On Not Getting To Denmark

Reflections On Societies Without God

Claude Monet, “Impression, Sunrise” (1872)

Is This It?

Have the pears and plums come in yet?

My brother-in-law Gary recently put his house on the market. He has been living in it—first with his three kids and then on his own—over the past 11 years. My eldest sister Jen and Gary bought the house not long before, in December 2013, she was taken by an ambulance to the hospital.

I remember speaking to her in early January 2014 about the fruit trees that she and Gary had just planted in the backyard. She spoke of longing to see them fruit. Twelve weeks later, she was dead.

Afterward, I kept asking myself, “Is this all there is?”

Abdication And Fratricide

Two excellent histories of modern atheism—Michael Buckley’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism (1987) and Alan Charles Kors’s Atheism in France, 1650-1729, Volume I: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (1990)—show how Christianity inadvertently invented the very enemy that would subsequently come to eat it alive.

For Buckley, the central mistake was that Christian theologians handed over the defense of God’s existence and benevolence to natural philosophers, who in turn were tasked both with synthesizing the new science with Christian faith and with demonstrating that God could be known through inference, not through His Presence. The problem, to be precise, turns on matter or on the creation of the physical world more generally. “What is it that moves matter?” What set matter in motion, it was initially held, must be God. Yet as science progressed, it became possible to assert that matter wasn’t totally passive but—such could be the hypothesis even before Darwin—actually dynamic. If matter were self-creative or self-organizing, then “the God hypothesis” could ultimately be dispensed with. And so it was.

So much for Buckley—yet what about Kors? Kors tells a quite different story, one that involves a pedagogical mistake that unfolded through heated institutional infighting. Aristotelian, Cartesian, and Malebranchean theologians not only introduced the figure of the imaginary atheist with a view to refuting his erroneous views and thus to strengthening the Christian faith but also got into “civil wars” among each other. The unintended consequence of these pedagogical excursions into hypothetical atheism was that the “scholarly” arguments for atheism were handed over, in due course, to actual French atheists who could then agree with rival schools’ critiques of one another and thus conclude that God’s existence was thereby disproved. Debating tools, once invented, came alive and turned upon their makers.

Whether the emphasis is placed on abdication or fratricide or both, the result comes to the same. By the end of the nineteenth century, atheism had become a live option.¹

What is most astonishing of all is the fact that what was once such a hotly debated issue has, starting in the twentieth century, turned into a non-topic in the developed world. Today colleges and universities scarcely touch on God (except insofar, perhaps, as Aquinas’s “five ways to God” may be set forth), most intellectuals find the very idea worthy of contempt (a subject I touch on below), and ordinary persons barely speak about God on a day-to-day basis. The “immanent frame,” as Charles Taylor called it in A Secular Age (2007), now holds sway. Truly, the question concerning the ultimate nature of reality is so far off the table as to be precisely what does not, almost cannot come to mind.²

Societies Without God

For people in developed countries, “Denmark” is a mythical place that is known to have good political and economic institutions: it is stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and has extremely low levels of political corruption.

—Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011), p. 14.

“Denmark” is, for Francis Fukuyama, the appellation applied to whichever country meets the following three conditions: (i) there’s a modern, bureaucratic state, (ii) the rule of law is applied universally and impartially, and (iii) governments are held accountable through procedures like free and fair elections. “Denmark,” thus, is the antithesis of Sicily. In some sense, “getting to Denmark” is—even if political decay is possible as suggested by his second, equally weighty volume, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrialization to the Globalization of Democracy (2014)—means arriving at “the end of history.”

And what do we find as we turn to actual Denmark? In Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (2008), the American social scientist and atheist Phil Zuckerman marvels at the “societal health” he experiences while living in Aarhus, Denmark, around 2005. The streets are clean and safe, with police officers nowhere in sight. Trains and buses depart and arrive on time. People are orderly, nice, and quiet. Crime and unemployment rates remain consistently low. Social services are readily available. Maternity leave is generous. The disparity in wealth between rich and poor is a fraction of what it is in the United States. In short, Denmark is safe, prosperous, orderly, and, Zuckerman believes, especially wonderful.

May I nonetheless beg to differ?

‘“God” Is An Embarrassing Word’

When I [Phil Zuckerman] asked her [Agnethe, Dane who’s 65-years-old] what she thought happens after we die, she paused, looked right at me, and then with her right hand she swiped her neck as though slitting her throat and made a verbal “swish” sound and then with the same hand she quickly made a fist and stuck her thumb out and pointed downward toward the ground and made a sort of verbal farting or squashing noise. It was very succinct and to the point. A sort of “no nonsense” gesture that basically said: you die and then you go to the ground and that’s that.

—Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (2008), p. 58

In his near-utopia, Zuckerman asks quite a few Danes and Swedes about their religious beliefs and, more notably, about their lack thereof. Concerning Danes’ general view of God, a small town Lutheran pastor named Jokum relates, “In Denmark, the word ‘God’ is one of the most embarrassing words you can say. You would rather go naked through the city than talk about God” (Society Without God, p. 100).

Fukuyama and Zuckerman have a real thing for Denmark, and I did too. I taught at Kaos Pilots, a social entrepreneurship-cum-art school in Aarhus from 2012-18. Who is beyond being smitten by Aarhus’s cobblestone streets, bustling cafes, large squares, and, here and there, a picturesque Lutheran church? We cannot possibly quibble with the claim that the Latin Quarter is charming.

And yet, I stopped traveling to Denmark in 2018. Why? Zuckerman’s interviews brought home to me with a chill what it feels like to be engaged with nice people who live without a certain “inner torment,” the twisting that comes from wrestling and wrangling with the fact that a human life is measured against realities that are far greater and more awesome. Where Zuckerman finds belonging, I see decadence, the loss of vital energy due to a culture’s relinquishing of deep metaphysical thinking.

Truth be told, I don’t want to live in a society in which “matters of ultimate concern” (to cite Paul Tillich) have gone by the wayside. And if we contemplate what’s the quickest shorthand we can summon to allude to “matters of ultimate concern,” it must, without a doubt, be the name “God.”³

Shockingly, thoughtlessness begets smugness. God’s just a human projection, interviewees tell Zuckerman without mentioning Feuerbach or Freud. Humans (Lucretius? Epicurus? Democritus?) are made only of material stuff—no question of anything immaterial like souls, or spirits, or energy. Religion, deflated by virtue of being moralized, consists at best, say respondents, of a set of moral precepts that amounts to being blandly good to your neighbor, caring abstractly about the least among us, and supporting, through taxes, the social welfare state. And, well, when you die, you just go into the ground. That’s it—and then a chuckle.

Smugness And Thoughtlessness

In a culture in which matters of ultimate concern no longer matter, what are we left with? Material needs satisfied–yes—but where is there room for thoughtfulness? Where for heartfeltness (atmabhava)? And where, most especially, for a deep humility that is felt in the face of the greatest of all mysteries—the very nature of reality? In a word, is it possible that something deep is missing in a society that not only makes possible but also tacitly approves of the “religiously tone deaf”?

When I look carefully at atheists (and I was once one of these), I commonly observe three vices—two intellectual, one moral: smugness, thoughtlessness, and heartlessness.

In “A Brief History of Disbelief,” a three-part BBC series narrated by the late Jonathan Miller, there are a couple of telling moments in the first episode. The first: Miller is speaking with Colin McGinn, then a prominent analytic philosopher teaching at Rutgers, and McGinn is telling him that he’d like to believe in a God who punishes the wicked and rewards the virtuous because in this world, he sees no signs of cosmic justice: time and again, the former prosper while the latter suffer. He’d like to believe, but he cannot. Thus does McGinn happily play the heroic atheist, the one whose truthfulness defies any cowardly temptation toward mere consolation.⁴ If one pays close enough attention, then one can feel his self-indignant smugness.

The second episode: at Balthazar, a French brasserie in New York City, Miller and his atheist friends are sitting around cracking jokes at the expense of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Ostensibly, the scene is intended to show the viewer that free speech is live and well in the United States in 2003 and thus that any atheist, even after September 11, 2001, can speak his mind without the threat of blasphemy hanging over his head. But that’s not how I interpret what is taking place. What I sense is that this group of intellectuals really feels like the smart set and quite contentedly expresses this contempt for others (read: commoners) while believing that they are speaking truths that any sane, reasonable person would readily assent to.

Smugness—which, at least, has the virtue of engaging such questions if only to snicker and then dismiss them with a wave of the hand—comes from our intellectual elites, yet what “trickles down” as the centuries unfold is a thoughtlessness that gets embraced by ordinary persons. In other words, thoughtlessness, more pernicious than smugness, is the product of a secular culture that has lost contact with ultimate questions. Hence, more horrifying than the gestures from “both French salons” above are Zuckerman’s interviews with ordinary Danes and Swedes who have flat-out lost any sense of the divine. This forgetfulness would not be so concerning were it not an indication of a broader unreflectiveness, of a decadence in which material or worldly goods are almost ubiquitously affirmed.

What happens to a people when it collectively gives up grappling with perplexities about first and final things? Did Jen just go into the ground?

Heartlessness

The vices of smugness and thoughtlessness leave many stains behind. In fact, they make a beeline for heartlessness.

At the heart of St. Benedict’s Rule is the “Ladder of Humility,” a path the monk is to trod in order that his ego-sense may be purged. This path is made possible by the monk’s having a sense of measure. He can neither fathom nor reckon with his own vices, not the least his recalcitrant pride, unless he contemplates God’s goodness. To be humble is to be emptied out; to be proud is to be full.

Without, too, experiencing the “slings and arrows of life” and thus without extending these considerations to others’ lives, how is thoughtfulness to spring forth, let alone to be cultivated? We are thoughtful because we are faced with the puzzle of finitude and the squirming that comes from feeling limited, separated, divided.

Above all, how is the heart to be opened unless one is purified by humility and energized by increasingly sensitive thoughtfulness?

I’m not claiming, as theists once did, that atheism entails immorality. That’s a poor argument. Zuckerman rightly points out that Denmark and Sweden are safe, clean, and prosperous and that the people are generally caring. Rather, I’m inviting you, the reader, to fathom what may be missing when contemplation ceases to be valued by any society. We become—to misquote Nicolas Carr—”pancake people.” We fail to realize the massive potential that Raja yogis tell us lies dormant within. Humility, open-mindedness, and atmabhava, I am urging, are impossible without metaphysics. So too are states much greater than these.

The Mind’s Greatest Longing

Imagine 1950s San Francisco, which was then burgeoning with “the new religions.” See the eloquent Swami Ashokananda giving public lectures on Advaita Vedanta. One of his central messages, in what I’m about to cite, is that the mind must be purified so that it can merge in its Source.

He sees our predicament and points the way out of it:

Many of you will say that the ultimate questions with which people have wrestled in previous generations are unnecessary. Why bother about God or afterlife or immortality and all that rubbish? Many philosophers tell us that those philosophical problems do not really exist; they are just tricks of language and meaningless. (Ascent to Spiritual Illumination: Ten Lectures on Spiritual Practice (2007), pp. 40-1)

His reply?

I know that there are other states of mind. I know that those states of mind are infinitely superior to our so-called contented [read also: secular, atheistic] state of mind, that is to say, the mind of the average person, the “normal” person. I know that there is God and that God has been seen by people and that this God-vision has required a certain state of mind…. I know that all the things which plague the average person are nothing but echoes of stronger feelings and longings in the centre of his being. (Ibid, pp. 41-2)

And what does Swami Ashokananda know that—just maybe—we do not, yet might? A most wondrous koan in conclusion.

1. See James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1985). I discuss some aspects of this book in this YouTube video.

2. My allusion is to Emmanuel Levinas’s Of God Who Comes to Mind (1998).

3. As in Jacob Needleman’s aptly titled book What is God? (2009).

4. Charles Taylor discusses this posture of atheistic courage in A Secular Age (2007).