Build a better secularist and the world will beat a--Wait, they build themselves? Really?

There are tons of secular communities; you just can't tell because they let everybody in. Sydney Cityscape by Dion Archibald, 2006.

David Brooks writes (Building Better Secularists, New York Times, February 3 2015):

In recent years, the number of unchurched, unbelieving, or unaffiliated infidels appears to have been increasing quite rapidly, in 2012 up to 20% from 15% in 2007 among U.S. adults and 32% among the 18-to-29 group, and their increasingly assertive spokespersons have been going around making the paradoxical claim that there could be something positive in all this startling negativity and that faithlessness might be regarded as a kind of faith.

I'm not sure whether I've met anybody like this—I mean, you wouldn't expect me to ask, I'm only a journalist, for Pete's sake—but I've been learning about them from the fluid and pleasurable prose of Phil Zuckerman (I haven't used the word "fluid" in months—nice to see you, old pal!), a sociology professor, in his new book "Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions", which wandered into my Kindle in January.*

According to Zuckerman, secular people are autonomous individuals who can take care of their own spiritual needs without having to submit themselves to some paternalist authority, an idea that seems bizarre to a conservative like myself when I'm not out there preaching sacred American Liberty and the individualism that made this country the greatest place on earth, which is admittedly not as often as it used to be now that I'm humble.

The nonreligious, in this view, focus their attention on this life instead of the after-one, and base their concepts of morality on simple concepts like not harming others and practicing the Golden Rule, and being empathetic. Zuckerman makes them seem like perfectly nice and modest people, freed from metaphysical delusions and leading peaceful and satisfying lives, but I feel he underestimates the difficulties they will have in making their philosophy work. Indeed, I'm so upset I'm going to break out into a bullet list**:

• Secular individuals must construct their own moral philosophies, without the assistance of a tradition from Confucius and Epicurus down through Spinoza and Kant and Jefferson to Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, John Rawls, and beyond. They literally have nothing to read that tells them what to believe, unlike religious people whose creeds have evolved over centuries.


• Secular individuals must construct their own communities and rituals with which to maintain them; you can't expect them to just sit at home on a Sunday morning watching me and Senator McCain on the TV as a Christian might do.


• Secular individuals must construct their own Sabbath and, once they have got it, pass it on to Hindus, Buddhists, and other who will certainly appreciate the technique.


• Secular individuals will have to construct their own moral motivation. How will they be good without any Sky Father ordering them to do it? It astonishes me that no philosopher has ever thought of this before.***

The point is not that secular people should become religious, or that religious people are somehow better than secular people, merely that secular people must inevitably drift, suffering from loss of meaning and an unconscious boredom with their lives, problems from which the churched or shul'd are all blessedly free.

• One other thing: Past secularist creeds have been based on the assumption that man is a rational animal, which recent research indicates is not the case. I am totally on board with this, as shown by my repudiation of rational choice economics, hahaha.

But seriously, folks, the new secularist religion I am asking everybody who doesn't believe in God to adopt will have to have an irrational element, just as the old ones do, as you know if you've ever been to a Saturday Reform service or a Sunday Methodist one, where the people are virtually rolling on the floor in their ecstatic God-ridden transports, an experience that I've read about a good deal myself and from which the secular must inevitably be forever excluded.**** We need an atheism of enchantment so that these benighted souls can be as happy and fulfilled as Reverend Robertson and me.

Image via The Guild of Blessed Titus Brandsma.

*He can't have read it all that carefully, surprise surprise, because the second page or so refers to a more current figure from Gallup, July 2014, which gives the number of nonreligious Americans as now up to 30%. That's Brooksian economy; why read any more than you have to to squeeze your column out? Practically all his discussion of Zuckerman's book seems to have stemmed from a single tiny passage four or five paragraphs after the missed statistic, from just after "hapless oblivion" to just before "deep transcendence", which is approximately where Zuckerman begins the project that will occupy the rest of the book, which would, had Brooks looked at it, have answered all his interesting-teenager questions, as you can pretty much see from looking at the passage yourself:

**The bullets are visible only in the Android version of the column, but I thought they made a lovely visual representation of how distraught our author is.

***Incidentally, W.M. Gervais reports in an interesting paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (General section, August 2014) that a good deed inspired by religious motivations is seen as less good than one that is not:

Many people view religion as a crucial source of morality. However, 6 experiments (total N = 1,078) revealed that good deeds are perceived as less moral if they are performed for religious reasons. Religiously motivated acts were seen as less moral than the exact same acts performed for other reasons (Experiments 1-2 and 6). Religious motivations also reduced attributions of intention and responsibility (Experiments 3-6), an effect that fully mediated the effect of religious motivations on perceived morality (Experiment 6). The effects were not explained by different perceptions of motivation orientation (i.e., intrinsic vs. extrinsic) across conditions (Experiment 4) and also were evident when religious upbringing led to an intuitive moral response (Experiment 5). Effects generalized across religious and nonreligious participants. When viewing a religiously motivated good deed, people infer that actually helping others is, in part, a side effect of other motivations rather than an end in itself. Thus, religiously motivated actors are seen as less responsible than secular actors for their good deeds, and their helping behavior is viewed as less moral than identical good deeds performed for either unclear or secular motivations.

****Just one word: Brahms. I don't know for sure, but I think there are actually a lot of different kinds of transcendence experience available outside of churches and synagogues already. Find your own. (I guess it is obligatory to add here that I am not Richard Dawkins, actually think religion can be really terrific for those who have it, and wish only that they would in turn accept my right to my own views, as seriously religious friends have indeed done all my life. I only have trouble with the American Taliban and with concern-troll hacks like the Yale Professor of Humility Studies, who certainly has no more concept of spirituality himself than a toad does.)

(...And Murray Perahia is his prophet...)