The Mourning Cloak

Secularism is a complex idea, or set of ideas and practices, with a long history. Considerable thought and work has gone into tracing that history and much ink has been spilled. Charles Taylor, a Quebec-based philosopher, in his book A Secular Age outlines a perspectival shift from the Middle Ages in which it was almost impossible not to believe in God to the modern secular age when it becomes one option among many. Talal Assad, an anthropologist, in his Formations of the Secular works to develop an anthropology of the secular through an analysis of agency and pain. John Milbank, a theologian, in his Theology and Social Theory, argues that the secular is not simply the absence of religious thought but a view of the world that is imagined and put into practice as ideas about God, nature, and morality shift. In a similar vein Michael J. Buckley described the origins of modern atheism in the progressive self-alienation of (Christian) religion as thinkers began to rely on philosophical paradigms and Deistic notions of God.

Suffice to say that secularism has a longer history than can be satisfactorily dealt with in a blog post. The fortunes of secularism, and of atheism more generally, have shifted tremendously since the days of Denis Diderot and Baron D’Holbach, and, as might be expected, the historical situation in which secularism arose as a challenging intellectual movement has largely been forgotten. A recent book review in The New Yorker seeks to animate the secular faithful with the tagline “Can secularists bring religious intensity to redeeming our actual existence?” (James Wood “The Time of Your Life in The New Yorker, May 20,2019 pp. 90-95.

James Wood reviews Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. He begins, however, with Marilynne Robinson’s lamentation that, although she has met good people who are atheists she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” Wood responds with a paen to the secular saints, beginning with Pliny the Elder. The quarrel is with eternity, not as a reality, but as a concept and a belief. Belief in the afterlife, Pliny held, destroyed “Nature’s particular boon… the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by adding anxiety about the future to the familiar grief of departure… How much easier for each person to trust in himself and for us to assume that death will offer that same freedom from care that we experienced before we were born.” This freedom from care is, of course the great oblivion. The fact that Pliny can say, apparently unaware of the contradictions involved, “that we experienced” anything before we were born is a pretty good sign that Wood’s panegyric to this pagan saint does not answer Robinson’s lament. The good Atheist position has not yet been articulated, at least not by Pliny.

Wood will go on, following Hägglund, to make the case that belief in eternity depreciates temporality, renders our moral engagement with this world suspect. Eternity, he asserts, is at best incoherent and meaningless, and at worst terrifying. Pliny’s belief in the “blessing of death,” he holds to be humane. Pliny’s perspective, of course, is that of a well-established Roman citizen. Pliny is an historian, a naturalist, an army commander, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. His immortality in the annals of history, at any rate, is secured. It is doubtful that those who stood on the losing side of the First Jewish-Roman war would have agreed with Pliny the Elder’s “humane convictions,” as they watched their beloved Temple razed to the ground by this “humanitarian intervention.”

Pliny the Elder is an unlikely forefather in a list that goes on to include Montaigne, Chekhov, James Baldwin, and Primo Levi. The idea is that they are all part of some shared ideology which eventually emerges as secularism is a strange argument to make, particularly when that argument eventually pushes towards a democratic socialism as the truest form of secularism. At the end of his book Hägglund will read Martin Luther King Jr.’s religious convictions as disavowed secularist commitment. King’s final speech, with its focus on how God has “commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day” is read by Hägglund and Wood as a pitch for a revaluation of value that is essentially an anti-capitalist, secularist credo.

There are some serious problems with this reading. For one thing it gives weight to the fact that King had read Marx and Hegel, but does not attend to the fact that King was steeped in the tradition of African-American preaching. From a theological perspective the dogma of the Incarnation, the Christian belief that the eternal enters into temporality and is only encountered within our bodily existence, is simply ignored. Naturally, there is a theological history here. The doctrines of creation and of cosmic renewal tend to be muted or absent within mainstream American Protestantism. Within this reduced theological landscape, the doctrine of the incarnation makes very little sense. But it is within this same reduced theological landscape that it makes sense to interpret King with an eye to Marx and German Idealism rather than, say, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

King had studied his Marx, and had begun to question the capitalistic economy. That is not in dispute. To claim that this makes him a “closet secularist” is, however, a stretch. It ignores key elements of his rhetorical style; what are we to make of his invocation of God as the one who has commanded us to concern ourselves with the poor? What are we to make of the role that the story of the Exodus and the promised land play in King’s vision of America? What are we to make of King not only as an idealist, but as a man and a leader of his people? A people who have shaped music, rhetoric, and conceptions within spaces we would largely recognize as religious.

Wood, at one point, does raise the suspicion that Hägglund’s vision of the good life is that of an academic professor whose ethically and intellectually satisfying work is “institutionally dependent on a busy, fertile capitalism.” (95). This is the closest Wood gets to anything approaching criticism of Hägglund’s work, and it is the part of the article that, to me, rings most true. Throughout the article we get nothing more than the assertion that eternity causes us to despise our own lives. Those who find meaning and purpose through religious vocations, or are powerfully shaped by the practices of religious communities, are rather scornfully appropriated. Hägglund the academic, knows better than King himself what King is about. His “religiosity was really a committed secularism.” Despite the brief moment of awareness that Hägglund’s critique is institutionally dependent on capitalism, Wood fails to recognize that a secularist ideology can function just as effectively as a religious one as a tool of oppression.

In the end, the religious intensity is not brought by the secularists, so much as it is appropriated from the struggles of particular communities. Time is all we have, says Wood, so we should measure its value in units of freedom. “Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge.” (95) Wood sees freedom in terms of a “glorious idea,” and though he does not say it, “a gloriously marketable idea.” The fact that King can be interpreted as an apostle for secularism, in spite of the actual communities of struggle to which he belonged and the biblically rooted language of liberation which he spoke, is a sign that appropriation has taken place. King has been converted into a new currency, and, in keeping with the dictates and direction of global capitalism, its key feature is its fungibility. Translating King into the narrative of bland secularism, we are left with little besides an image with which to associate the “glorious idea of freedom.”

King becomes, in this story, the material support for an (eternal) idea – the idea of freedom. Hägglund and Wood do not seem particularly interested in King for who he really was, they are interested in him as a cipher for their own ideas. These ideas prove to be somewhat confused since, in rejecting eternity, it is actual existence that becomes unavailable to them. Eternity, or at least the pseudo-eternity of ideas and heroes, seems to be the place they have decided to pitch their tents. Though their ministrations induct King into a hall of fame that includes Pliny the Elder and G.W.F. Hegel, it is not clear that this is the company King himself would choose to keep. Perhaps the Baptist minister would be happier to keep time with Jesus and Rosa Parks.

The impulse behind the article isn’t entirely wrong. Wood’s thought is based on a secularized version of the ethical injunction to “love thy neighbour as thyself,” which, in one version or another has been a guiding light for religious traditions around the world. Given the tradition of “pie-in-the-sky when you die” Christianity that has so influenced the development of the USA, the rejection of eternity appears to be an attractive solution to the lack of care and attention for real places and people. However, the rejection of eternity does not lead to a renewed care for people and places. Pliny the Elder had articulated his vision of the afterlife as “freedom-from-care.” Pliny, as a worshipper of death, can envision freedom only in terms of an absence of care and affection. The notion that our care and affection are eternally relevant is beyond the scope of his imagination and understanding. Pliny tells his reader to “trust in himself” by which he can only mean to trust in the decay and dissolution of his life. Death, for Pliny, is not only the end, but the very logic and character of life. It isn’t particularly clear why anyone should “trust in himself,” given that the only thing he is really capable of doing is disavowing the meaning and, consequently, the responsibility for his own actions.

As seductive as Pliny’s little hymn appears, therefore, with its idyllic portrayal of death as the great boon of Nature, and the sweet oblivion of freedom, I think it is nothing more than a mask for guilt and anxiety. Surely Pliny was aware, at some level, that his actions would continue to impact the world after he had shuffled off this mortal coil. Death, perhaps, would end his consioucness and absorb his body, but it would not absolve him of responsibility for what he had done.

Through the concept of eternity, religious traditions have woven together the notions of responsibility and conscious reflection. It is a daunting concept, to be sure, and one which allows for numerous misunderstandings and misapplications. Simply disavowing the reality of eternity, however, is no solution. We may desire to circumscribe our own scope of responsibility and reflection, in order to make it more manageable. In order to do this, however, we must live with blinders on, equally oblivious to the sorrow and joy and to the extent that our own actions and lives are beyond the scope of our control.

In the end, I will have to lament with Marilynne Robinson. “I have met good people who are atheists, but I have yet to hear the good Atheist position articulated.”