THE END, AGAIN

The dominant western myths have been historical narratives, and it has become fashionable to view narrative as a basic human need. Humans are tellers of tales, we have come to think, who cannot be happy unless they can see the world as a story. Over the past two centuries the dominant story line has been one of human progress, but it has also included a tale of a world besieged by dark forces and destined for destruction. The two plots were interwoven – as when Marx and his followers believed that humanity advanced through a series of catastrophic revolutions and the Nazis that demonic powers were conspiring against the Volk and its ascension to a state of semi-divine immortal harmony. In a different idiom, liberal humanists have talked of humanity advancing, inch by inch, in a gradual process of improvement. In all these accounts history is told as a coherent narrative, and nothing is more threatening than the idea that it is a meandering flux without purpose or direction.

The belief that history has an underlying plot is central to the millenarian movements, secular and religious, that have been examined in this book. All who belong to these movements believe they are acting out a script that is already partly written. In versions of apocalyptic belief that are avowedly religious, the author of the script is God, with the Devil and assorted demons writing their own lines but finally submitting to the authority of the divine narrator. In secular apocalyptic, the author is that equally elusive figure humanity, battling the forces of ignorance and superstition. Either way, the demand for meaning is met by narratives in which each individual life is part of an all-encompassing story.

The dangers of the need for an overarching human narrative are clear. To feel oneself the target of a global conspiracy as the Nazis did may not seem a positive state of mind, but it banishes the lack of meaning, which is a worse threat. Paranoia is often a protest against insignificance, and collective delusions of persecution bolster a fragile sense of agency. The problem is that this benefit is purchased at a high price: a price measured in the lives of others who are forced to act out a role in a script they have not read, still less written. Those who are crushed or broken in order to create a higher humanity, who are killed or mutilated in acts of spectacular terror or ravaged in wars for universal freedom may have ideas about their place in the world altogether different from those they are assigned in the dramas that are being enacted. If universal narratives create meaning for those who live by them, they also destroy it in the lives of others.

The sense of having a part in such a narrative is delusive, of course. John of Leyden believed God had called him to rule over the New Jerusalem. Lenin was sure he was expediting the laws of history. Hitler was certain the corrupt world of liberal democracy was doomed. True believers in the free market interpreted the collapse of communism as a sign of an inexorable trend, and neo-conservatives greeted the few years of American supremacy that seemed to follow as a new epoch in history. All of these prophets imagined they had grasped the plot of history and were completing a preordained pattern. In fact, their rise to power was accidental, and only the non-arrival of the Millennium was preordained. Millenarian movements come about as the result of a combination of random events, and when they fall from grace it is as a result of features of human life whose permanence they deny. The history of these movements is scarcely tragic, for those who belong to them rarely perceive the fateful contingencies by which their lives are ruled. They are actors in a theatre of the absurd whose lines are given by chance.

Seeing one’s life as an episode in a universal narrative is a fantasy, and while it is supported by powerful western traditions it has not always been regarded as a good thing. Many of the world’s mystics have aimed to achieve a state of contemplation in which the succession of happenings from which we construct the story of our lives is absent. Plato and his disciples prized an eventless eternity over any process of change, and here they were close to Hindu and Buddhist thinkers. In a different tradition, Taoists taught that freedom lies in freeing oneself from personal narratives by identifying with cosmic processes of death and renewal. Within Christianity, the temptation to construct a narrative from the accidents of history has been extremely strong. But in the orthodoxy that was created by Augustine the temptation has been curbed by the idea that meaning is to be found in a timeless realm, whose intimations may appear at any moment.

Freedom from narrative is not a condition of which only mystics dream. Poets and epicureans have cultivated a condition of spontaneity in which they could enjoy each moment for its own sake. Spending one’s life looking to the future means inhabiting a world fashioned from memory. Yet memory has also been used as a means of freeing oneself from narrative. Marcel Proust writes of the sensation he experienced when drinking tea mixed with crumbs of petites madeleines, the small cakes given him by his mother, that it ‘had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased to feel I was mediocre, contingent, mortal.’¹⁸ Here Proust turned to the past in a search for a way out of time. It was a search that could only be partly successful, since memories that carry intimations of immortality cannot be summoned at will.

The need for narrative can be a burden, and if we want to be rid of it we should seek the company of mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers rather than utopian dreamers. Though they look to the future these dreamers nearly always recall an idealized period of innocence –Marx’s primitive communism, or the lost world of bourgeois virtue cherished by neo-conservatives. As the writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, ‘Clearly, apocalyptic thinking is nostalgia at its very worst.’¹⁹ The effect of seeking refuge in an imaginary future harmony is to bind us to the conflicts of the past.

Myths are not true or false in the way scientific theories are true or false, but they can be more or less truthful in reflecting the enduring realities of human life. Most of the myths by which humans have lived have not been historical narratives of the sort that govern Christian and post-Christian cultures. The promise of liberation from time in Plato and eastern religions is also a myth, but one that dispels the hope of a final triumph of good of the kind that has had such a baleful impact on the modern West.

Secular myths reproduce the narrative form of Christian apocalyptic, and if there is a way of tempering the violence of faith it must begin by questioning these myths. In secular thought science has come to be viewed as a vehicle of revelation, a repository of truth rather than a system of symbols that serves the human need to understand and control. Post-modern philosophies that view science as just one belief-system among many are too silly to be worth refuting at length – the utility of scientific knowledge is a brute fact that is shown in the increase of human power. Science is an instrument for forming reliable beliefs about the world. Religions are also human instruments, but they have other goals. The ideal goal of scientific inquiry may be an end-point at which human beliefs mirror the world in an all-embracing theory, and in science this ideal may be useful (even if it is also illusive). But why should religions aim for consensus? While true beliefs may be useful in our everyday dealings, doubts are more to the point in the life of the spirit. Religions are not claims to knowledge but ways of living with what cannot be known.

The collision between science and religion comes from the mistake that both have to do with belief. It is only in some strands of Christianity and Islam that belief has been placed at the heart of religion. In other traditions, religion has to do with the acceptance of mystery rather than catechisms or creeds. Science and religion serve different needs, which though they pull in different directions are equally human. In the contemporary world science has authority because of the power it confers. That is why fundamentalists ape its claims to literal truth – as in the cartoon science of creationism. Yet creationism is hardly more ridiculous than Social Darwinism, dialectical materialism or the theory that as societies become more modern they become more free or peaceful. These secular creeds are more unreasonable than any traditional faith, if only because they make a more elaborate show of being rational.

The most necessary task of the present time is to accept the irreducible reality of religion. In the Enlightenment philosophies that shaped the last two centuries, religion was a secondary or derivative aspect of human life that will disappear, or cease to be important, when its causes are removed. Once poverty is eradicated and education universal, social inequality has been overcome and political repression is a thing of the past, religion will have no more importance than a personal hobby. Underlying this article of Enlightenment faith is a denial of the fact that the need for religion is generically human. It is true that religions are hugely diverse and serve many social functions – most obviously, as welfare institutions. At times they have also served the needs of power. But beyond these socio-political purposes, religions express human needs that no change in society can remove – for example the need to accept what cannot be remedied and find meaning in the chances of life. Human beings will no more cease to be religious than they will stop being sexual, playful or violent.

If religion is a primary human need it should not be suppressed or relegated to a netherworld of private life. It ought to be fully integrated into the public realm, but that does not mean establishing any one religion as public doctrine. Late modern societies harbour a diversity of world-views. There is little agreement on the worth of human life, the uses of sexuality, the claims of non-human animals or the value of the natural environment. Rather than tending towards a secular monoculture, the late modern period is unalterably hybrid and plural. There is no prospect of a morally homogeneous society, still less a homogenized world. In the future, as in the past, there will be authoritarian states and liberal republics, theocratic democracies and secular tyrannies, empires, city-states and many mixed regimes. No one type of government or economy will be accepted everywhere, nor will any single version of civilization be embraced by all of humanity.

It is time the diversity of religions was accepted and the attempt to build a secular monolith abandoned. Accepting that we have moved into a post-secular era does not mean religions can be freed of the restraints that are necessary for civilized coexistence. A central task of government is to work out and enforce a framework whereby they can live together. A framework of this kind cannot be the same for every society, or fixed for ever. It embodies a type of toleration whose goal is not truth but peace. When the goal of tolerance is truth it is a strategy that aims for harmony. It would be better to accept that harmony will never be reached. Better yet, give up the demand for harmony and welcome the varieties of human experience. The modus vivendi between religions that has flourished intermittently in the past might then be renewed.²⁰

The chief intellectual obstacle to coexistence among religions is a lack not of mutual understanding, but of self-knowledge. Matthew Arnold’s once-famous Dover Beach (1867) speaks of the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of Christianity – as if that meant the end of religion. The Victorian poet underestimated the urgency of the demand for myth. The Utopias of the past two centuries were deformed versions of the myths they denied, and if the last of them has perished in the deserts of Iraq it need not be mourned. The hope of Utopia spilt blood on a scale that traditional creeds cannot match, and the world is well rid of it.

The danger that goes with the death of secular hope is the rebirth of something like the faith-based wars of an older past. A renewal of apocalyptic belief is underway, which is unlikely to be confined to familiar sorts of fundamentalism. Along with evangelical revivals, there is likely to be a profusion of designer religions, mixing science and science fiction, racketeering and psychobabble, which will spread like internet viruses. Most will be harmless, but doomsday cults like those that led to the mass suicide in Jonestown and the attacks on the Tokyo subway may proliferate as ecological crisis deepens.

If the scientific consensus is accurate, the Earth may soon be different from the way it has been for millions of years, certainly since the appearance of humans. In one sense this is a genuinely apocalyptic prospect: while humans are unlikely to become extinct, the world in which they evolved is vanishing. In another sense the prospect is not apocalyptic at all. In wrecking the planetary environment humans are only doing what they have done innumerable times before on a local level. The global heating that is underway is one of several fevers the Earth has suffered, and survived, during its history. Though humans have triggered this episode, they lack the power to stop it. It may mean disaster for them and other species, but in planetary terms it is normal. This is likely to be too much reality for most people to bear, and as climate change runs its course we can expect a rash of cults in which it is interpreted as a human narrative of catastrophe and redemption. Apocalypse is, after all, an anthropocentric myth.

Happily, humanity has other myths, which can help it see more clearly. In the Genesis story humans were banished from paradise after eating from the Tree of Knowledge and had to survive by their labours ever after. There is no promise here of any return to a state of primordial innocence. Once the fruit has been eaten there is no going back. The same truth is preserved in the Greek story of Prometheus, and in many other traditions. These ancient legends are better guides to the present than modern myths of progress and Utopia.

The myth of the End has caused untold suffering and is now as dangerous as it has ever been. In becoming a site for projects of world-transformation political life became a battleground. The secular religions of the last two centuries, which imagined that the cycle of anarchy and tyranny could be ended, succeeded only in making it more violent. At its best, politics is not a vehicle for universal projects but the art of responding to the flux of circumstances. This requires no grand vision of human advance, only the courage to cope with recurring evils. The opaque state of war into which we have stumbled is one such evil.

The modern age has been a time of superstition no less than the medieval era, in some ways more so. Transcendental religions have many flaws and in the case of Christianity gave birth to savage violence, but at its best religion has been an attempt to deal with mystery rather than the hope that mystery will be unveiled. In the clash of fundamentalisms this civilizing perception has been lost. Wars as ferocious as those of early modern times are being fought against a background of increased knowledge and power. Interacting with the struggle for natural resources, the violence of faith looks set to shape the coming century.