Finding a faith for the faithless
faithful would eat, pray and swop moral parables.
This is his antidote to the modern restaurant, which places disparate diners in nearkissing proximity but doesn’t encourage them to “open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with each other”.
His scripted communal feast sounds nightmarish. Picture yourself having to lurch over to a stranger and say: “Hi there. I don’t know you from Adam, but let’s have a casual chat about your deepest fears and regrets. Oh, and isn’t the foie gras divine? In the figurative sense, of course.”
De Botton admires much of religious culture: its architecture, its didactic art, its solemn spaces of worship.
He sees modern society as a fractious, neurotic thing, fraught with petty jealousies and anxiety.
In the religious atmosphere he sees a cure to “the darkness of mere being”. Modern life certainly tends to be an estranged one – insular, consumerist, bureaucratic, superficial and individualistic.
Consider the cynical wisdom of postmodernism: “God is dead, so is Marx, and I don’t feel so well myself.”
De Botton wants to hijack religious institutions to stitch this modern wound. He wants their ceremonies and sacraments, lilted liturgies and communal confessions, all completely evacuated of their original cosmic significance.
This is a kind of “faith of the faithless” and commits an elementary mistake.
It doesn’t appear to realise that the majesty of a ritual is reduced without the intoxicant of faith. Take away the organising beliefs and mere charade remains.
Yet humans have resiliently continued to find meaning without organised religion.
De Botton makes no mention of the existentialist philosophers (Jean-paul Sartre, Albert Camus) who have already grappled with his question: how does man make meaning without god?
In a pessimistic age of apocalypse-mongers, De Botton has been gripped by a religious nostalgia.
He’s the reluctant atheist. He asks us to look to religion for the yin to our suffering yang.
This argument is an admirable plea for a communitarian society. But the appeals to religion are in fact appeals to a set of moral principles (community, tenderness etc) which are quite easily derived without the “religion” that De Botton thinks is false in the first place.
Religion need not enter the argument at all. Subtract it and the book lapses into selfhelp rhetoric. Although to save him, he’s always been more about whimsy than rigour anyway, and his style is biting, funny and readable.
The society that De Botton offers us is one of propaganda and dictatorship.
He works hard to take away the freedoms to make ourselves which religion denies us. Art galleries become ruined by explicit notes which tell you what you’re “meant” to see; Anna Karenina is assigned in a course “on the tensions of marriage”.
In this world, individual liberties are surrendered to the communal whole. One can’t escape the holier-than-thou quality of this vision – religion is “secularised” and becomes an assembly line to churn out moral, obedient citizens.
The book has the odd pinprick of wisdom, but its claims have no depth. The utopian relish of this hug-everybody vision is insensate to class division, capitalist logic and even history.
De Botton – like atheist missionaries – engages the symptoms, leaving the core malady untouched. True emancipation from religion will come only once we uproot the conditions that produce ignorance and moral slavery. His proposed world is Orwellian in its banality and condescension.
Chetty is a graduate scholar of critical theory and literature.