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The City of
No God
Graeme Hunter on the Most Challenging Thought Experiment of All Time
Around the beginning of the seventeenth century, daring provocateurs invented the most challenging thought experiment of all time: Try to conceive of a world in which there is no God. Mainstream thinkers quickly became aware that this project had "gone viral," as we would say nowadays. In 1623, long before there was a single documentable atheist in the known world, the philosopher and scientist Marin Mersenne guessed that there were over 50,000 of them in Paris alone.
That sounds less strange once you realize that atheism meant something vaguer back then than it does today. Then it meant having false opinions about God, not denying his existence altogether. There were plenty of people with false opinions, but none yet so extreme and deluded as to say there was no God.
Even in its weaker sense, however, 50,000 atheists was still a gross exaggeration. The figure, rather than the accusation, is what makes Mersenne's claim so interesting. He was a keen reader of trends, and the great thought-experiment of the age had come to his attention. He feared that something unheard-of and sinister was afoot, something related to what he knew as atheism. And in that he was correct.
Nothing Wrong but the Notion of Wrong
By the end of the eighteenth century almost everyone could see it. The new thought experiment was the pastime of the modern age. New pieces were always falling into place. A new physics had been born in which everything happened through natural causes. Providence, mind, and miracle were banished from science and forgotten. Nothing there was beautiful or had a purpose.
Hierarchies had also skulked away. There was no Great Chain of Being in science; higher social classes were an abomination; there was no objective standard by which to evaluate art or behavior. Each thing must be the thing itself: a poor, bare, forked creature. All matter was prime matter in one or another of its ever-shifting shapes, none better than the one next to it or the one before or after.
On a long, hot, midsummer evening, a friend and I were looking at the Ottawa skyline from a rooftop patio. "Out there in concrete is the 'death of God,'" my friend sighed. "We've rejected the City of God: we're fast building the city of no-God."
Looking with new eyes, I saw a city without a cross or steeple. There were only towers that ended where they began: the upper parts higher off the ground but in no way more important, signifying nothing beyond themselves, reflecting nothing but their peers. It is a city that scoffs at confession and penitence, because nothing is wrong, except the notion of wrong itself.
And except, of course, for wrong people who think things are wrong. They are the holdouts who cling to "male privilege" or "white privilege" or some other exclusionary principle of discrimination, from which arise good and evil and their hydra-headed brood. Such people are wrong, and theirs is a wrong too great to be tolerated. They must be made to confess; they must be penitent; they must be punished. Justice will have to be meted out to them—done and seen to be done—so that equality may be all in all.
Tradition Migrates to the Moneyed
If they are smart, the people who know of things better and worse will keep what they know to themselves. According to Charles Murray, in his recent book, Coming Apart, they are already adept in that regard. They isolate themselves. Murray knows where they live. Most are found in one or another of a handful of gated communities, the cosseted retreats of the wealthiest and best-educated Americans. They tend to be the bosses of everything. You work for them, though you may never meet them. They have underlings to meet with you.
These people marry within their community. And it is noteworthy that men marry women there, and normally stay married to them till death do them part. They have children by the women they marry, go to church with them most Sundays, and usually find a great deal of satisfaction in their lives.
That these stabilizing and traditional patterns are so strongly represented in the lap of luxury is one of Murray's startling findings. Not startling, but still underappreciated, is that these patterns are less and less present in the middle and lower classes, who now tend to live in places rather than communities. They stew in a kettle of races and clans that is no longer a melting pot. Church attendance falls and falls; marriage is irrelevant; there are few children and no beliefs to raise them on; satisfaction in life is elusive.
The great goods of stability and satisfaction have migrated up to where the money is, but with one great difference from the past: a hundred years ago, the Rockefellers and Carnegies, like the Booths and Baden Powells, saw the need to raise up the fallen poor, to make them conformable to the standard of behavior then called "respectability."
Not so today. According to Murray, those in the most exclusive communities seldom venture outside them. They marry neither down nor out. They continue to have religious beliefs and produce children, and raise their children according to their beliefs. About lesser people and lesser people's children, however, they may have only formal or perfunctory concerns.
Charity, of course, is a trillion-dollar economic sector, and the poverty industry grows through bull and bear markets alike. But unlike a century ago, today the world of the dole has no improving ethos. We go to the materially disadvantaged to learn rather than teach; we "come alongside" the dysfunctional without improving them.
Barren Monotony from Perpetual Change
The greatest thought experiment of all time is still in progress. But it's far enough along now that almost everyone can see how it's going to look. Yes, a certain kind of human excellence will still exist, but it will be hidden in exclusive places and in studied reticence. Among those people and in their protected spaces, transcendent gestures that otherwise have disappeared may still be performed, but mainly as ceremonies of belonging and self-affirmation. Outside these privileged communities, perpetual change will produce only a barren monotony of sameness. The justification of this chaotic uniformity will be that in it everything is possible.
Men can become women, for example, and women men. Children can be treated as wise and judicious, while their parents are subjected to the hermeneutic of suspicion. But these are obvious matters. Let's be more fanciful. Suppose that men desire to be adverbs or square roots. That's not possible, you'll say, but you'll admit, I suppose, that we could pretend that a man is a square root by insisting that, when multiplied by himself, he produces a specified quantity. We could say that the same man is also an adverb, because we can use him to modify a verb so as to answer such questions as how, when, where, and why.
And even if we are not prepared to humor such fantastic wishes, why should that be an obstacle? Who are we to call them fantastic? Why may they not be "visionary ambitions of inclusion"?
It's not as if our consent is required. The matter may easily be resolved in court, ending the centuries of grammatical and mathematical condescension countless previous generations have had to endure. The proud gates of grammar and math can be forced open by the siege engine of the law. A new grammatical and mathematical day will dawn, in which it will be just as appropriate to call men adverbs or square roots as today it is to call them married to one another. The city of no-God is built of such visions. New parts are always falling into place. •
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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