Why History isn't Scientific (And Why It Can Still Tell Us About the Past)

(This is a guest post I was invited to write for the atheist blog Deity Schmeity.  Regular readers of Armarium Magnum or of my answers on Quora will recognise the general themes).

"History sucks."

 In April last year Grundy, the usual writer of this blog, posted "History Isn't My Area", commenting on the release of Bart Ehrman's critique of the Jesus Myth hypothesis, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.  Unlike the majority of actual historians, many prominent atheists find Jesus Mythicism convincing and many of them are unhappy with the generally sceptical and highly renowned Ehrman for criticising this idea.  Grundy, for his part, stated frankly "I honestly have little knowledge as to whether or not Jesus existed", though added  "I tend to think he did".  That said, he made it clear why the overwhelming consensus of historians and other relevant scholars that the Jesus Myth idea is junk was underwhelming for him:

"History sucks. Okay, that’s unfair, but it was never my subject. My confidence of the accuracy of historical events goes down exponentially with the paper trail. The idea that history is written by the victors highlights the biases of the past. Books are burned. Records fade. Who should I trust for an accurate portrayal of events two thousand years ago?"

Since history actually is my area, I responded by making some critical comments on this attitude and some points about how history , as an academic discipline, is studied.  Grundy, unlike many so-called "rationalists" I've encountered over the years, was happy to listen, and he invited me to expand on my points in this guest post.

Atheists and Historical Illiteracy

I should begin, however, by pointing out that I am an atheist.  I have been an atheist for my entire adult life, am a paid up member of several atheist and sceptical organisations and have a 21 year online record of posting to discussions as an unbeliever.  I note this because I've found that when I begin to criticise my fellow atheists and their grasp of history or historiography, people tend to assume I must be some kind of theist apologist (which doesn't follow at all, but this happens all the time anyway).

After 30+ years of observing and taking part in debates about history with many of my fellow atheists I can safely claim that most atheists are historically illiterate.  This is not particular to atheists:  they tend to be about as historically illiterate as most people, since historical illiteracy is pretty much the norm.   But it does mean that when most (not all) atheists comment about history or, worse, try to use history in debates about religion, they are usually doing so with a grasp of the subject that is stunted at about high school level.

This is hardly surprising, given that most people don't study history past high school.  But it means their understanding of any given historical person, subject or event is (like that of most people), based on half-remembered school lessons, perhaps a TV documentary or two and popular culture: mainly novels and movies.  Which is why most atheists (like most people) have a grasp of history which is, to be brutally frank, largely crap.

Worse, this also means that most atheists (again, like most people) have a grasp of how history is studied and the techniques of historical analysis and synthesis which is also stunted at high school level - i.e. virtually non-existent.  With a few laudable exceptions, high school history teachers still tend to reduce history to facts and dates organised into themes or broad topics.  How we can know what happened in the past, with what degree of certitude we can know it and the techniques used to arrive at these conclusions are rarely more than touched on at this level.  This means that when the average atheist (yet again, like the average person generally) grasps that our knowledge of the past is not as cut and dried and clear as Mr Wilkins the history teacher gave us to understand, they tend to reject the whole thing as highly uncertain at best or subjective waffle at worst.  Or, as Grundy put it, as "crap".

This rejection can be more pronounced in atheists, because many (not all) come to their atheism via a study of science.  Science seems very certain compared to history.  You can make hypotheses and test them in science.  You can actually prove things.  Scientific propositions are, by definition, falsifiable.  Compared to science, history can seem like so much hand-waving, where anyone can pretty much argue anything they like.

History and Science

In fact, history is very much a rigorous academic discipline, with its own rules and methodology much like the hard sciences.  This does not mean it is a science.  It is sometimes referred to as one, especially in Europe, but this is only in the broader sense of the word; as in "a systematic way of ordering and analysing knowledge".  But before looking at how the historical method works, it might be useful to look at how sciences differ from it.

The hard sciences are founded on the principle of probabilistic induction.   A scientist uses an inductive or "bottom up" approach to work from observing specific particulars ("mice injected with this drug put on less fat") to general propositions ("the drug is reducing their appetite").  These propositions are falsifiable via empirical testing to rule out other explanations of the particulars ("the drug is increasing their metabolism" or "those mice are more stressed by being stuck with syringes") and so can be tested.

This is all possible in the hard sciences because of some well-established laws of cause and effect that form a basis for this kind of induction.  If something is affecting the mice in my examples above today, it will affect them in the same way tomorrow, all things being equal.  This allows a scientist to work from induction to make an assessment of probable causation via empirical assessment and do so with a high degree of confidence.  And their assessment can be confirmed by others because the empirical measures are controlled and repeatable.

Unfortunately, none of this works for the study of the past.  Events, large and small, occur and then are gone.  A historian can only assess information about them from traces they may, if we are lucky, leave behind.  But unlike a researcher from the hard sciences, a historian can't run the fall of the Western Roman Empire through a series of controlled lab experiments.  He can't even observe the events, as a zoologist might observe the behaviour of a gorilla band, and draw conclusions.  And there aren't well-defined laws and principles at work (apart from in a very broad and subjective sense) that allow him to, say, simulate the effects of the rise of the printing press or decide on the exact course of the downfall of Napoleon the way a theoretical physicist can with the composition of a distant galaxy or the formation of a long dead star.

All this leads some atheists, who have fallen in to the fallacy of scientism and reject anything that can't be definitively "proven", to reject the idea of any degree of certainty about the past.  This is an extreme position and it's rarely a consistent one.  As I've noted to some who have claimed this level of historical scepticism, I find it hard to believe they maintain this position when they read the newspaper, even though they should be just as sceptical about being able to know about a car accident yesterday as they are about knowing about a revolution 400 years ago.

The Historical Method

Just because history is not a hard science does not mean it can't tell us about the past or can't do so with a degree of certainty.  Early historians like Herodotus established the beginnings of the methods used by modern historical researchers, though historians only began to develop a systematic methodology based on agreed principles from the later eighteenth century onwards, using the techniques of Barthold Niebuhr (1776-1831) and Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886).

The Historical Method is based on three fundamental steps, each of which has its own techniques:

1. Heuristic - This is the identification of relevant material to use as sources of information.  These can range from the obvious, such as a historian of the time's account of events he witnessed personally, to the much less obvious, like a medieval manor's account book detailing purchases for the estate.  Everything from archaeological finds to coins to heraldry can be relevant here.  The key word here is "relevant", and there is a high degree of skill in working out which sources of information are pertinent to the subject in question.

2. Criticism - This is the process of appraisal of the source material in the light of the question being answered or subject being examined.  It involves such things as determining the level of "authenticity" of a source (Is it what is seems to be?), its "integrity" (Can its account be trusted?  What are its biases?), its context (What genre is it?  Is it responding or reacting to another source?  Is it using literary tropes that need to be treated with scepticism?)  Material evidence, such are archaeology, architecture, art , coins etc needs to be firmly put into context to be understood.  Documentary sources also need careful contextualisation - the social conditions of their production, their polemical intent (if any), their reason for production (more important for a political speech than a birth certificate, for example) , their intended audience and the background and biases of their writer (if known) all have to be taken into account.

3.  Synthesis and Exposition - This is the formal statement of the findings from steps 1 and 2, which each finding supported by reference to the relevant evidence.  

The main difference between this method and those used in the hard sciences is that the researcher lays all this material, its analysis and his conclusions out systematically, but the conclusions are a subjective assessment of likelihood rather than an objective statement of probabilistic induction.  This subjectivity is what many trained in the sciences find alien about history and lead them to reject history as insubstantial.  

But the key thing to understand here is that the historian is not working toward an absolute statement about what definitely happened in the past, since that is generally impossible except on trivial points (eg there is no doubt that Adolf HItler was born on April 20 1889).  A historian instead works to present what is called "the argument to the best explanation".  In other words, the argument that best accounts for the largest amount of relevant evidence with the least number of suppositions.  This means that the Principle of Parsimony, also known as Occam's Razor, is a key tool in historical analysis; historians always favour the most parsimonious interpretation that takes account of the most available evidence.  

For example, regarding the existence of Jesus, it is far more parsimonious to conclude that Christianity's  figure of "Jesus Christ" evolved out of the ideas of the followers of a historical Jewish preacher, since all of our earliest information tells us that this "Jesus Christ" was a historical Jewish preacher who had been executed circa 30 CE.  People have tried to propose alternative origins for the figure of "Jesus Christ", positing an earlier Jewish sect that believed in a purely celestial figure who became "historicised" into an earthly, historical Jesus later.  But there is no evidence of any such proto-Christian sect and no reason such a sect would exist and then vanish without leaving any trace in the historical record.  This is why historians find these "Jesus Myth" hypotheses uncompelling - they are not the most parsimonious way of looking at the evidence and require us to imagine ad hoc, "what if" style suppositions to keep them from collapsing. 

Ways Atheists (Sometimes) Get History Wrong

Managing this process of systematic historical analysis requires training, practice and a degree of skill.  Without these, it's very easy to do something that looks a bit like historical analysis and arrive at flawed conclusions.

Take the initial heuristic process, for example.  I've come across many atheists who don't accept that a historical Jesus existed on the grounds that "there are no contemporary references to him and all references to him are later hearsay" or even that "there are no eyewitness accounts of his career".  So they rule out any evidence we do have referring to him on the basis that it is not contemporary and/or from eyewitnesses.  But if we ruled out any reference to an ancient, medieval or pre-modern person or event on these grounds, we'd effectively have to abandon the study of early history: we don't have contemporary evidence for most people and events in the ancient world, so this would make almost all of our sources invalid, which is clearly absurd.  Given that we have no eyewitness or contemporary sources for far more prominent figures, such as Hannibal, expecting them for a peasant preacher like Jesus is clearly ridiculous.  No historian of the ancient world would regard this as a valid historical heuristic.

Atheists can often make similar elementary errors in the criticism of sources as well.  There is no shortage of lurid material on the horrors of the Inquisition, with whole books detailing vile tortures and giving accounts of hundreds of thousands of wretched victims being consigned to the flames by the Catholic Church.  In the past, nineteenth century writers took these sources at face value and until the early twentieth century this was essentially the story of the Inquisition to be found in textbooks, especially in the English-speaking (i.e. substantially Protestant) sphere.

But much of this was based on sources that had severe biases - mainly sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant polemical material, usually produced in England which, as a political, religious and economic enemy of Spain, was hardly going to produce unbiased accounts of the Spanish church and crown's use of the Inquisition.  Uncritical use of this material gives a warped, enemy's-eye-view of the Inquisition that has been substantially overturned by more careful analysis of the source material and the Inquisition's own records.  The result is that it is now known that in the 160 years of its operation in Spain, the Inquisition resulted in 3,000-5,000 executions, not the hundreds of thousands alleged by uncritical nineteenth century writers like Henry Charles Lea.  Basing an argument on the earlier, uncritical accounts of the Inquisition might suit many atheists' agendas, but it would be bad history nonetheless.

Finally, historical synthesis and exposition requires at least an attempt at a high degree of objectivity.  An analyst of the past may have personal beliefs with the potential to bias their analysis and incline them towards certain conclusions.  Worse, these beliefs could make them begin with assumptions about the past and so make them select only the evidence that supports this a priori idea.  Historians strive to avoid both and examine the evidence on its merits, though polemicists often don't bother with this objective approach.  All too often many atheists can be polemicists when dealing with the past, only crediting information or analysis that fits an argument against religion they are trying to make  while downplaying, dismissing or ignoring evidence or analysis that does not fit their agenda.  Again, this is bad history and rarely serves any function other than preaching to the converted.

So, for example, until the early twentieth century the history of science was popularly seen as a centuries-long conflict between forward thinking scientific minds trying to advance knowledge and human progress but constantly being persecuted and suppressed by retrograde religious forces determined to retard scientific progress.  Again, in the mid-twentieth century historians of science reassessed this general idea and rejected what is now referred to as the "Conflict Thesis", presenting a far more complex, nuanced and well-founded analysis of the development of science that shows that while there were occasional conflicts, which were rarely as simple as "science versus religion", religion was usually neutral on the rational analysis of the physical world and often actively supportive of it.  Overt conflicts, such as the Galileo Affair, were exceptions rather than the rule and, in that case as in many others, more complicated than simply “religion” repressing “science”.

Objectivity, Bias and Historical Fables

We atheists and freethinkers regularly deride believers for their irrational thinking, lack of critical analysis and tendency to cling to ideas out of faith even when confronted by contrary evidence.  Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to talk about being rational, and criticise others for not being so, than it is to practice what we preach.  Everyone has their biases and “confirmation bias”  - the tendency to favour information that confirms our prior beliefs - is an innate psychological propensity that is hard to counter even when we are aware of it.  This means that atheists can, in many cases, be as bad as believers in accepting appealing ideas without checking their facts, holding to common misconceptions in the face of contrary evidence and liking neat, simple stories over messy, complex and more detailed alternatives that happen to be more solidly supported by the evidence.

The idea that the medieval Church taught the earth was flat, that Columbus bravely defied their primitive Biblical superstition and proved they were wrong by sailing to America is a great story.  Unfortunately, it’s historical nonsense – a fable with zero basis in reality.  It’s bad enough that I have  had the experience of intelligent and educated atheists repeating this story as an example of the Church holding back progress without bothering to check if it’s true.  What’s worse is that I’ve also experienced atheists who have been shown extensive, clear evidence that the medieval Church taught the earth was round and that the myth of medieval Flat Earth belief was invented by the novelist Washington Irving in 1828, and they have simply refused to believe that the myth could be wrong.

Neat historical fables such as the ones about Christians burning down the Great Library of Alexandria (they didn’t) or murdering Hypatia because of their hatred of her learning and science (ditto) are appealing parables.  Which means some atheists fight tooth and nail to preserve them even when confronted with clear evidence that they are pseudo historical fairy tales.  Fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who can be dogmatic about their myths.

One of the main reasons for studying history is to get a better understanding of why things today are as they are by grasping what has gone before.  But it only works with a good grasp of how we can know about the past, the methods of analysis used and the relevant material our understanding should be based on.  It also only works if we strive to put aside what we may like to be true along with any preconceptions (since they are often wrong) and look at the material objectively.  Atheists who attempt to use history in their arguments who don’t do these things can not only end up getting things badly wrong, but can also wind up looking as stupid or even as dogmatic as fundamentalists.  And that’s not a good look.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, (Norton, 2012) 368 pages
Verdict?: 2/5 Never let history get in the way of a good Pulitzer Prize

Back in 1931 a young Oxford don named Herbert Butterfield published a slim volume on historiography that almost no-one read and which virtually passed without review notice.  Butterfield's book, which at a mere 80 or so pages was really more of a longish essay, would probably have vanished without trace if, in 1949, he had not published Christianity and History; a book that became a surprise best-seller.  His publishers reprinted his earlier book, The Whig Interpretation of History in 1950 and it went on to become one of the most read theses on how history is studied of the last century or so.

The "Whig interpretation" of Butterfield's title was summed up in his essay as "studying the past for the sake of the present" as opposed to "trying to understand the past for the sake of the past" (Butterfield p. 13).  Butterfield criticised most of the English historians of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries for a blatant tendency toward "dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress".  Anything that historians like Macauley and Acton saw as moving toward things of which they approved (liberalism, Protestantism, democracy, industry, "progress") was judged as "good" and written of approvingly.  Anything that could be seen or painted as not doing so was judged as "bad" and its agents or proponents became the villains of the historian's story.  At the heart of the Whig interpretation was the historiographical fallacy of "Presentism": the idea that what we have now is (mostly) good and wise and intelligent and all of the past has been a stumbling and wandering path progressing towards our wonderful and oooh-so-right present.

This presentist perspective lent itself nicely to some other ideas many Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century historians (and many current popular history writers) rather liked.  The idea of history being propelled by a series of "revolutions" and "rebirths", where stagnant or retrograde tendencies are swept aside by a sudden wave of brilliant new developments was one.  And the "Great Man" was another - the idea of a single, titanic intellect or personality who, by his sheer brilliance, changes everything largely by being "before his time" and therefore a force dragging the stupid sluggards of the past toward the glorious, sunlit uplands of the present (eg Galileo, Newton, Darwin).

Butterfield elegantly critiqued these ideas, arguing that they don't actually illuminate history but, rather, completely distort it.  He wrote:

The total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully on the present - all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress, of which the Protestants and whigs have been the perennial allies while Catholics and tories have perpetually formed obstruction. (Butterfield, p. 11)

It was far better, he argued, to study the past as objectively as possible and to look at it for its own sake and on its own terms, without judging it against a measuring stick of how close it may be to things we happen to like about our present.  We should seek to understand the past, rather than to judge it.  We should try to find out what happened and why, rather than to divide it into good guys and bad guys according to a presentist calculus.  Doing so means that, say, the history of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century ceases to be one of the triumph of the good and wise reformers over the corrupt and wicked Catholics and becomes a more nuanced and careful analysis of how such differing views arose within the same social and religious milieu.  If we do this, Butterfield argues, "we will see Protestant and Catholic of the sixteenth century more like one another and more unlike ourselves than we have often cared to imagine" (p. 24)  And, by looking at them directly rather than through the distorting prism of Whig Fallacy and presentism, we will see them more clearly.

Much of the bad history that I've critiqued on this blog is a product of the Whig Fallacy.  Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind is a textbook example of how this old-fashioned, rather school-masterish approach still infests popular history writing and how publishers can be suckers for what is actually very bad history.  As the ever-perceptive Butterfield noted, "all history must tend to become more whig in proportion as it becomes abridged" (p. 6), so it's hardly surprising that while most scholarly works of history tend to avoid the Whig Fallacy these days, pop history tends towards it to an ever increasing degree.

"Those Terrible Middle Ages"and the "Glorious Renaissance"

Not surprisingly, the period of history that is a perpetual whipping boy for pop history writers of the Whig Fallacy persuasion is the Medieval Period.  For the Whiggish pop historian, the common misconceptions of this period as one of unrelenting barbarism, superstition, technological stagnation, scientific paralysis and religious oppression work superbly as a counterpoint to any parable about the march of progress or shiny narrative about a "Great Man" who, "ahead of his time", brought light to the world after centuries of darkness.  There have been recent efforts to try and correct these ideas and bring the results of the last century of scholarship on the Medieval period into the public consciousness.  James Hannam's God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Science has done a superb job of correcting ideas about Medieval science and bringing modern scholarshhip to a wider audience, despite wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who would like to cling to the outdated myths (and here we find Charles Freeman, once again).  The worthy essays in Grigsby and Harris' Misconceptions About the Middle Ages are generally very good, but they are aimed mainly at history undergraduates rather than a broader audience.  Régine Pernoud's Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths is aimed at a popular audience of sorts, though largely a well-educated and very French one and her references to French buildings and history might leave most average Anglophone readers more confused than enlightened.

It's not surprising that when Butterfield chooses an example of a period of history that is least well-served by the Whig interpretation, he picks the Middle Ages:

A caricature of [the Whig fallacy's] result is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority - a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion.  It is illustrated to perfection in the argument of a man denouncing Roman Catholicism at a street corner, who said "When the Pope ruled England, them was called the Dark Ages!" (Butterfield, pp. 11-12)

It's interesting but rather sad that, writing in 1931, Butterfield characterised this view as "still not quite eradicated", expressing a hope that soon it would be.  But while they may express it more eloquently than Butterfield's cockney street preacher, this view is far from "eradicated".  From the works of people like Freeman to those of Hitchens and Dawkins and across a great swathe of mass publication, Whiggish pop histories, this "popular view" is not just alive and well, it's rampant.

The problem with history, of course, is that it's sprawling, complex, messy and often obscure.  The historian's task is to try to impose some order on and extract some explanations from this roiling mess of events or, rather, references to them.  The danger here lies in doing so in a way that reduces history to a series of oversimplified fables - a danger exemplified by the Whig fallacy.  One fable that most of us absorbed, usually in childhood thanks to school teachers, was the pretty fable of "the Renaissance".  It tells of how the Greeks and Romans founded western civilisation and invented things which were good, like science and reason and realistic art and nice buildings.  But then the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe fell into the "Dark Ages" when everyone was ignorant and stupid and superstitious and dirty and feudal.  But luckily along came the glorious Renaissance, where Leonardo invented flying machines and paintings became realistic and therefore good again and everyone became much cleaner and more rational.

Of course, even as a kid, I could see some problems with this story.  As someone who was already coming to appreciate abstract expressionism and other non-realistic modern art, I wondered why realistic art was necessarily "good" and why its revival and development was therefore an "advancement".  I also knew enough about the Middle Ages to recognise the technical achievement that was Gothic architecture or to know that Medieval scribes were copying and studying Greek and Roman literature, particularly philosophy, centuries before the so-called "revival of ancient learning" in the Renaissance.

It was not until university that I came to understand that while the fable of the "glorious Renaissance" was not total crap, it was a weird distortion of history.  In fact, it was a perfect example of the Whig fallacy creating a moral fairy tale out of bits and pieces of historical and pseudo historical ideas.  The real eye-opener for me was reading Charles Homer Haskins' 1927 classic study The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and realising that the revival of ancient learning came not in the Sixteenth Century "Renaissance", but four centuries earlier, in the heart of the so-called "Dark Ages".  My medieval history lecturer, the inimitable Dr Rod Thomson, always got a chuckle when he dismissed the Sixteenth Century "Renaissance" as "you know - the other one; the one with the pretty pictures and the crackpot inventor."

Greenblatt's Central Thesis

Stephen Greenblatt's book has a 26 page "Selected Bibliography" but, oddly, it doesn't mention Charles Homer Haskins' seminal work on the revival of ancient knowledge in the Middle Ages.  Not surprisingly, a general reader could get through the whole of The Swerve and have absolutely no idea anyone between the fall of Rome and the "glorious Renaissance" ever rediscovered Greek and Roman learning at all, let alone get any inkling of the amazing story of the riches of philosophical, scientific and technical works that flooded into medieval Europe, revolutionising thinking, invigorating the schools and the new universities and laying the foundations of modern western thought.  Greenblatt is the John Cogan Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and his speciality is Renaissance literature.  It seems his interest in the Early Modern historical context of that literature has not left him with any time to study the Middle Ages, as that could be the only explanation for his abysmal and comically bad grasp of the earlier period.   To be blunt, this Harvard professor's grasp of medieval history is stunted at about high school level.  For Greenblatt, the Middle Ages was a period of monks hunched over manuscripts they never read, of Greek and Roman learning ignored or suppressed and, it would seem, a lot of flagellation.  Greenblatt seems rather obsessed with medieval flagellation.

The thesis of Greenblatt's book  - which won 2012's Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction it should be remembered - is tenuous to say the least.  He claims that the Roman philosopher Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, about whom we know very little) wrote a poem in the mid-First Century BC which was a summary of the cosmos from an Epicurean perspective - De rerum natura ("On the Nature of Things").  He claims this work was a brilliant philosophical synopsis that summarised a major and highly influential ancient school of thought - one that was defiantly atheistic and materialist, excluding gods and magic and presenting a very modern-sounding, almost scientific universe of atoms and material structures.  He then claims that this poem and its ideas were suppressed by Christianity and that almost all copies of De natura were destroyed.  He goes on to tell the story of how a Humanist scholar, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered a surviving manuscript of it in Germany in 1417 and how the return of this work to the west revolutionised thinking, inspired some of the greatest minds of the modern age (Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo Gallilei, Francis Bacon, Thomas Jefferson) and changed the world.

It's a grand and remarkable claim and one that many readers who are reasonably well-informed about these things would justifiably regard with a high degree of scepticism.  Since Greenblatt is clearly not an idiot, he is aware of this.  Which is why, a mere eleven pages into his book, having laid out these remarkable claims in grandiose style, he quietly undercuts them with this judicious but very meek little paragraph:

One poem by itself was certainly not responsible for an entire intellectual, moral and social transformation - no single work was, let alone one that for centuries could not be spoken about freely in public.  But this particular ancient book, suddenly returning to view, made a difference. (Greenblatt, p. 11)

Er, right.  It "made a difference".  Greenblatt's book is full of this kind of thing.  After pages and pages of making a point, often more by broad assertion, generalisation or even insinuation, he will slip in a brief "escape clause" sentence which shows that he knows what he is saying can be challenged or which even undermines what he has just presented completely.  But he does so very quietly and many or even most general readers would not notice or understand the import of these asides.  Certainly few of his reviewers did so.

It should be noted that I personally love De rerum natura and have read it several times.  While the Stoics are my favourite ancient school of philosophy, I'd say the Epicureans come a close second and that both are certainly, in many respects, far more accessible in their ideas and sentiments than the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy that has dominated western thought for most of the last 2400 years.  But my appreciation of the philosophical ideas of Epicurus and their eloquent expression in Lucretius' poem does not mean I won't notice when someone is overselling the significance and influence of both in the ancient world.

Reading Greenblatt, the general reader would get the impression that the Epicureanism that  Lucretius summarises was a dominant philosophical position in ancient Greece and Rome and that a large number of ancient Greeks and Romans were out and out atheists who denied the gods and saw the universe as nothing more than atoms in motion.  Of course, in his characteristic style, having given his impression Greenblatt gives one of his passive corrections.  "For many Romans at least, the gods had not ceased to be - even the Epicureans , sometimes reputed to be atheists thought the gods existed, though at a far remove from the affairs of mortals" (p. 71)  Exactly; though the word "many" in that sentence should be replaced with "virtually all".

Monks and Flagellations

Greenblatt's high school level grasp of history tells him that intellectual life in the Middle Ages was all about monks.  So he spends a long time early in his book telling us what he knows about medieval monks.  Monks, he tells us, did write books.  And he assures us (slightly grudgingly) that this "helped salvage the achievements of ancient thought" (p. 25)  But in Greenblatt's Whiggish history medeival scholars are the bad guys who didn't appreciate "ancient thought" and condemned Lucretius' masterpiece to obscurity, so he has to spend some time getting around a problem - how can he condemn the very people who preserved this ancient thought, including Lucretius' book, so that he can contrast them with the good guys in his fable, Poggio and the Renaissance humanists?  He does this by depicting monks (and to him all medieval scholars were monks and monks were the only medieval scholars) as unthinking drones who copied ancient works purely because their orders required them to spend part of the day labouring in the scriptorium.  But they didn't actually read what they copied and by no means was it ever discussed or debated.  Greenblatt assures us that intellectual curiosity was forbidden:

But the actual interest of the scribes in the books they copied (or their distaste for those books) was strictly irrelevant.  Indeed, insofar as the copying was a form of discipline - an exercise in humility and a willing embrace of pain - distaste or simple incomprehension might be preferable to engagement.  Curiosity was to be avoided at all costs. (Greenblatt, p. 41)

For anyone with more than a high school level grasp of medieval intellectual life, it's hard to know what part of this weird caricature is more ridiculous.  If Greenblatt had read anything on medieval thought at all, and to judge by his bibliography he hasn't, he would know that the idea they copied books purely as a physical discipline is ludicrous.  These were works of auctoritas - "authority" - and that included the works of ancient pagan writers.  They were not regarded with "distaste".  Even when the scholar may disagree with them, these scholars saw them as the "gold of the Egyptians": wisdom given to them by God since all wisdom, even pagan learning, ultimately came from God.  They may have mentally filtered out elements that they saw as contrary to their faith, but they believed, as Clement of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo had told them, that the Greek and Roman pagan thinkers had been given a special gift for rational analysis and that this was to be respected and studied.  Even the most basic undergraduate introduction to medieval thought would have explained all this to Greenblatt.  But he seems to have been too interested in presenting his childish cartoon about "monks".

His last point in the quote above is more evidence of his lack of understanding of the period he's working so hard to distort and then condemn.  There certainly were regular condemnations of curiositas amongst monks.  In his ignorance of the period and because of his distorting Whiggish prejudices, Greenblatt has decided this means "intellectual curiosity" and claims this means they may have copied the works he likes so much, but they can't have actually thought about them or discussed them as this was forbidden.  In fact, the word refers to curiosity about others, gossip and idle chatter - something probably common in small enclosed communities of celibate men - and had nothing to do with intellectual curiosity.  Greenblatt's weird cartoonish picture of the Middle Ages as 1000 years of monks copying works they did not read and could not discuss while occasionally flagellating themselves looks decidedly odd to anyone with a genuine grasp of the period.  Where is Aquinas in this odd picture?  Where is Albertus Magnus, William of Occam or Roger Bacon?  Where are the intricate debates of the medieval universities?  Where is the medieval practice of quodlibeta, where medieval students gathered for day-long disputations where anyone could challenge any master on any philosophical subject, however provocative, and where bright students earned their spurs in no-holds-barred intellectual debate?  In fact, where the hell are medieval universities in Greenblatt's book?  They get one mention, in a single paragraph, where they are dismissed as institutions entirely unworthy of his humanist Poggio (p. 134).

What does get a great many mentions, however, is medieval flagellation.  If the Epicurianism of De rerum was suppressed in the Middle Ages, according to Greenblatt, it's because the Middle Ages despised the pursuit of simple pleasures, as proscribed by Epicurus and his follower Lucretius, but instead embraced discipline through pain.  In loving detail he describes Saint Benedict mortifying his flesh by hurling himself into stinging nettles and happily catalogues medieval examples of religious penitential self-discipline:

... forms of corporal punishment - 'virgarum verbera' (hitting with rods), 'corporale supplicium' (bodily punishment), 'ictus' (blows), 'vapulatio' (cudgeling), 'disciplina' (whipping) and 'flagellatio' - were routinely inflicted on community members who broke the rules. (Greenblatt, p. 106)

 And they were.  But Greenblatt's pages of examples of this facet of medieval life, which seems very odd to us, pretend that this wasn't just a facet but was the whole jewel.  A reader with little knowledge of the period would think that this was what the medieval attitude to pleasure and pain was and that the whole of society for the entire period revelled in beatings and flagellations and the occasional roll in the nettles until Greenblatt's Poggio came along, rediscovered Lucretius and allowed us to have fun again.

But where in this caricature is Chaucer and Boccaccio?  Where is the rollicking bawdy of the Goliardic poems or riotous carnivals and festivals that marked the medieval cycle of the year?  Where is the pageantry of feasting and tournaments?  Where is Le Roman de la Rose and the whole, vast culture and literature of amor courtois? Yes, there was an ascetic tradition. but the whole reason medieval moralists had to keep banging on and on about it and the reason its practitioners had to keep rolling in the nettles is that they were surrounded by a culture that was sensuous, pleasure-seeking and indulging in more than a little rolling in the hay.  To paint the ascetics as the whole picture and ignore the world of sensuous pleasure they were retreating from and reacting against is, yet again, a bizarre distortion.

But it's precisely the sort of oversimplification, selective argument and studied ignorance that a Whiggish fable like Greenblatt's necessarily rests on.  The real Middle Ages simply do not fit in his story, so he just cuts out some cartoonish pictures from his high school history book and sticks them on a piece of cardboard with some simplistic commentary in coloured ink around them and hands it in to the teacher for a Pulitzer Prize.

The Imaginary "Suppression" of Lucretius

The middle of the book is actually a quite interesting account of the life and tumultuous career of Poggio Bracciolini, his rise in the Papal court with all of its intrigues and pitfalls, the fall of his patron Pope John XXIII after the Council of Constance and his subsequent finding of a manuscript of De rerum.  This part of the book was rather enjoyable and with a bit more work could perhaps have been a book in itself.  Maybe this was Greenblatt's original idea and he certainly seems to be on much firmer ground regarding the historical context of this part of the story, since it is not as riddled with howlers, distortions and selective evidence as the rest of his tale.

Unfortunately he is determined to stick to his fable of how Lucretius' poem somehow "changed the world" or explains "how the Renaissance began".  He quotes from Poggio uncritically, without thinking for a moment that the humanists of this period may have had some heavy biases of their own.  Poggio was scornful of the monasteries in which he and his fellow enthusiasts found manuscripts of the ancient poetry and plays they held in such esteem, as is the uncritical Greenblatt.  The oddity here is one that even the most casual reader has to notice - if the medieval Church was so keen to suppress Lucretius and other pagan writers, why were there any manuscripts for Poggio and Co. to find?  The manuscript he found in 1417, probably in the great Benedictine library at Fulda, was itself the work of a medieval monk.  So if, as Greenblatt regularly asserts (though never with any substantiation) the Church had spent 1000 years trying to "suppress" or even "destroy" Lucretius, why was there a copy in Fulda at all?

As mentioned earlier, very attentive readers will notice Greenblatt slips in brief snippets that indicate, however weakly, that he is not actually telling us the true story.  After continually insisting that the Church "suppressed" or actively "destroyed" all copies of this subversive poem, he has to admit that not only was Poggio's copy made by a medieval monk, but there were other copies as well:

Looking back from this distance, with Lucretius' masterpiece securely in hand, modern scholars have been able to identify a network of early medieval signs of the text's existence - a citation here, a catalogue entry there ... (Greenblatt, p. 53)

 In other words, we know that there were copies of this supposedly "suppressed" work in circulation.  And we also know this because medieval copies have survived, as Greenblatt also has to admit later:

Two ninth century manuscripts of 'On the Nature of Things', unknown to Poggio or any of his humanist contemporaries, did make it through the almost impenetrable barrier of time.  (Greenblatt, p. 204)

Indeed.  In fact we have these two manuscripts - Voss. Lat. F. 30 and Voss. Lat. Q. 94 - as well as two further fragments of other copies.  And stemmatic analysis of these four manuscripts shows that they in turn are derived from at least three earlier copies that have not survived.  And there were other copies as well.  From references to and quotes from the poem we know that there were also copies at the monastery of Reichenau, the library at St. Gall and Rabnanus Maurus also quoted Lucretius from his archbishopric at Mainz.  Medieval library catalogues also mention copies at Bobbio in the Ninth Century, Lobbes and Corbie in the Twelfth Century and Sigebert of Gembloux mentions it in a gloss in the Eleventh.*

Given the patchy nature of our evidence for any medieval book, we know these references, fragments and handful of copies represent the tip of a largely vanished iceberg - if we have evidence of these copies, there were many other copies that have vanished without trace.  What this evidence shows is that Lucretius' work was not "suppressed" and was definitely not actively "destroyed" by the medieval Church.  These references and fragments are about typical of the evidence for many ancient Greek and Roman works.  This was not a work that greatly interested medieval scholars, but it interested them enough to preserve it about as much as they preserved many such (to them) second tier works.  After all, Virgil praised Lucretius and the medieval scholars loved Virgil, so they seem to have figured Lucretius' work was worth copying.  And Greenblatt's hero found his poem thanks to their diligence.  Even after the poem became more widely known thanks to Poggio and the printing press, the evidence for the supposed "suppression" of this work is rather pathetic.  At one point Greenblatt is reduced to noting that De rerum was suggested for inclusion on the Index of Prohibited Books but ... wasn't.

Over and over again, a reader who ignores Greenblatt's rhetoric, hints, assertions and occasional histrionics and actually pays attention to the details of the evidence notices that it does not support what he is trying to claim.  He just wants a neat Whiggish fable with a happy ending.

 The Usual Suspects

Greenblatt's happy ending is a bit of a muddle and again, even positive reviewers have noted that he stretches his thesis past breaking point in the final section.  The last third of the book is a rather tenuous attempt at hinting that Lucretius' poem was deeply significant and influential on all kinds of interesting people.  Unfortunately this consists of little more than "X read Lucretius and X was great therefore the poem is important".  Worse, he often resorts to "Y may have read it" or worse still "Z was influenced by the general tenor of the period in which people were reading it".  This really is weak stuff. 

While meandering from Leonardo (there is no evidence he read it) to Newton (he wrote something that may have alluded to it) to Jefferson (he, at least, was influenced by it), we get a roll call of the usual suspects - Hypatia, Bruno and Galileo.  The Great Library of Alexandria and the destruction of the Serapeum are mentioned, though Greenblatt is wary enough not to claim the destruction of the latter was somehow the end of the former.  "Whether on this occasion the mayhem reached the (Serapeum's) library is unknown" he writes cautiously, ignoring the fact that there is no evidence there still was any library there at all when the derelict temple was destroyed.  But this does not matter to him anyway: "libraries, museums and schools are fragile institutions, they cannot long survive violent assaults" (p. 91), he assures us.  Then, despite the fact that he has not actually given any examples of any "violent assaults" on any "libraries, museums and schools" in this period whatsoever, he concludes solemnly, "a way of life was dying".

He is less careful when telling the story of Hypatia.  Ignoring the fact that no contemporary source makes any mention of her murder being due to her learning, he tells us this was the problem and that she was accused of being "a witch, practicing black magic" - something only added to the story centuries later.  Not content with that, he repeats Gibbon's error that she was flayed alive and then declares her death "effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life" (p. 93).  I imagine this would have been news to Aedisia, another female, pagan, Neo-Platonic philosopher who flourished in Alexandria a few years after Hypatia.  Or to Hierocles, Asclepius of Tralles, Olympiodorus the Younger, Ammonius Hermiae or Hermias; all renowned scholars who worked in the city after Hypatia.*  But Greenblatt does not want to let details and facts get in the way of his Whig fable.

So he presents Giordano Bruno as "a brilliant scientific mind", showing that he has never read a word of this kooky mystic's Hermetic nonsense.  And his account of Galileo is riddled with errors, including the nonsensical idea that the Jesuits, staunch champions of their famous pupil Galileo, may have actually initiated the move against him.  Redondi's debunked claim that the Galileo is affair was "really" over atomism and the doctrine of the Eucharist is also trotted out uncritically (though this is another claim he quietly undercuts in an endnote).

It's one thing that a Harvard professor could have actually written a work of such blatant bunk.  What is weird is that even most of the positive reviewers noted that his thesis feels contrived and that the whole work is patchy, disjoined and the ending is weak.  And this is from the people who are not clued up enough to know where Greenblatt has fiddled with history to make it fit his fable.  Yet most of these reviews were gushing and this rather crappy book won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction?  I am at a loss to explain this, other than to note that Whiggish fables make for nice, neat stories.  But non-fiction is meant to be something else.  This book, to be blunt, is smoke and mirrors.

* Many thanks to Baerista, whose excellent review of Greenblatt's book over at Renaissance Mathematicus was published back in May and who made most of the same points as I have.  Given the length of time I took writing this review, I used some of his research and am grateful for his summary of the manuscript history of De rerum - that saved me some time.

Addenda: As noted in a comment below, Professor John Montfasani has written a highly critical review of Greenblatt's book in Reviews in History, with a rather weak and very brief response by Greenblatt.  Jim Hinch has gone into much more detail in the Los Angeles Review of Books in a long and suitably scathing piece: "Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong - And Why it Matters". JJ Cohen on the In the Middle blog notes, rather sadly, that Greenblatt winning the Pulitzer is bad enough, but the MLA has also awarded him the James Russell Lowell Prize for this book.  Criticisms lamenting Greenblatt's distortions can also be found on Text Technologies, on Medieval Meets World, on In Romaunce as We Rede and on The Bookfish.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Bottton

Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion, (Hamish Hamilton/Pantheon, 2012) 320 pages
Verdict?: 4/5 Insightful, eloquent thought-provoking and provocative

If you want to annoy some atheists, go to an atheist online forum and say something nice about religion.  It won't take much.  You don't even have to be very complimentary - just say or even imply that religion is not actually wholly and completely bad, stupid and wrong and that it may even occasionally get some things right or even be useful in some way.  Actually, you don't even have to do that much.  You only need to find where atheists are trying to make historical claims to criticise a religion and note that some of them have got  a few key facts wrong.  Doing any of these things is the online discussion equivalent of sauntering up to a busy hornets nest with a hefty stick and engaging in some vigorous whacking.  The result is about as noisy, angry, aggressive and, I'm sorry to say, usually as brainless.

Actually, I'm being a little unfair to many (not all, by any means) of my fellow atheists.  Sometimes their reactions to religion are far less vociferous.  Mellow even. For example, I recall one discussion where a practitioner of some kind of "Celtic" variety of the modern neo-pagan religion called "Wicca" wandered onto one atheist forum to talk about her religion.  Instead of being met with demands to justify her beliefs, ridicule of her rituals or references to her belief in "woo", she was greeted with a few questions about her faith, how she came to it and so on, and then a general attitude of "well, each to their own".  This was a marked contrast to the way a similar post by a Christian or Muslim was usually received.  And the attitude to her faith was also very different to that toward other modern, constructed religions - like Scientology - even though "Wicca" is only a decade or so older than Hubbard's "church".

And atheists can also recognise the value of at least some religious ideas and practices.  Many Buddhist ideas are well-received by rationalists and meditation, stripped of any of its "woo" or supernatural associations, is recognised as a beneficial practice that non-religious types can and do utilise.  So religion is seen as being able to get some things right occasionally.

But the hornets start to get agitated when the religion in question is Christianity or Islam or (to a lesser extent) Judaism.  Being something of a contrarian and a bit of a stickler for actually being rational rather than just shouting about it, I have on occasion been known to note that Christianity and Christians actually haven't always been absolutely wrong about everything.  And the hornets have been much displeased.

So the British populariser of philosophy, Alain de Botton, seems to have realised that he would need to don a hornet-proof suit when he released his latest best-selling book Religion for Atheists - even the title is a tongue-in-cheek provocation. He seems to have gone into the process of writing it well aware that his objective was going to annoy people, stating early in the book "The strategy outlined in this book will, of course, annoy partisans on both sides of the debate." (p. 17)  He was substantially correct, though he seems to have annoyed one side more than the other.

A fairly typical response by a Christian is that of Rev. Richard Coles, an Anglican vicar (and, oddly, former member of the 1980s pop duo the Communards) who now presents on BBC Radio 4 and writes slightly anodyne newspaper op eds.  In a review for the Guardian, Coles has generally nice things to say about de Botton's book, describing it as a welcome change from New Atheist screeds that "leave their readers with the impression that affiliation to a church is equivalent to, say, participating actively in the Spanish Inquisition".  But he ends with a brief assurance for the faithful that, despite his kind words, real religion is superior to what de Botton proposes as an alternative.  "[B]ut Christianity does not (just) offer consolation, it offers salvation. That is why people built cathedrals, and in other dispensations enormous mosques and complexes of temples: they sought, and seek, salvation, and for this God‑givenness seems to me essential."  Other Christian reviewers were less warm, but few went further than to smugly claim that by embracing any of religion's trappings, de Botton was at least partially admitting that religion is actually "right" (which doesn't follow at all).

The hornets of the New Atheist world, however, were in full buzz when the book emerged.  What got them buzzing particularly vociferously was the idea, trumpeted in the media, of de Botton building a "Temple of Atheism" in central London.  Reporting on other media outlets' reporting, the Huffington Post declared:

Author Alain de Botton announced plans to build an Atheist temple in the U.K., reports DeZeen magazine. A collaboration with Tom Greenall Architects, the structure will be built in the City of London. Dedicated to the idea of perspective, the black tower will scale 46 meters (150 ft), with each centimeter honoring earth's age of 4.6 billion years, notes Wired.

 A "Temple of Atheism"?!  This was enough to give the New Atheist hornets near-terminal conniptions.   Biologist, blogger and New Atheist, Jerry Coyne, promptly declared de Botton "an embarrassment to atheists".  Asked by the Guardian to comment, Richard Dawkins spluttered "Atheists don’t need temples ... I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on."  And across the New Atheist online commentariat, the scorn was whipped to a fever pitch.  A thread on the "Rational Skepticism" forum gives us a flavour of the commentary:

"This guy is clearly a monumental prick .... a (literally) monumentally stupid idea .... what an arse .... this guy is an anti-atheist .... this guy's several sandwiches short of a picnic .... he could be a theist infitrator (sic) ... sent by the Pope .... this dickhead .... this is a fifth column job to make atheists look stupid etc"

You get the idea.  Of course, what almost none of these "rational skeptics" bothered to do was actually check the damn story.  They should have noticed, after all, that despite claiming de Botton had "announced" this plan, none of the news reports bothered to link to or cite precisely where and when de Botton had made this supposed "announcement".  As it turns out, this is because he didn't - the whole story was a media beat-up invented from a press release about the publication of de Botton's book.  In the book he does say that buildings constructed and designed purely as places for contemplation would be a great idea and one worth stealing from religions, but as he explained in the wake of the media fire-storm, he never "announced" a plan to build one at all. And the whole "atheist temple" concept was invented by some journalist.

Carrying off the Gold of the Egyptians

So what exactly does this "arse', "dickhead", "prick", "anti-atheist" and possible Pontifical infiltrator have to say in the book that few to none of the so-called "skeptics" have bothered to read?  Put simply, de Botton makes a highly humanist argument.  Religions, he argues, are fundamentally human institutions.  If we accept that no "God" or gods exist (a proviso he makes perfectly clear on the book's very first page), it remains valuable to look at religions as purely human constructs and see if there is anything about them that has worth when the supernatural underpinnings are removed.  This is very much in the spirit of my favourite humanist motto "Homo sum.  Humani nil a me alienum puto" (I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me.) - a sentiment few of the New Atheists seem ready to embrace, since they seem determined to regard everything religious, even if only by association, as utterly and irrevocably alien to them.  De Botton claims that by jettisoning many of the uses, practices and symbols associated with religion wholesale we have "allowed religion to claim as its exclusive dominion areas of experience which should rightly belong to all mankind - and which we should feel unembarrassed about reappropriating for the secular realm." (p. 15)

As he notes, religions do this all the time, to each other.  Early Christianity merrily stole from, re-badged or absorbed all kinds of earlier, pre-Christian rituals, festivals and ideas; partly as a way of easing the conversion of a new territory but partly because these things were so closely woven into the fabric of the societies in question because, at a fundamentally psychological, sociological and human level, they worked.

De Botton argues that religions are not sterile exercises in learning and reinforcing abstract ideas of the supernatural or repetitions of and commentaries on theology.  They are made up of communities of human beings and, fundamentally and even primarily, function on that level.  My elderly mother, a devout Catholic all her life, is most certainly a believer and accepts the doctrines and theology of her faith wholeheartedly and to the best of her understanding - she would never claim to be a Biblical scholar or theologian.  But if you talk to her about her life in the Church what you hear about is people and community: who has had a baby, who has died, who is ill, who got married and how the community in her parish has responded to all this (via celebrations, hospital visits, ceremonies, gifts, support etc).  Religions may be focused on God or gods or supernatural ideas, but primarily they are institutions about people and for people in a very fundamental way.  Believe me - you can listen to my Mum talk about her church life for hours and never hear God or Jesus get so much as a mention.

So de Botton argues that given that many religions have been around for a very long time, clearly they must be getting at least some of this "people" stuff right.  Therefore it's worth looking at how religions fulfil human needs and see if these are worth adopting into a non-religious life.

His first section looks at "Community", which as the example of my mother shows, religions can sustain very effectively.  The media is constantly reminding us of how lonely much of modern existence can be.  According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, single-person households are currently the fast growing demographic in Australia; a statistic mirrored in most of the developed world.  Loneliness seems to be something of an epidemic in western societies and our lives seem structured in such a way that a sense of community is hard achieve.  I live in a major city and in a large building of mainly one bedroom apartments.  I usually smile and nod at my neighbours if I see them in the lift or the building's gym, but I only know one of them by name (and that's because he's a fairly famous TV presenter).  I travel to work each day by train and regularly see the same commuters on my line, but I have never considered speaking to any of them, apart from the attractive female ones.  And I'm quite sure that if I turned to one of them between Central Station and Green Square, sincerely said "Peace be with you" and shook their hand or kissed them they would call for Transit Security.

Yet every Sunday, across the world, millions of people turn to perfect strangers and do just that.  It's called "the Sign of Peace" and it marks a key point in the Catholic Mass.  De Botton holds up the Catholic Mass as an example of how religion has developed structures and processes that establish and reinforce community in ways that are often missing in the secular world:

A Catholic Mass is not, to be sure, the ideal habitat for an atheist.  Much of the dialogue is either offensive to reason or simply incomprehensible.  It goes on for a long time and rarely overrides a temptation to fall asleep.  Nevertheless, the ceremony is replete with elements which subtly strengthen congregants' bonds of affection, and which atheists would do well to study and on occasion learn to appropriate for use in the secular realm. (p. 30)

He notes the ways the Mass does this.  Everyone leaves their normal lives and environments and makes an effort to come together in a communal place set aside solely for this purpose.  Churches are designed to make this easy to do, but they are also generally egalitarian in their design - social status, wealth and accomplishments in the world outside generally mean nothing once you are through the doors.  The ritual also emphasises community and oneness.  As de Botton notes "if there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and (even more meaningfully) of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us .... closer to our need for one another." (p. 35)  By breaking down our egoism and acknowledging shared fears and afflictions, the Mass by its very structure brings us together in a way that a sports team or hobby group simply can't.

The origins of the Mass lie in early Christian "agape feasts" - communal meals where believers came together to worship and to eat.  There is something hard to beat about the sense of community that comes from sharing a meal, so de Botton paints a picture of a hypothetical "agape restaurant", where anyone can share a meal with strangers, where status and rank are irrelevant, where family and friendship groups are spaced apart so everyone meets new people and where it's expected that we approach and address strangers and that they can do the same.  If that doesn't sound very feasible without the common bond of a religious belief, de Botton's enterprise - the School of Life - is already holding communal meals at restaurants in London where strangers are invited to attend and meet new friends.  Some of these have themes, with dinner speakers followed by conversations at the communal tables.  Others have a "conversation menu" on each table from which the diners can choose.  Not everyone's cup of tea perhaps but by all reports, these have been a great success .  So maybe de Botton is onto something.

Education, Wisdom and learning how to live

The rest of de Botton's book examines other parts of human life and looks at how religious structures, rituals and ideas have supported them and at what we can learn from the for our own lives, religious or otherwise.  I particularly liked his insights into exactly how badly our educational institutions prepare us for life or show us how to live.  Modern educational institutions often trumpet noble sentiments about the purpose and value of education, though they usually do so in the introduction to a university prospectus or a Vice-Chancellor's address to freshmen at the beginning of a new year.  After that, lofty ideas of the university as a home "for the best that has been said and thought in the world" are rapidly forgotten:

Graduation speeches stereotypically identify liberal education with the acquisition of wisdom and self-knowledge, but these goals have little bearing on the day-to-day methods of departmental instruction and examination.  To judge by what they do rather than what they airily declaim, universities are in the business of turning out a majority of tightly focused professionals (lawyers, physicians, engineers) and a minority of culturally well-informed but ethically confused arts graduates aptly panicked about how they might remuneratively occupy the rest of their lives. (p.105)

As de Botton has pointed out in some of his interviews about this book, a student who turned up at university and asked to be shown how to live a good life would be regarded as a bit of a nut, yet this is precisely what a liberal education, as envisaged by J.S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, was supposed to give students.  The getting of wisdom and learning how to live a good life were the central focuses of all education in the ancient world and is the underpinning of the entire western educational tradition.  Plato's academy and Epicurus' garden school didn't produce any lawyers, accountants or marketers, but they didn't do too bad a job of showing people how to live fulfilling lives and of turning out some of the best thinkers in human history.

De Botton contrasts modern secular education with the religious educational ethos, which "believes us to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable" (p. 112)  Secular education orders, delineates and passes on discrete blocks of fact - what modernism is, the basis for the law of torts, how to structure a below-the-line direct marketing campaign etc.  Despite its lofty claims, it concentrates virtually not at all on passing on wisdom, let alone guidance on how to live as the complex, emotional, interconnected, confused and often (when at university at least) inexperienced and immature humans we are.  Religious education, by contrast, helps that part of us "which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension" (p. 113)  De Botton would win no friends in the New Atheist hornet's nest by doing so, but he suggests we could refer to this idea by the Christian word - the soul.

Yet he sees merit in the religious idea that we are in our essence not just ignorant, but childlike and confused.  We need lessons, parables and sermons that will not just give us mere information but more importantly give us guidance, wisdom, insight and comfort.  There doesn't have to be anything supernatural about this, but it strikes him as odd that "it would be a shocking affront to university etiquette to ask what Tess of the d'Ubervilles might usefully teach us about love, or to suggest that the novels of Henry James might be read with an eye to discover parables about staying honest in a slippery mercantile world." (p. 117)  But surely education should serve us by teaching us these things rather than merely passing on a vast quantity of facts, information and concepts.  Secular education could learn from religious education's desire to educate our immature "souls" rather than just have us rote-learn a whole lot of ... well, "stuff".

Why modern art can be (literally) crap

Last month I visited my former home state of Tasmania and spent a bit over a week doing everything I could to forget about work and my career and just relax.  Tasmania's combination of scenery, wilderness, fine food and wine (and local single malt whisky!) makes this pretty easy to do, though the part of my trip that made me totally step out of my daily grind was the day I spent at MONA.  This amazing "Museum of Old and New Art" was built by local billionaire eccentric David Walsh to house his personal art collection, indulge his love of radical architecture and give Tasmania a "subversive adult Disneyland".  The result - a vast, labyrinthine, Bond villain-style underground lair that looks like it was designed by M.C. Escher and decorated by David Lynch - is so amazing it has become the state's most popular tourist attraction and features on many "must see" lists for visitors from all over the world.

What I liked about MONA was how far it is from most art museums.  There are no guides, no tours and no little plaques to tell you about the art.  Visitors are given an iPhone-style touch screen console and then set loose to wander the darkened underground maze wherever they want.  Most get lost pretty quickly, but that's part of the idea.  The consoles detect what art works are closest to you and then you can get as much or as little information on the piece as you want via a series of menus (including one entitled "Art Wank" with a graffiti penis as an icon).  The resulting experience is so strange, immersive and so abstracted from the world outside that on emerging back into the sunshine I noticed most of my fellow visitors came out in silence and with a look on their faces best described as "contemplative".

Perhaps de Botton would approve of MONA, at least in some respects, but he clearly does not approve of how modern museums and galleries present art.  "While exposing us to objects of genuine importance, they nevertheless seem incapable of adequately linking these to the needs of our souls". (p. 209)  The rather clinical way that galleries and museums present great art of the past, which are often religious objects taken from their original contexts of ritual, parable, symbolism and significance and stuck in a white-walled room with a plaque carrying dates and bald information about styles and schools, robs them of most of their meaning.  He describes the resulting reactions of most gallery visitors as resembling that of "the disappointed participants in a failed seance". (p. 215)

It gets worse when the art is from our own period and created largely to be presented in clinical white-walled rooms.  Here we are often even more at a loss as to what the hell the art is even meant to mean, let alone what it can tell us about ourselves: "the only certainty is neither the artist nor the museum is going to help us: wall texts are kept to a minimum; catalogues are enigmatically written". (p. 215)  In his TED lecture which encapsulates the thesis of the book (which I highly recommend - it's well worth watching in full) de Botton admits that his main reaction to most modern art galleries is bafflement, a comment which gets a knowing laugh of sheepish agreement from the audience.  The experience at MONA was sometimes baffling, but usually only when it was meant to be.  On the whole, this museum did go out of its way to help me understand the art in question via the touch-screen console, which usually gave me access to audio interviews with the artist.  Though when I stood in front of one piece - the odd and pungent-smelling "Cloaca" by Wim Delvoye, a series of glass vats and tubes that simulates human digestion and produces a daily quantity of shit - I did have to ponder whether at least some modern art is literally crap.

De Botton thinks we could learn from religious art and make it and its museums and galleries remind us of what matters:

It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls.  It is a mechanism whereby our memories are forcibly jogged about what we have to love and to be grateful for, as well as what we should draw away from and be afraid of. (p. 215)

In 1512 Matthias Grünewald was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the monastery of Isenheim.  The resulting Crucifixion is one of the greatest pieces of art ever produced by the Northern Renaissance and an eloquent if horrific study of human cruelty, suffering, sorrow and pain.  There is absolutely no doubt what this painting is about and even someone with no knowledge of the Christian story of Jesus could recognise the human emotions and ideas embodied in it.  What is notable is why it was produced.  Isenheim was a monastery devoted to tending to the sick, especially those afflicted by ergotism - a painful and terrifying disease that causes seizures, wild hallucinations, gangrene and usually madness and death.  It was customary for patients admitted to the monastery's infirmary to first be taken to the chapel to meditate on a painting that said "pain is human" loud and clear.  No bafflement there.

Religious art has generally had this didactic element, made accessible via a shared language of symbols and indicators.  Someone not versed in that didactic language would understand the human emotion of this painting, but would probably not recognise John the Baptist, Mary, Magdalene and John the Apostle as the other figures around the cross.  Many would object to that level of didacticism in secular art but something like de Botton's idea of a gallery arranged according to emotions and ideas, with a "Gallery of Suffering" or a "Gallery of Self-Knowledge" may lead to people emerging from an art museum looking enlightened or at least contemplative rather than baffled and disappointed.  The looks on the faces of my fellow visitors to MONA indicated to me that David Walsh at least is getting it partially right.

Getting Away from it All

As de Botton's previous book The Architecture of Happiness  argued, the spaces we live in have an effect on how we feel. So it's no surprise he notes the way religious architecture has always functioned to help people to remove themselves from the mundane, look at themselves differently, inspire them to see themselves from a wider, vaster, eternal, more cosmic perspective. In his section on how some buildings can, just by being in them, help us to see our place in things and to literally put things into perspective, he imagined a "Temple to Perspective" - a narrow light well shaft where the visitor enters to look up toward a skylight or opening high above, with each centimetre of its height representing a million years in the age of the universe (p. 262).  A good place to sit and think, I'd say.  It was this rather elegant idea that got caricatured into the "De Botton plans to build a Temple of Atheism" story that bothered the New Atheist hornets so much.

But there's more to getting away from it all than having well-designed spaces for peaceful contemplation.  Religions have been providing structured processes for meditation, self-examination, reassessment, penitence and simple stillness for centuries.  Even my atheist colleagues have to acknowledge the way that Buddhism can and does give us insights into these things.  But religious retreats of all kinds have long given us an opportunity to step away from our lives, re-examine things, relax, think and - probably best of all - shut the hell up for a while.  Holidays at luxury golf resorts or visits to a day spa don't quite do the same thing.  If I reassess my life's priorities while relaxing by a fire in a mountain resort or getting a really good massage, it's by chance, not because my holiday had a structured point where I was invited to do so.

Taking time once a year to go on a personal, non-religious retreat with similar structures and objectives is certainly something non-believers can do.  So is making a time each day for meditation or contemplation and quiet, without any associated references to deities or the supernatural.  Some of de Botton's other suggestions are less practical and several seem to be mainly tongue in cheek, but all of them give food for thought.

And I have to say that this is the first book on atheism I have read in years that has actually done that - made me think.  Dawkins' The God Delusion would perhaps have made me think when I was 16, but is so sophomoric I felt its main purpose is to reinforce some pretty simple ideas, even if they are ones I generally agree with.  Hitchens' God Is Not Great is far more eloquent and a much smarter book, but its main purpose is to highlight certain religious stupidities and to stoke rage against various religious obscenities.  As such, it's another exercise in taking a 12-gauge shotgun to a barrel full of large salmon and calling yourself a fisherman.  But Alain de Botton's book not only made me think, it actually made me reassess several things in my life.  I have now made an effort to seek out more community with those around me.  I'm getting back into the habit of meditating daily (well, mostly).  And I'm seriously considering taking myself off to the Blue Mountains next month for three days of retreat, self-analysis and contemplation.

Meanwhile, New Atheist bloviator and blowhard, PZ Myers, has fired off a string of typically moronic insults at de Botton, while at the same time showing that he hasn't actually bothered to read the book or understand what de Botton is even saying.  He describes de Botton as " the atheist who has been straining to crawl up religion’s asshole and take its place" and brays:

Our culture is currently divided between three groups: Atheists, who think the truth matters, and want our problems addressed with real-world solutions; theists, who want a god or supernatural powers to solve our problems with magic; and fence-sitting parasites like de Botton who see a personal opportunity to pander to the believers for their own gain, who will ride the conflict while pretending to be aloof from it, and win popularity with the masses by trying to tell everyone they’re all right.

  His eloquent response to a mild observation de Botton made about New Atheists like Myers was "fuck you very much".  It's certainly interesting to turn from de Botton's genuinely thought-provoking and stimulating analysis written in elegant and measured prose to Myers' gems with titles like "the League of Nitwits has farted in my general direction".  De Botton's book has done what all good books should do, added to my understanding and shown me the world in a new light.  In fact, it's also made me change the way I live.  No-one will ever say that of PZ Myers.