally proved or disproved. So you must choose. And your choice is existentially consequential on so many different levels. And among those consequences is the choice to live in a world that is ontologically meaningless or meaningful.
Why would anyone choose to live in a world that is meaningless? There are only two reasons that I can think of:
That’s honestly how one experiences it. Everything in his or her life is meaningless, graceless, cruel, and without purpose.
Two, it’s an idol of the tribe. It’s the fashion. There’s a kind of intellectual conformity that drives it. You can’t be an intellectual in good standing unless your beliefs conform to what is for the moment hegemonic.1
And I’d add a third reason, peculiar to our moment, that reinforces both of these—the nihilistic hegemony of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Insofar as it is the cultural operating system on which our cultural/political/economic system runs, it promotes meaningless and unfreedom. It wants you to be docile and to derive your sense of meaning from your participation in its hive mind. Human meaninglessness and unfreedom are essential to its program.
But, you might object, if you are of an Ayn-Randian, Libertarian bent, isn’t the creative entrepreneur free? Isn’t he the Nietzschean uebermensch? Aren’t they creating their own meaning? I don’t see Sam Altman as free. I see him as a slave of the TCM, and the same is true for Musk. These figures, as I explained in yesterday’s post, are compelled by the logic of the TCM, and are simply its tools. They are bric-a-brac being swept along by its flood.
As are the rest of us if we don’t find a place to set our feet to resist.
But one last point. My argument for the restoration of a transcendentalist metaphysics to replace the hegemonic nihilism of the TCM is not an argument for faith, because there is no argument for faith. Either you have it or you don’t. Belief and Faith are not the same thing. And so it’s not an argument for Christianity or any other confessional commitment, which requires some minimal level of faith. It is an argument, however, for a choice, a la the Kantian antinomies, that we need to make as a civilization—i.e., either to ‘believe’ that the cosmos is meaningful or that it’s not. If most elites and everyday folks choose meaning to be the collective default, that has consequences, mostly positive.2 Right now the meaninglessness of the TCM is the collective default, and it has consequences, mostly negative.3
So the point that I’m making, and the one I think that Douthat’s making, is that it’s not unreasonable to believe that the cosmos has meaning, and while you as an individual are perfectly free to believe that it doesn’t, we’d all be better off if as a civilization we believed it did. Right now the meaninglessness that Packer so stoically embraces is the default among the culture's elites that is leading us to a dystopia. If the rest of us join him in such ‘belief’, it becomes for all of us a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Notes
1 I can hear all the objections, but I don’t want the post text to be overly long in preemptively refuting them. I’d be happy to address them in comments.
2. How such a “collective” choice is made and what its positive consequences might be are what I want to explore in my “Rescuing Aristotle” series in coming months.
3. My argument about how the TCM is our default cultural OS is central to my argument, and I don’t know anybody else who is making this argument in the way I am. Please let me know if I’m wrong about that. But for that very reason it might seem rather eccentric—interesting but not to be taken seriously. I think it has to be taken dead seriously.