Think about this from Ross Douthat:
When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Aubade’ — that ‘death is no different whined at than withstood.’
(Previously in Douthat.) There is a grade of sophistry which approaches comedy, and Douthat owns it. Here he takes a vision of atheism Hitchens’ sanguine state on the threshold of death should properly be seen to be evidence against and makes it attest to that vision. Truly, the argument is: there can be no consolation for death but faith (that is, my faith), Hitchens didn’t seem disconsolate, therefore Hitchens didn’t really disbelieve in my consolation or faith. Douthat doesn’t see that fairy tales and happy talk were exactly what Hitchens’ atheism wasn’t stripped of, and what Larkin’s was. Hitchens believed in plenty. Not in a timeless future in heaven, or a god, but certainly against God, and in a sort of elitist humanism that proclaimed the desirability of the perfectibility of man towards the condition of Hitchens and his friends. Larkin’s and Hitchens’ creeds were at one so far as they were atheists, and only that far. Atheism means you don’t believe in God. It takes a believer to think it could imply that since you’ve given up the fairy tales and happy talk of Christianity you’ve got to give up all the tales and talk life licenses. It so happened that Larkin did (or almost: he believed in girls). But Hitchens was a living example of the fact that a belief sufficient to make sense of a life needn’t by any means be religious.
This isn’t why what Douthat says is funny, though. Think about these from Cioran (from Écartèlement and Le Mauvais Démiurge):
‘It is of no importance to know who I am since one day I shall no longer be’—that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition.
It makes no sense to say death is the goal of life. But what else is there to say?
‘You really should come to the house—one of these days we might die without having seen each other again.’ —‘Since we have to die in any case, what’s the use of seeing each other again?’
Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, the difference [of immediacy] in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood [the extent to which] it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when.
‘Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s’—why does Douthat say that? Because neither of them believed in heaven, and that’s what matters to him.
If as Douthat says atheism casts a wasting shadow ‘over every human hope and endeavour’ can’t the fact that such a shadow hasn’t been cast—isn’t cast—prove that atheism is false? That the answer is no helps us appreciate that in the piece atheism is treated (intentionally or not, who knows) as something we don’t just choose whether to believe in but choose whether it’s true. Assume at the same time that atheism is true and that what Douthat says about it is true. In that case, what might our recourse be? Our recourse would be to believe it wasn’t—to breed gods. Operating in the broad daylight of Douthat’s column is a pragmatic relativism in terms of which it is all one and the same thing whether atheism is true or false. For Douthat is right that we choose what to believe, and that what we believe matters to us far more than what’s true, and he’s sort of right that atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope, in the very narrow sense that he’s in agreement with everyone who’s intuited as much (since if we don’t know atheism’s true it’s at least apparent, which is why faith is called faith) and chosen to disbelieve in atheism in light of it. This reading of the passage frees us to claim that Douthat as good as admits there that a terror of death is what compelled him to choose to believe in heaven—the place where (Douthat hopes) Hitchens ‘finally knows why’ Larkin was ‘completely wrong to give in to despair.’
All metaphysical beliefs answer the same anomaly, all address the same lacuna, and all are equally inadequate to this purpose. In a 2010 article Hitchens confessed to being bothered by a fear he’d never see England again. I’m not sure, but I don’t think he did. And in the week of his death I was troubled by the question what had happened to that regret, and struck in consequence by the necessity of the distinction between the ineluctable conclusion that now the regret means nothing and the conclusion Cioran seems to propose in these aphorisms that it never meant anything, and struck by the conviction that this was a crux with a bearing on all lives: does death negate life? The Christian solution of no, actually, death is not the end of life has to be the idlest conceivable. But whether you are atheist or Christian really has no say in the matter, because the consciousness of death is prior to all gods. Death is certain, it is not believed in.
I’ve no conclusion except to suggest that like the way in which the question whether atheism is true affects us ungovernably to the extent that we choose to believe it isn’t because it seems to be, it’s also true we can’t control the way the question whether death negates life affects us because whatever is the case we’ll live as though it doesn’t and more than reason and intuition and decision what we do is our truth’s expression and sign and if death does cast a shadow over every human hope and endeavour, it wastes only with our consent.
Update. I just came across a passage—from a 2000 review of Ravelstein—which is strikingly apt:
‘Ravelstein’ doesn’t whine as the end approaches. We don’t actually see him die (Bellow’s own near-death experience follows, perhaps, too hard upon) but we witness him in the humiliating shipwreck of his last illness and he remains a wise-cracking atheist and materialist. ‘Chick’ chooses to see this as a pose, and to take literally Ravelstein’s expiring gags about a reunion beyond the grave, which strikes me in the light of a slight but significant breach of faith. Say what you will about the Straussians, they aren’t hypocrites or weaklings and they don’t burble about heavenly rewards to make up for when the mind has gone. Indeed, they have made rather a pointed study of the dignified hemlockian terminus. Bloom should have been allowed this last nobility.
