'IMAGINE', AND RICHARD DAWKINS

Imagine there's no Heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today

 

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace

 

You may say that I'm a dreamer

 But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

 

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world

 

You may say that I'm a dreamer

 But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

 

                                         

‘The old religion said “Heaven help us!”  Our new one, from its very lack of that faith in heaven will teach us the more to help one another.’

Thus George Eliot.  Her sentiment reflects, I think, the first verse of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’; although the ideas contained therein are more likely to have come from Karl Marx.  Being cynical, one might say that ‘living for today’ has a certain fecklessness and lack of foresight more appropriate to Hippie Haight Ashbury than to a solution for the world’s problems. Being charitable, let us assume the Eliot/Marx hypothesis: belief in Heaven stops people from bothering to put things right on Earth.  Getting rid of Heaven – and Hell – is a prelude to social justice.

Well it might be, if we could be sure of the basic niceness of everyone.  But can we be?  Is the school bully motivated by thoughts of Heaven or Hell?  If he/she forgets about them and starts living for today will he/she start patting heads instead of thrusting them down toilets?   To believe that arguably requires a more robust faith than the one just disposed of.  And the probable heavenless future can be gauged by just one example from the heavenless past:  it is not clear that Attila the Hun believed in Heaven; or, if he did, his idea of heaven was to create hell on earth.  Not believing in an afterlife is no guarantee that you will try to make things better for everyone else.

For George Eliot’s course of action is not the only possibility; especially if you lack any sense of the categorical imperative.  Take away Heaven, and the promise of reward, and you might decide that if you only live once then you have a charter for selfishness: climbing on the hands and faces of potential rivals for worldly resources as you ascend the ladder of material success.  Get rid of Hell and you take away the threat of punishment in the afterlife: a potential charter to do what you like as long as you don’t get caught by terrestrial authority.  Either line of behaviour makes quite as much sense as helping other people on anything more than the ‘scratch my back’ principle.

This is not to argue that without belief in an afterlife everyone will adopt a policy of let’s live like pigs.  It is to doubt that disbelief in an afterlife will necessarily promote everyone’s altruism.

 

Lennon’s second verse ponders the evils caused by nationalism (countries) and ideologies (religion).   Get rid of nations and belief systems and there will be peace.  Really?   How can you know, until you’ve done so?   And what if you’re wrong?  What if strife were to continue in a stateless, ideology-free world?

            My scepticism is fuelled by memories of the heyday of football hooliganism: groups such as the Inter City Firm or the Chelsea Headhunters, who left calling cards pinned to the bodies of felled supporters of rival teams.  Unless you are to treat football as a religion, that sort of stuff had little to do with ideology, something to do with nationalism (undercover research in the 1980’s established links between such groups and the National Front), and a lot to do with tribal rivalry which, if Darwin’s The Descent of Man is to be believed, was around before religions or countries were even thought of, and will continue – pace the Marxist dream – after the nation state has withered away. The contemporary versions of tribalism – city-centre fights after pub closing time, or gang knifing of any one who ‘disses’ you: even if from the same culture/country – are showing vigorous life, and suggest that Lennon was a dreamer indeed. 

 

Lennon’s identified evil in the third verse is personal possessions.   Without them, there would be no need for greed or hunger.  One is reminded of Rousseau’s On the Origin of Inequality: the archetypal villain is the one who first erected a fence and said, ‘This is mine!’

            But it is not clear to me that hunger is caused purely by the greed of others.  What about famine arising from prolonged drought?  How would lack of possessions help prevent that?  Might not that lack exacerbate the problem?  And how extreme should lack of possessions be?  Would it include not having a bowl for an Aid handout, or no bucket to carry water in?  In such a situation, those with possessions are the only ones in a position to help.  Egypt and the seven years of famine come to mind.  It was fortuitous all round that Pharaoh followed the advice of Joseph and built more grain silos; rather than following the advice of Lennon  – or his ancient equivalent – and getting rid of those he had. 

            I am, of course, being satirical.  But even if ‘no personal possessions’ means ‘possessions held in common’, can we feel confident that communal possessions would be distributed fairly in a time of shortage?  Especially if we remember the survival of the fittest.  Would the ‘fittest’ in this situation turn out to be the greediest?

 

Darwin brings me onto Richard Dawkins.  In the Preface to The God Delusion, Dawkins cites Lennon’s ‘magnificent song’ with approval, and targets the national and social conflicts arising from religion.  But can we sure that all the instances Dawkins cites are caused by religion, rather than, say, nationalism or male arrogance?  Let’s consider just two examples from his list:   Northern Ireland – Britain’s Cuba – and the partition of India.

Was it religion that caused the Cuban Missile Crisis when two of the parties in the ménage à trois – USSR and Cuba – were officially atheist; or was it the global strategy of two political superpowers?  

Ireland as Cuba.  Historically, Ireland has been a convenient stopping off point for Britain’s enemies.  Certainly Protestant England exacerbated the hostility of Catholic Spain.  But what about trade issues?  Galway used to trade with Spain.  When Britian stopped that link by insisting that all Irish trade must be with Britian were the reasons religious or commercial?  Would it have happened anyway, even if Britain had remained Catholic, or had had no religion at all?  Economic survival of the fittest?  Were the ‘Troubles’ primarily a question of Protestant versus Catholic: or of Scottish settler versus Irish native?  When Protestant Britain and Catholic France disputed with each other over Canada, was the issue religion or the expansion of empire?  England and France fought each other about territory when both were Catholic.  Britain and Holland fought each other for commercial reasons when both were Protestant.  The Thirty Years War started in disputes about religion, but ended in disputes about borders.    Which factor was the more important?

            Was the division of India purely a Muslim/Hindu issue?  What about the fact that the Muslims were originally invaders from the North?  By analogy, is the current division of Cyprus caused by difference of religion or by difference of race?   Was religion the issue in the divison of Korea or Viet Nam?   Or was it rival ideologies?  Or rival economic systems? 

            I am not suggesting religion was not a factor in any of the above.  I am asserting that it is simplistic to cite religion as the only, or even the dominant, factor.  (In fairness to Dawkins, he does make the same sort of point himself in Chapter 7: both about Ireland, and about football teams.  Lennon has more to answer for than Dawkins does). 

 

To make the Preface’s religion-free world of ‘Imagine’ a reality, however, Dawkins has sought in the rest of the book to eliminate the idea of God.  How successful has he been, and is his diagnosis the correct one in the first place?  Would the getting rid of religious delusion create the hoped-for improvement on Earth?  I han me doubts. 

In any case,  you won’t get rid of  the delusion in question simply by writing a book about it.  Some faith heads may have had their beliefs destroyed; but others, like me, may have read the thing from cover to cover and remained unconvinced by it.

Why?  Well, in his own field of biology, Dawkins is brilliant and illuminating – what fascinated me most about the book was the explanation of why moths fly into candles – but when he strays outside his comfort zone he is pretty amateur.  His demolition of Anselm’s ontological argument, for instance, makes it sound far more trivial than it is by ignoring the context of Platonic universals that underlies it.  If Dawkins really thinks Arianism would have made no difference to anything, could he  refute G K Chesterton’s assertions to the contrary in The Everlasting Man?  What about Dawkins’ dating of the Gospel of Thomas, or his easily-won assertion that Christ never claimed to be God?  There is too much of a sense of A N Wilson, and too little of serious Biblical scholarship. 

Dawkins says we pick and choose bits from the Bible.  Do we?  Not if we are in the tradition of C S Lewis’ ‘The Weight of Glory’: “If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which appear puzzling or repellent.” 

Granted that Dawkins has done his homework in tracking down all the most repellent episodes and instructions in the Old Testament.  Responding to this issue – and it is a searching and legitimate query that has been asked by many others before Dawkins, and is not to be glibly answered – is a separate topic in itself.   One thing I would note is that he has a tendency to assume that because events are in the text they are there to be approved of, rather than the opposite.  Consider the rape and cutting up of the concubine in Judges 19.  What Dawkins doesn’t refer to is the opening of that chapter: that there was no king at that time.  Isn’t that the point made: when people become a law unto themselves, these are the sorts of things that happen? 

In similar vein, the Christianity Dawkins is rejecting has a very Muslim feel about it: a religion of works rather than faith, which for Dawkins simply means the ability to believe the unbelievable.  Can you be good without religion? is his key question: as if Christianity said that the purpose of our existence was to be good, and earn brownie points accordingly, rather than to know and love God.  Christ’s, “If you love me, you will obey my commandments,” is not, as far as I know, a text that Dawkins addresses, and he seems much more comfortable with God as sadomasochist than with God as Love. 

And having disposed of his version of Pascal’s wager, the Dawkins oeuvre generally presents us with a stark choice of his own – evolution or God – without ever satisfactorily explaining why it is not possible to believe in both.

Despite these reservations, in the variety of issues it confronts The God Delusion is the product of a wonderfully searching, fertile, satirical, far-ranging and formidable intellect. As a full-frontal attack, it is refreshingly honest and overt in its intentions.  Probably too much so for its own good.  For, perceiving the agenda, genuine religious bigots, Christian or Muslim – the real target of Dawkins’ attack – will probably not read the book at all.

 

The biggest problem I have with Dawkins – and if he resolves this satisfactorily then I have either failed to understand him or missed the relevant section altogether   – is that on the one hand he is desperately eager for us all to accept a Darwinian take on things, while simultaneously insisting that survival of the fittest is a principle by which we cannot live.  But isn’t there a danger that if we adopt the one we will adopt the other: casting off, as Nietzsche did, and Hitler after him, the sympathy by which Darwin was constrained? 

Far more likely than Dawkins anyway, in my view, to bring about the Darwinisation of Britain is the Darwinism-by-stealth of contemporary reality TV.  Take ‘Golden Balls’ (now mercifully discontinued), ‘The Weakest Link,’ ‘Come Dine with Me’, or ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of Here!’ as a reasonably representative sample. Consider the encouragement to lie and betray in order to win; the humiliation of contestants by appearance, intelligence or personality; the bitchiness of comments about fellow diners, and strategic voting regardless of the actual dining experience; or the easy contempt for lesser creatures: does even a cockroach deserve to be put in a tank with the likes of some of the celebrity contestants?   

There, indeed, is the survival-of-the-fittest social principle, untrammelled by Christian constraint,  that dooms ‘Imagine’ – Lennon or Dawkins variety – to remain the dream that it is, and reawakens the hope of Heaven as humanity’s only ultimate solution.