I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for many years, and devour each issue within a few days after it arrives, often reading every article. And yet the magazine has two features that irritate me. The most important is that there are far too many pieces that don’t say very much, but say it in very good English. The meaty articles of yore have largely disappeared, replaced with pop-culture stuff or simply pieces that read well but leave one unsatisifed. Less important, but still annoying, is the magazine’s occasional critiques of atheism and its soft-pedaling of religion. The editors know very well that any hard-core questioning of faith won’t go down well with its readers.

Both of these annoyances are in view in James Wood’s critique of atheism in the latest issue, “Is that all there is? Secularism and its discontents.” (Wood, an English professor at Harvard, is a superb literary critic but, as we’ve seen on this site, likes to take an occasional swipe at atheism [see also here].) Wood, apparently a nonbeliever, is undergoing a mid-life crisis: he’s reading the obituaries of his contemporaries and is beset day and night with the Big Questions of cosmic purpose and meaning. (Wood includes among these, “How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose?” and ” Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?”).

Wood doesn’t fathom that for many of us those questions don’t matter, because we know that there is no cosmic purpose and meaning to our life, only the meaning we impute to it ourself.

These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral. . .

Note that this paragraph sounds good, in typical New Yorker style, but says very little except that Wood is having an existential crisis. Religion does not assume that the Big Questions are invalid: many religious people consider that those questions are unanswered, and their faith is a constant quest for answers. And even if the faithful considered them answered, why does that make them invalid? As for atheists, we consider the questions invalid because we have answered them: they are meaningless things to ask, akin to asking “what is the purpose of a pebble”? The universe is a physical system without teleological purpose or god-imputed meaning.

Wood then tarts up his short essay with erudite references to Virginia Woolf, Max Weber, and Charles Taylor before he gets to the ostensible subject of the piece, a review of the book The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, edited by George Levine. He doesn’t much like the book, apparently because it uses the word “secular” in two ways: One problem is that it’s not always clear what Levine and his contributors mean by secularism. Some of the time, I think they mean just atheism or practical agnosticism (i.e., living without appeal to, or belief in, supernatural agency). Such a life is, of course, civically compatible with the continued existence of organized religion. More often, the working definition here is of secularism as a historical force ultimately triumphant and victorious: a vision of the future as an overcoming of religion. What, exactly, is the point of saying that atheism is “civically compatible” with organized religion? That’s just plain dumb. Yes, atheists live in a society full of religious people. That statement is nothing other than a fatuous attempt to say that atheism and religion are compatible. And do the notions of secularism as non-religion or as a social movement bent on overcoming religion differ in any important way? And then there’s this, which is the last paragraph of his piece: Another difficulty is that, whether or not people did feel full or enchanted in centuries past, religion cannot be identified with the promise of fullness or enchantment. Both Christianity and Islam harshly challenge the self with an insistence on submission, sacrifice, and kenosis—an emptying out of the self, an exchange of the wrong kind of fullness for the right kind of humility—and Buddhism seeks to undermine the very idea of the sovereign, unified self. Revolutionary asceticism, which is what these religions in different ways embody, could be said to be hellbent on disenchantment. Classic New Yorker style: saying something in nice words that is either meaningless or wrong. Does Wood not see that both Christianity and Islam reward submission with promises of paradise? If so, why does he say that “religion cannot be identified with the promise of fullness or enchantment”? And Buddhism, while emphasizing one’s liberation from the shackles of ego, can hardly be said to be disenchanting. Rather, it’s fulfilling, a way to find peace in in this world. As for kenosis: well, that’s just a big word that doesn’t belong here. As far as I can see, this paragraph either says nothing or is wrong. It’s hard to tell. But that’s what happens when the New Yorker confuses florid writing with good thinking.

h/t: IA