by MICHAEL LIND
Democritus meditating on the seat of the soul by Léon-Alexandre Delhomme (1868). IMAGE/Wikipedia
Atheism doesn’t have to be so angry. Look at Democritius and Santayana.
Like O’Hair’s creed, the evangelical atheism of Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and others is best understood as a counter-Christianity or counter-Abrahamism. It is defined by what it is against, Abrahamic monotheism, and it fights the enemy by adopting its tactics (and, in the case of O’Hair’s atheist church, its very organization). The very term “atheist” defines the belief system in terms of what it opposes. The philosopher John Gray has even described “evangelical atheism” as a new form of fundamentalism.
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I call as my first witness Democritus, the ancient Greek philosopher who with Leucippus introduced the idea that the universe is made up of atomic particles. Democritus was known as “the laughing philosopher.” What little is known about him consists largely of humorous anecdotes. Here is the entry from L’Empriere’s Classical Dictionary:
He continually laughed at the follies and vanity of mankind, who distract themselves with care, and are at once a prey to hope and anxiety….He taught his disciples that the soul died with the body; and therefore, as he gave no credit to the existence of ghosts, some youths, to try his fortitude, disguised themselves in a hideous habit, and approached his cave in the dead of night, with whatever noises could create astonishment and terror. The philosopher received them unmoved; and, without even looking at them, desired them to cease making themselves such objects of ridicule and folly.
The same vein of good humor can be found in Epicurus, and, in modern times, in Hume and Voltaire. Even though he was a German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who belongs in this broad tradition, was quite funny. These secular philosophers could not be perpetually angry with humanity, for the simple reason that their expectations of their conspecifics were so low. In the words of George Santayana about a contemporary, “Mr. Lovett does not seem to remember that mankind is a tribe of animals, living by habit and thinking in symbols and that it can never be anything else.”
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A Spanish-American who was educated at Boston Latin and Harvard, where he taught for a while, George Santayana (1863-1952) grew so alienated from New England culture that he resigned from Harvard in 1912 and spent the rest of his life in Europe. During his old age he lived in the Convent of the Blue Nuns in Rome, explaining that he was a Catholic atheist: “There is no God, and Mary is His Mother.” Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about him there, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.”
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His review takes the form of excerpts, followed by his comments.
Page 23. “The average congressman…is…not only incompetent and imbecile, but also incurably dishonest.” Why exaggerate? “His knowledge is that of a third-rate country lawyer…his intelligence is that of a country-newspaper editor, or evangelical divine. His standards of honour are those of a country banker…” Why not? Shouldn’t a representative be representative? A reformer, a prophet, an expert, a revolutionary committee sitting in enlightened New York would not be a fair vehicle of popular government. Isn’t democracy built on the experience and the conviction that superior people are dangerous, and that the instinct of the common people is a safer guide? But what surprises me more than disbelief in democracy, is this hatred of the countryside. Is agriculture the root of evil? Naturally, the first rays of the sun must strike the east side of New York, but do they never travel beyond?
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