Atheism 2.0 | Alain de Botton

1,446,653 views ・ 2012-01-17

TED


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00:15
One of the most common ways of dividing the world
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is into those who believe
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and those who don't --
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into the religious and the atheists.
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And for the last decade or so,
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it's been quite clear
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what being an atheist means.
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There have been some very vocal atheists
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who've pointed out,
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not just that religion is wrong,
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but that it's ridiculous.
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These people, many of whom have lived in North Oxford,
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have argued --
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they've argued that believing in God
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is akin to believing in fairies
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and essentially that the whole thing
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is a childish game.
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Now I think it's too easy.
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I think it's too easy
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to dismiss the whole of religion that way.
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And it's as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
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And what I'd like to inaugurate today
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is a new way of being an atheist --
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if you like, a new version of atheism
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we could call Atheism 2.0.
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Now what is Atheism 2.0?
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Well it starts from a very basic premise:
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of course, there's no God.
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Of course, there are no deities or supernatural spirits
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or angels, etc.
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Now let's move on; that's not the end of the story,
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that's the very, very beginning.
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I'm interested in the kind of constituency
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that thinks something along these lines:
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that thinks, "I can't believe in any of this stuff.
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I can't believe in the doctrines.
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I don't think these doctrines are right.
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But," a very important but, "I love Christmas carols.
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I really like the art of Mantegna.
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I really like looking at old churches.
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I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament."
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Whatever it may be,
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you know the kind of thing I'm talking about --
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people who are attracted to the ritualistic side,
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the moralistic, communal side of religion,
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but can't bear the doctrine.
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Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice.
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It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine
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and then you can have all the nice stuff,
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or you reject the doctrine and
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you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland
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under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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So that's a sort of tough choice.
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I don't think we have to make that choice.
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I think there is an alternative.
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I think there are ways --
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and I'm being both very respectful and completely impious --
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of stealing from religions.
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If you don't believe in a religion,
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there's nothing wrong with picking and mixing,
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with taking out the best sides of religion.
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And for me, atheism 2.0
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is about both, as I say,
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a respectful and an impious way
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of going through religions and saying, "What here could we use?"
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The secular world is full of holes.
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We have secularized badly, I would argue.
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And a thorough study of religion
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could give us all sorts of insights
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into areas of life that are not going too well.
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And I'd like to run through a few of these today.
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I'd like to kick off by looking at education.
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Now education is a field
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the secular world really believes in.
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When we think about how we're going to make the world a better place,
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we think education; that's where we put a lot of money.
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Education is going to give us, not only commercial skills, industrial skills,
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it's also going to make us better people.
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You know the kind of thing a commencement address is, and graduation ceremonies,
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those lyrical claims
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that education, the process of education -- particularly higher education --
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will make us into nobler and better human beings.
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That's a lovely idea.
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Interesting where it came from.
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In the early 19th century,
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church attendance in Western Europe
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started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked.
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They asked themselves the following question.
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They said, where are people going to find the morality,
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where are they going to find guidance,
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and where are they going to find sources of consolation?
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And influential voices came up with one answer.
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They said culture.
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It's to culture that we should look
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for guidance, for consolation, for morality.
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Let's look to the plays of Shakespeare,
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the dialogues of Plato, the novels of Jane Austen.
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In there, we'll find a lot of the truths
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that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John.
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Now I think that's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea.
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They wanted to replace scripture with culture.
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And that's a very plausible idea.
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It's also an idea that we have forgotten.
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If you went to a top university --
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let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge --
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and you said, "I've come here
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because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation;
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I want to know how to live,"
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they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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This is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning
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are in the business of.
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Why? They don't think we need it.
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They don't think we are in an urgent need of assistance.
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They see us as adults, rational adults.
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What we need is information.
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We need data, we don't need help.
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Now religions start from a very different place indeed.
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All religions, all major religions,
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at various points call us children.
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And like children,
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they believe that we are in severe need of assistance.
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We're only just holding it together.
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Perhaps this is just me, maybe you.
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But anyway, we're only just holding it together.
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And we need help. Of course, we need help.
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And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning.
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You know, in the 18th century in the U.K.,
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the greatest preacher, greatest religious preacher, was a man called John Wesley,
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who went up and down this country delivering sermons,
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advising people how they could live.
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He delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children
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and children to their parents,
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the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich.
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He was trying to tell people how they should live
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through the medium of sermons,
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the classic medium of delivery of religions.
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Now we've given up with the idea of sermons.
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If you said to a modern liberal individualist,
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"Hey, how about a sermon?"
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they'd go, "No, no. I don't need one of those.
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I'm an independent, individual person."
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What's the difference between a sermon
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and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture?
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Well a sermon wants to change your life
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and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information.
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And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition.
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The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable,
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because we are in need of guidance,
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morality and consolation --
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and religions know that.
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Another point about education:
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we tend to believe in the modern secular world
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that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it.
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Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato
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at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years,
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and that lesson will stick with them.
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Religions go, "Nonsense.
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You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day.
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So get on your knees and repeat it."
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That's what all religions tell us:
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"Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day."
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Otherwise our minds are like sieves.
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So religions are cultures of repetition.
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They circle the great truths again and again and again.
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We associate repetition with boredom.
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"Give us the new," we're always saying.
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"The new is better than the old."
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If I said to you, "Okay, we're not going to have new TED.
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We're just going to run through all the old ones
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and watch them five times because they're so true.
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We're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times
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because what she says is so clever," you'd feel cheated.
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Not so if you're adopting a religious mindset.
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The other things that religions do
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is to arrange time.
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All the major religions give us calendars.
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What is a calendar?
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A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year
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you will bump into certain very important ideas.
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In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar,
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at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome
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and his qualities of humility and goodness
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and his generosity to the poor.
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You won't do that by accident; you will do that because you are guided to do that.
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Now we don't think that way.
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In the secular world we think, "If an idea is important, I'll bump into it.
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I'll just come across it."
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Nonsense, says the religious world view.
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Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time,
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we need to synchronize encounters.
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This comes across also
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in the way in which religions set up rituals
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around important feelings.
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Take the Moon. It's really important to look at the Moon.
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You know, when you look at the Moon,
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you think, "I'm really small. What are my problems?"
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It sets things into perspective, etc., etc.
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We should all look at the Moon a bit more often. We don't.
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Why don't we? Well there's nothing to tell us, "Look at the Moon."
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But if you're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September,
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you will be ordered out of your home, made to stand on a canonical platform
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and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi,
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where you will be given poems to read
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in honor of the Moon and the passage of time
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and the frailty of life that it should remind us of.
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You'll be handed rice cakes.
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And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon
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will have a secure place in your heart.
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That's very good.
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The other thing that religions are really aware of
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is: speak well --
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I'm not doing a very good job of this here --
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but oratory, oratory is absolutely key to religions.
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In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker
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and still have a great career.
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But the religious world doesn't think that way.
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What you're saying needs to be backed up
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by a really convincing way of saying it.
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So if you go to an African-American Pentecostalist church
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in the American South
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and you listen to how they talk,
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my goodness, they talk well.
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After every convincing point, people will go, "Amen, amen, amen."
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At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they'll all stand up,
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and they'll go, "Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior."
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If we were doing it like they do it --
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let's not do it, but if we were to do it --
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I would tell you something like, "Culture should replace scripture."
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And you would go, "Amen, amen, amen."
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And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up
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and you would go, "Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen."
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And we'd know that we had a real rhythm going.
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All right, all right. We're getting there. We're getting there.
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(Applause)
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The other thing that religions know is we're not just brains,
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we are also bodies.
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And when they teach us a lesson,
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they do it via the body.
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So for example,
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take the Jewish idea of forgiveness.
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Jews are very interested in forgiveness
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and how we should start anew and start afresh.
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They don't just deliver us sermons on this.
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They don't just give us books or words about this.
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They tell us to have a bath.
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So in Orthodox Jewish communities, every Friday you go to a Mikveh.
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You immerse yourself in the water,
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and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea.
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We don't tend to do that.
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Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another.
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Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two.
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Let's look at art now.
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Now art is something that in the secular world,
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we think very highly of. We think art is really, really important.
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A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums, etc.
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We sometimes hear it said
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that museums are our new cathedrals, or our new churches.
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You've heard that saying.
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Now I think that the potential is there,
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but we've completely let ourselves down.
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And the reason we've let ourselves down
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is that we're not properly studying
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how religions handle art.
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The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world
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that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art:
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The first idea is that art should be for art's sake --
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a ridiculous idea --
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an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble
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and should not try to do anything with this troubled world.
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I couldn't disagree more.
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The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn't explain itself,
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that artists shouldn't say what they're up to,
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because if they said it, it might destroy the spell
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and we might find it too easy.
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That's why a very common feeling when you're in a museum --
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let's admit it --
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is, "I don't know what this is about."
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But if we're serious people, we don't admit to that.
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But that feeling of puzzlement is structural
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to contemporary art.
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Now religions have a much saner attitude to art.
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They have no trouble telling us what art is about.
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Art is about two things in all the major faiths.
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Firstly, it's trying to remind you
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of what there is to love.
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And secondly, it's trying to remind you
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of what there is to fear and to hate.
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And that's what art is.
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Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith.
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So as you walk around a church,
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or a mosque or a cathedral,
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what you're trying to imbibe, what you're imbibing is,
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through your eyes, through your senses,
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truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind.
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Essentially it's propaganda.
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Rembrandt is a propagandist
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in the Christian view.
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Now the word "propaganda" sets off alarm bells.
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We think of Hitler, we think of Stalin. Don't, necessarily.
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Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something.
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And if that thing is good, there's no problem with it at all.
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My view is that museums should take a leaf out of the book of religions.
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And they should make sure that when you walk into a museum --
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if I was a museum curator,
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I would make a room for love, a room for generosity.
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All works of art are talking to us about things.
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And if we were able to arrange spaces
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where we could come across works
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where we would be told, use these works of art
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to cement these ideas in your mind,
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we would get a lot more out of art.
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Art would pick up the duty that it used to have
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and that we've neglected because of certain mis-founded ideas.
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Art should be one of the tools
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by which we improve our society.
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Art should be didactic.
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Let's think of something else.
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The people in the modern world, in the secular world,
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who are interested in matters of the spirit,
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in matters of the mind,
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in higher soul-like concerns,
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tend to be isolated individuals.
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They're poets, they're philosophers, they're photographers, they're filmmakers.
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And they tend to be on their own.
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They're our cottage industries. They are vulnerable, single people.
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And they get depressed and they get sad on their own.
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And they don't really change much.
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Now think about religions, think about organized religions.
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What do organized religions do?
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They group together, they form institutions.
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And that has all sorts of advantages.
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First of all, scale, might.
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The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year
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according to the Wall Street Journal.
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These are massive machines.
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They're collaborative, they're branded, they're multinational,
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and they're highly disciplined.
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These are all very good qualities.
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We recognize them in relation to corporations.
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And corporations are very like religions in many ways,
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except they're right down at the bottom of the pyramid of needs.
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They're selling us shoes and cars.
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Whereas the people who are selling us the higher stuff --
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the therapists, the poets --
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are on their own and they have no power,
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they have no might.
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So religions are the foremost example
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of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind.
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Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us,
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but we can admire the institutional way
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in which they're doing it.
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Books alone, books written by lone individuals,
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are not going to change anything.
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We need to group together.
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If you want to change the world, you have to group together, you have to be collaborative.
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And that's what religions do.
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They are multinational, as I say,
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they are branded, they have a clear identity,
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so they don't get lost in a busy world.
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That's something we can learn from.
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I want to conclude.
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Really what I want to say
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is for many of you who are operating in a range of different fields,
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there is something to learn from the example of religion --
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even if you don't believe any of it.
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If you're involved in anything that's communal,
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that involves lots of people getting together,
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there are things for you in religion.
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If you're involved, say, in a travel industry in any way,
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look at pilgrimage.
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Look very closely at pilgrimage.
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We haven't begun to scratch the surface
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of what travel could be
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because we haven't looked at what religions do with travel.
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If you're in the art world,
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look at the example of what religions are doing with art.
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And if you're an educator in any way,
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again, look at how religions are spreading ideas.
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You may not agree with the ideas,
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but my goodness, they're highly effective mechanisms for doing so.
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So really my concluding point
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is you may not agree with religion,
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but at the end of the day,
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religions are so subtle, so complicated,
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so intelligent in many ways
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that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone;
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they're for all of us.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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Chris Anderson: Now this is actually a courageous talk,
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because you're kind of setting up yourself in some ways
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to be ridiculed in some quarters.
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AB: You can get shot by both sides.
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You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists,
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and you can get shot by those who fully believe.
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CA: Incoming missiles from North Oxford at any moment.
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AB: Indeed.
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CA: But you left out one aspect of religion
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that a lot of people might say
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your agenda could borrow from,
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which is this sense --
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that's actually probably the most important thing to anyone who's religious --
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of spiritual experience,
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of some kind of connection
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with something that's bigger than you are.
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Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0?
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AB: Absolutely. I, like many of you, meet people
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who say things like, "But isn't there something bigger than us,
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something else?"
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And I say, "Of course." And they say, "So aren't you sort of religious?"
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And I go, "No." Why does that sense of mystery,
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that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe,
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need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling?
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Science and just observation
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gives us that feeling without it,
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so I don't feel the need.
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The universe is large and we are tiny,
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without the need for further religious superstructure.
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So one can have so-called spiritual moments
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without belief in the spirit.
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CA: Actually, let me just ask a question.
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How many people here would say
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that religion is important to them?
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Is there an equivalent process
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by which there's a sort of bridge
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between what you're talking about and what you would say to them?
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AB: I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life
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and these can be plugged.
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It's not as though, as I try to suggest,
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it's not as though either you have religion
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and then you have to accept all sorts of things,
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or you don't have religion
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and then you're cut off from all these very good things.
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It's so sad that we constantly say,
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"I don't believe so I can't have community,
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so I'm cut off from morality,
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so I can't go on a pilgrimage."
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One wants to say, "Nonsense. Why not?"
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And that's really the spirit of my talk.
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There's so much we can absorb.
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Atheism shouldn't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion.
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CA: It seems to me that there's plenty of people in the TED community
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who are atheists.
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But probably most people in the community
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certainly don't think that religion is going away any time soon
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and want to find the language
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to have a constructive dialogue
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and to feel like we can actually talk to each other
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and at least share some things in common.
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Are we foolish to be optimistic
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about the possibility of a world
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where, instead of religion being the great rallying cry
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of divide and war,
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that there could be bridging?
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AB: No, we need to be polite about differences.
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Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue.
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It's seen as hypocrisy.
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But we need to get to a stage when you're an atheist
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and someone says, "Well you know, I did pray the other day,"
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you politely ignore it.
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You move on.
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Because you've agreed on 90 percent of things,
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because you have a shared view on so many things,
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and you politely differ.
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And I think that's what the religious wars of late have ignored.
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They've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement.
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CA: And finally, does this new thing that you're proposing
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that's not a religion but something else,
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does it need a leader,
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and are you volunteering to be the pope?
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(Laughter)
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AB: Well, one thing that we're all very suspicious of
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is individual leaders.
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It doesn't need it.
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What I've tried to lay out is a framework
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and I'm hoping that people can just fill it in.
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I've sketched a sort of broad framework.
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But wherever you are, as I say, if you're in the travel industry, do that travel bit.
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If you're in the communal industry, look at religion and do the communal bit.
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So it's a wiki project.
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(Laughter)
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CA: Alain, thank you for sparking many conversations later.
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(Applause)
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