practical humanism

We’re back to Andre Comte-Sponville’s Little Book of Atheist Spirituality today. We noted, when we first made his acquaintance, that there’s something unexpectedly Deweyan in his version of natural piety and the idea that our task is more to transmit than to invent values. Fidelity, not faith, thus becomes the distinctive mark of atheist spirituality.

But the circumstances of a pseudo-fideist French atheist are different than those for even the friendliest American atheist. Not entirely– we too must find something to oppose to fanaticism from without and nihilism from within. The Christian west as we know it, though, has not ceased to be Christian at all. Not around these parts, anyway.

There does feel to be something of a safely post-facto nostalgia at work in AC-S’s feeling of connectedness and fidelity to the specific history, tradition and community that was once a vibrant European Christian culture. You’d have to go back nearly to Henry Adams‘ Virgin of Chartres and his “study of thirteenth-century unity,” though, to find an intensity and spontaneity of un-self-circumspect emotional devotion to that tradition to match the fervor that still pervades our Bible Belt. We’ve not really yet embraced, as a tradition and community, the “dynamo” of postmodernity here.

So, friendly as I mean to be, I can’t earnestly mimic his Christian atheism. That would confuse and infuriate my real Christian neighbors. But I can cheerfully echo his quest to be a friendly atheist in a Judeo-Christian land, out to convert nobody but simply to co-exist on however slim a sliver of common ground we can manage to share. We do have a history together, after all. And I’m already on board with the “What does God have to do with it?” attitude, even if most Christians (unlike many Jews) continue to obsess about that.  God is not the day-to-day focal point of most religious life, life is.  (“More life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is the end of religion.” -WJ)

Fidelity matters more than faith… There is no need to believe in God– one need believe only in one’s parents and mentors, one’s friends (provided they are well chosen) and one’s conscience… Believing or not believing in God changes nothing of great significance, except in the eyes of fundamentalists. Whether you have a religion or not, nothing can exempt you from having to respect the lives, freedom and dignity of other people.

This fidelity to humanity and to our own duty to be human is “practical humanism,” and it’s what AC-S finds lacking in Nietzsche’s nihilistic post-nihilism. What a rotten, miserable life he had, though he wrote some good books and dashed off some spirited lines. And poetry.

And this is “cheerful despair” (or Stoicism, or Spinozism):

Happiness is not something to be hoped for but something to be experienced here and now!

The hope for tomorrow’s happiness prevents you from experiencing today’s… cut off from the present (which is all) by the future (which is nothing)… The wise live in the present, wishing only for what is (acceptance, love) or what they can bring about (will).

All trips end eventually. Is that any reason to renounce undertaking one and enjoying it? -Of course not! On the contrary, it is a powerful reason to go on paying the utmost attention to life, peace, justice… and our children. Life is all the more precious for being rare and fragile.

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A Catholic priest who cheerfully admits that God and immortality are “secondary matters”? Not to his parishioners. There’s really something rotten in Rome these days. But AC-S draws the right moral from this encounter:

The value of human beings has nothing to do with whether or not they believe in God or life after death… It would be madness to attach more significance to what we don’t know and what separates us than to what we know from our own experience and what brings us together… people’s real worth is measured by the amount of love, compassion and justice of which they are capable!

Of course. But priests and pastors and Rabbis ought not to misrepresent themselves, either. [“Preachers Who Are Not Believers“]

This post is getting too long, there are gems on every page, I’m not going to come close to today’s target (chapter 2). Just one more sparkler, please:

Why dream about paradise? The kingdom is here and now. It is up to us to inhabit a material and spiritual space (the world, our bodies: the present)… people’s spiritual elevation could be accurately measured by their greater or lesser indifference to the question of their own immortality. If we are already in the kingdom, we are already saved. What could death take away from us? What more could immortality give?

There is no need to wait until we are saved to be human.

Humanity = communion, fidelity, love… Amen!

Tags: Andre Comte-Sponville, Friedrich Nietzsche, God, Henry Adams, humanism, John Dewey, William James