8 August 2014
Last updated at 12:04 ET
It is not the content of our beliefs that really matters, so much as the practice of believing itself, argues Will Self.
In Dostoevsky's great metaphysical whodunit, The Brothers
Karamazov, the main philosophical point of the novel - inasmuch as it
has one - comes early on. Throughout a turbulent meeting in the cell of
the venerable monk, Father Zosima, the driven, atheistic intellectual
Ivan Karamazov has his heterodox opinions coaxed out of him. Ivan
maintains that without belief in the possibility of an afterlife, one in
which we will be judged for our sins, there can no longer be any moral
stricture limiting our Earthly behaviour - we may fornicate, intoxicate
and even murder as much as we want. If we were to paraphrase Ivan's
contention, it's that in a godless world, "Do what thou wilt"
constitutes the whole of the law.
Dostoevsky, himself, was a devout Christian
I'm not interested in discussing the existence or otherwise of
God or gods - and nor, I think, was Dostoevsky - but what this passage,
and the novel overall, forces our attention on to is the question of our
beliefs. Dostoevsky understood that what humans are, in terms of our
moral being, is crucially tied up with what - if anything - we believe.
In the contemporary secular era, one the lineaments of which Dostoevsky
could perfectly well discern when he was writing in the 1870s, there are
plenty of people keen to assert that they have no beliefs at all, if by
this is meant a settled conviction about such big questions as why we
are here, where we are going, and whether good and evil are ultimate
realities or merely functions of a given social structure during a
particular era. The Cubist painter, Francis Picabia, was the herald of
this new scepticism when he proclaimed, "Beliefs are ideas going bald".
But is it really true to say we have no beliefs? After all,
if we truly believed nothing it would be difficult for us to operate in a
world where everyone else behaves as if they did believe in something,
that something being - by and large - the efficiency and reliability of
the technologies we rely on for our daily life. When we push button A we
very much expect B to happen, when we flick a light switch we
anticipate the light going on. We may not understand the minutiae of
wiring, but we know someone who does, so we've outsourced this
particular belief - in domestic electricity - to someone qualified to
hold it. It's the same with whole swathes of our existence - they depend
upon beliefs that we hold on trust, rather than because we've
personally empirically verified them. In an earlier era it would've been
said that we had faith in electric lights.
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- A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on BBC Radio 4 at 20:50 GMT and repeated Sundays, 08:50 GMT
- Will Self is a novelist and journalist
This reliance on essentially
occult beliefs for the smooth running of the physical aspects of our
lives has engendered a further strange belief in us, a belief about our
beliefs concerning those big, metaphysical questions. We may not have
read Wittgenstein ourselves, but we're attuned enough to the
philosophical zeitgeist to have absorbed the import of his ideas, which
is that mulling over the nature of our existence, or that of God or
gods, is symptomatic of a linguistic confusion - because there's no real
agreement about what these terms refer to, to ask questions about them
is simply nonsensical. This abrupt curtailment of the Western
metaphysical project has left us at the bottom of our metaphorical
gardens, in our figurative garden sheds, and depending for our belief
system on a series of makeshift structures we've knocked up ourselves.
So it is that the "beliefs" we depend upon are a species of
DIY - we take a bit from Eastern mysticism, another piece from
Freudianism, a spare part left over from Christianity and cobble them
together into something workable in the short-term. If called to account
on the gimcrack quality of our convictions, we relapse into a sort of
stoicism light: "Well," we say, "it's true that these beliefs aren't
altogether credible, but that doesn't matter because at root I don't
believe in anything - I'm just trying to get by like the rest of us."
But the problem with stoicism light is that it just can't deal with the
heavy stuff. A full-blown stoic unreservedly accepts the vicissitudes of
fate and the privations of life - we, on the other hand, squeal like
the Gadarene swine when we can't get hold of an electrician. The true
stoic - such as the discredited Roman Boethius, condemned to death in
his prison cell - achieves a perspective from which he can view death
with an unwavering gaze. But if we faced his predicament, we'd probably
try to sue the Praetorian Guard for neglecting our health and safety.
Philosophy Instructs Boethius on the role of God
It isn't, I believe, the content of our beliefs that really
matters, so much as the practice of believing itself. The problem with
our contemporary secular beliefs is that they're either makeshift, or
entered into unconsciously, simply as a necessary operating system for
our busy and digitised lives. The great believers in the wonder of the
universe, as revealed to us by science, seem to have considerable
difficulty in either galvanising us to social solidarity, or providing
us with true solace. I've yet to hear of anyone going gently into that
dark night on the basis that she or he is happily anticipating their
dissolution into cosmic dust, nor do I witness multitudes assembling in
order that they may sing the periodic table together, or recite prime
numbers in plain chant. By contrast, religious beliefs continue to offer
many people genuine succour, and they do this, I think, as Dostoevsky
realised, not because of the specific concepts they appear to enshrine -
such as an afterlife or eternal judgement - but because they place the
human individual in a universal context, and thereby give her life
meaning.
De Beauvoir and Sartre: Existentialism is appealing to the young
Nihilism is all very well when you're young - existentialism
can also seem a meaningful philosophy if all you have to worry about is
being true to your own self. After all, you never saw Simone de Beauvoir
- let alone Jean-Paul Sartre - pushing a baby buggy along the Rive
Gauche. As we grow older, and perhaps take on the responsibility for
other, putatively autonomous lives, we may find it hard to get them to
tidy up their rooms if we've brought them up to believe that human
existence is a series of fundamentally meaningless
actes gratuits.
With middle and then yet older age, the baggy and shapeless scepticism
of our prime can begin to seem a very threadbare garment indeed, while
our own state of dependency and the habits of a lifetime force turn us
into positive zealots - if the electric kettle fuses, or the bus doesn't
arrive on time it's as if the music of the spheres has become horribly
discordant.
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