In the inaugural number of the new magazine Standpoint, Alain de Botton tries to persuade us of the need for a 'secular religion'. This is how he begins:
The most boring question to ask about religion is whether or not the whole thing is "true".Well, what different people find interesting and boring varies widely; but, whether boring or interesting, the question of the truth of religion is at least an important one, and this to people answering it in opposite ways. Relative to it, the observations which follow from someone who finds the question boring are remarkable for their vapidity. De Botton commends to us thinkers who...:
... recognised that religion was not just a matter of belief, but that it sat upon a welter of concerns that touched on architecture, art, nature, marriage, death, ritual, time - and that by getting rid of God, one would also be dispensing with a whole raft of very useful, if often peculiar and sometimes retrograde, notions that had held societies together since the beginning of time.Try to get some precise meaning out of that. Religion sits upon concerns that touch on a number of other (listed) things. It's not clear why the double step is needed here and de Botton can't just go straight from religion to architecture, art and the rest. But one possible reason is that he can't quite make the claim which would enable him to say clearly that architecture, art and the rest need a religious basis, because the things he lists plainly do not. So he has to say something looser. But then it's not obvious what it is. Would a community of atheists have no art or architecture, be unable to marry or grieve, to experience wonder at nature or regret and reconciliation over the passage of time? He can't quite say any of this, because it would be, at best, unproven and, at worst, false. So you get the mouthful above which confusedly posits a need we all have for religion. Many people do have this need; others, however, don't. And it is the latter whom de Botton needs to convince but is unlikely to with the aid merely of beliefs sitting on concerns that touch on some other things.
When you then come to his actual proposals, what you get is the following: 'lots of new buildings akin to churches, temples and cathedrals'; 'works of art, landscape gardening and architecture'; an art that would 'improve' us; the offering of 'lessons in pessimism'; temples and feast days to disappointment; and 'teach[ing] people about how to live, about good (or not so good) ways of imagining the human condition'.
These proposals strike me as either empty or alarming. Empty when you note that much of what de Botton lists requires nothing called, or like, a religion. You want architecture, art, ethical doctrines, pessimism; there's plenty of it anyway, both religious and non-religious, and consequently it can go without religion as well as with it. Alarming if de Botton believes that what he's calling for has to be of the right kind and therefore (somehow) laid down - something, that is to say, very like a state religion in the worst sense. No thanks. We've already had those, secular and otherwise, and we know we can do without them.
