of our own brilliance.
Even before we have built the great Tower of Arse, we get ourselves into practice for the role of deity. We limber up, we do the requisite callisthenics. One such limbering-up exercise, for example, might be to rewrite the Ten Commandments, in our own image – but making sure all the while that we miss out the problematic stuff: the business about not coveting other people’s things, and not committing adultery, and how above all we must worship something which is not us, but is beyond and above us, i.e. God. And then replace these commands with vague and transient prescriptions which are so anodyne as to be, in effect, meaningless. Richard Dawkins, though he had no time for the magnificent Tower of Arse, rewrote the Ten Commandments in his book The God Delusion as something we could all cling to once we’d killed God. I suppose he did this as a kindness to the rest of us, in the belief that, having despatched God to the waste-paper bin of history, he ought to offer up something to put in His place. For which, thank you, professor. Here are Richard’s commandments numbers four and five:
Live life with a sense of joy and wonder!
Always seek to be learning something new!
Isn’t that lovely? Isn’t that absolutely lovely! That’s more fun than ‘Thou shall not kill,’ isn’t it? It is a slight surprise that Richard did not include, perhaps at number eight or nine on his fatuous list of spineless injunctions: ‘Always make sure you recycle your rubbish properly, putting the organic material in the green bag and the plastic stuff in the white bag.’ And then maybe at number ten: ‘Brush your teeth three times a day, and try to floss regularly, although not on public transport.’ I once mentioned to Richard – who, incidentally, I like personally, and respect as both a scientist and a propagandist for scientific enquiry – that his commandments seemed to be lacking something. You know: a little rigour, a certain sinew, a sense of permanence. He responded by saying that he thought that you, Rod, of all people, should appreciate that morality is ever-changing, that we do not cleave to the moral code which pertained a thousand or even one hundred years ago. I don’t know what he meant by ‘you, Rod, of all people’; I think it’s better if we let that lie. But his response was a partial evasion. Richard’s moral code, unlike the one given to us by Moses, will be defunct next week, it will have a half-life as brief as that of Einsteinium. It is not really a set of ‘commandments’ at all, but instead a flyer shoved through your letterbox from the local council’s Healthy Living subcommittee, or maybe from your nearest NHS provider; it asks nothing of us. Nobody could cavil at any one of its bland imprecations. It is close to meaningless.
Richard Dawkins is not the only person to have rewritten the Ten Commandments, of course – it’s been done, by vaulting secularists with the look of destiny in their eyes, plenty of times. The late Christopher Hitchens had a bash too, and his proscriptions were very similar to those of his ally, Dawkins; but at least Hitch included, at number eight: ‘Turn off that fucking cellphone.’ Yowser, Hitch; how did Moses miss that one?
Belligerent atheism has advanced, these last twenty years or so, partly as a consequence of sexually repressed and educationally subnormal jihadist maniacs blowing themselves up all over the place, which has made us question the attractiveness of religious certitude, and partly through the Wesleyan charisma and intelligence of its most voluble protagonist, Dawkins. We are, in effect, now a secular country, the obeisances paid to even the mild-mannered, clean-shaven and comparatively licentious God of the Church of England diminishing seemingly each week, by statute and by common practice. As J.S. Mill once urged us to do, we have wriggled free of Calvinism and its tiresome constraints; and so we have become dangerously free too of humility and the fear of existential censure. In place of God we cheerfully install ourselves – and immediately begin to draw up plans for building a giant Tower of Arse, a monument to our magnificence, with our own wondrous lives picked out in gold right at the top.
It is no coincidence that this rapid erosion of deference to an omnipotent, unseen other has occurred in tandem with the growth of institutionalised self-obsession, self-pity and public emoting. If there is no unseen other to bow down before, we bow down instead before ourselves; we are all that matters. And it is a short step from this delusion to the following thesis: ‘Actually, now I think about it, never mind this WE business – I am all that matters, and my petty vicissitudes, my miseries, will no longer be internalised but shared, at interminable length, with a grateful world.’ My parents’ generation were infected with none of this stuff, and would have found the current trend for intense introspection – of very boring and stupid people, often celebrities, perpetually ‘battling their demons’, to use the ubiquitous and carelessly obnoxious phrase – both deeply embarrassing and emetic. Keep it to yourself, your heroin addiction or your anorexia or your alcoholism or your mid-life crisis, you mug; you will answer, one day not too far away, for better or for worse – in the meantime, struggle on with fortitude and reserve.
Not any more. The mantra of our times is this: ‘But tell me, how do you FEEL?’, and its corollary – that the only thing that matters is how we feel about stuff – has taken on a bizarre, supernatural quality of late. A few years back I turned up at hospital to witness the birth of my daughter Emmeline, and was presented by the nurse with a chart enquiring of me my nationality and race. This was one of those PC bureaucratic procedures, the results of which would be of use to absolutely nobody except deathless bureaucrats, and which would undoubtedly cost a lot of money to process. But anyway, somewhere in the region of eighty races or nationalities were listed across two or three pages. All I had to do was pick one. Then I read a little more closely, and at the top of the page it said that I didn’t actually have to put down what race or nationality I really was – that, it seemed, didn’t matter. All I had to do was tell them what race or nationality I FELT I was, regardless (it made clear) of my parentage or where I was born. The actuality of who I was had no relevance whatsoever. The facts were of no consequence at all. So I told them I felt Somali. It seemed, in the circumstances, sort of appropriate, even if I was tempted to put ‘static traveller’ (which is the official description for people who were once travellers but now feel disinclined to move anywhere, so instead remain perfectly still, I’d guess). Still, sometimes I do feel Somali, you know? Fractious and dislocated and, through no fault of my own, unemployable. This enquiry – But what do you FEEL – has invaded every possible discourse. It has become almost the only discourse. It is the main criticism levelled at the people who devise the examinations sat by our children: that no longer are the kids required to actually know stuff, far more important is the emotive or interpretative reaction to stuff.
As if any of it really mattered – how we feel, inside – except to us. What is, is. Is it not?
Equally, the previous old-fashioned deference to an unseen other imposed upon us a responsibility to our fellow human beings: those commandments, the knowledge or suspicion or fear that we were being watched as we went about our nefarious business. We were, after all, equal in the eyes of God, and enjoined to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. It seems likely to me that our gradual rejection, over the last thirty years or so, of a collectivist approach to solving our problems and running our affairs has been at least partly occasioned by the rise of atheism and the slow occlusion of that unseen other. If we are freed from the depredations of a supernatural being, we are, by extension, sort of freed from a responsibility towards one another, too; we become atomised and aloof, we work towards our own ends, beholden to nobody. We succumb to the genetic selfishness which, as Richard Dawkins, in his previous and more palatable incarnation, beautifully depicted; driven onwards, ever onwards to replicate in competition with others, without even being conscious of that competition, altruism existing only as an adaptive trait, the basis of our behaviour largely pre-ordained by a markedly more brutal and callous God, our own genes.
It is undoubtedly true that as orthodox religious belief has retreated, so we have become more nakedly individualistic, more inclined to be immune to the needs and requirements of our fellow men. I suspect there’s a correlation. Dawkins, a decent metro-liberal bien pensant himself, of course, was always at pains to insist that somehow it needn’t be this way; that succumbing to the sociopathic and relentless and blind drive of our genes was not inevitable, but could be resisted and overcome. To which I would reply, yes, Richard, and yes again; and either our invention of God, or the actual existence of God – hell, take your pick,