Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (9 page)

i. What We Get Taught

1.
A busy high street in north London. In a neighbourhood studded with Cypriot bakeries, Jamaican hairdressers and Bengali takeaways, stands the campus of one of Britain's newest universities. It is dominated by a twelve-storey asymmetrical steel tower which houses, along a series of corridors painted a vivid purple and yellow, the lecture theatres and seminar rooms of the Department of the Humanities.

Across the university, 200,000 undergraduates are enrolled on 400 different degree programmes. This particular department was inaugurated just a few months ago by a minister for education and a cousin of the Queen, in a ceremony now commemorated on an engraved granite block embedded in a wall near the toilets.

‘A home for “
The best that has been said and thought in the world
” ', reads the plaque, borrowing
Matthew Arnold's famous definition of culture. The quote must have struck a chord with the university, for it reappears in the undergraduate admissions handbook and in a mural by the drinks dispenser in the basement cafeteria.

There are few things that secular society believes in as fervently as education. Since the
Enlightenment, education – from primary level through to university – has been presented as the most effective answer to a range of society's gravest ills; the conduit to fashioning a civilized, prosperous and rational citizenry.

A look at the degree courses offered by the new university reveals that over half are intended to equip undergraduates with practical skills, the sort required for successful careers in mercantile, technological societies: courses in chemistry, business, microbiology, law, marketing and public health.

But the grander claims made on behalf of education, the sort one reads of in prospectuses or hears about in graduation ceremonies, tend to imply that colleges and universities are more than mere factories for turning out technocrats and industrialists. The suggestion is that they have a yet higher task to fulfil: they may turn us into better, wiser and happier people.

As
John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ‘The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated
human beings
.' Or, to go back to
Matthew Arnold, a proper cultural education should inspire in us ‘a love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery'. At its most ambitious, he added, it should engender nothing less than the ‘noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it'.

2.
What unites such ambitious and beguiling claims is their passion – and their vagueness. It is seldom clear how education could turn students towards generosity and truth and away from sin and error, though it is typically hard to do anything other than passively lend one's assent to this inspiring notion, given its familiarity and its sheer beauty.

Nevertheless, it would be no injustice to examine the high-flown rhetoric in the light of certain realities on the ground, as revealed by an ordinary Monday afternoon in the Faculty of the Humanities in the modern university in north London.

The choice of department is not coincidental, for the transformative and lyrical claims made on behalf of education have almost always been connected to the humanities rather than endocrinology or biostatistics. It is the study of philosophy, history, art, the classics, languages and literature that has been thought to yield the most complex, subtle and therapeutic dimensions of the educational experience.

In a corner classroom on the seventh floor, a group of second-year history students are following a lecture about agricultural reform in eighteenth-century France. The argument made by their professor, who has spent twenty years researching the subject, is that the cause of declining crop yields between 1742 and 1798 had less to do with bad harvests than with the relatively low price of agricultural land, which encouraged landlords to invest their money in trade rather than farming.

On the floor below, in the classics department, fifteen students are comparing the use of natural imagery in the works of the Roman poets Horace and Petronius. The professor is pointing out that while Horace identifies nature with lawlessness and decay, Petronius, in many ways the more pessimistic of the two poets, reveres it for precisely the opposite qualities. Perhaps because the air ventilation system has broken down and the windows have jammed shut, the atmosphere is a little sluggish. Few students seem to be following the argument with the intent the professor might have hoped for when he was awarded his PhD in Oxford twenty years ago (‘Patterns of Meta-narrative in Euripides'
Ion
').

The application of the university's academics to their tasks is intense and moving. And yet it is hard to see how the content of their courses and the direction of their examination questions bear any significant relationship to Arnold's and Mill's ideals. Whatever rhetoric may be rehearsed in its prospectuses, the modern university appears to have precious little interest in teaching its students any emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it.

The prerequisites for a BA in philosophy, for example, are limited to a familiarity with the central topics of
metaphysics (substance, individuation, universals) and the completion of a thesis on concepts of intentionality in Quine, Frege or Putnam. An equivalent degree in English
literature will be awarded to those who can successfully tackle
The Waste Land
on allegorical and anagogic levels and trace the influence of
Seneca's dramatic theories on the development of Jacobean theatre.

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.

We have implicitly charged our higher-education system with a dual and possibly contradictory mission: to teach us how to make a living and to teach us how to live. And we have left the second of these two aims recklessly vague and unattended.

3.
Who cares? Why should we be worrying about the shortcomings of university education in a book ostensibly concerned with religion?

The reasons start to become clear when we consider the relationship between the decline in the teaching of scripture and the rise in the teaching of culture. When religious belief began to fracture in Europe in the early nineteenth century, anguished questions were raised about how, in the absence of a Christian framework, people would manage to find meaning, understand themselves, behave in a moral fashion, forgive their fellow humans and confront their own mortality. And in answer, it was proposed by an influential faction that cultural works might henceforth be consulted in place of the biblical texts. Culture could replace scripture.

The hope was that culture might be no less effective than religion (which was understood to mean Christianity) in its ability to guide, humanize and console. Histories, paintings, philosophical ideas and fictional narratives could all be mined to yield lessons not far removed in their ethical tenor and emotional impact from those taught by the
Bible. One would be able to have meaning unburdened by superstition. The maxims of
Marcus Aurelius, the poetry of Boccaccio, the operas of Wagner and the paintings of Turner could be secular society's new sacraments.

On the basis of such notions, whole subject areas which had never before been included in formal education began to enter the curricula of universities in Europe and the United States.
Literature, previously dismissed as being worthy of study only by adolescent girls and convalescents, was recognized as a serious subject fit for analysis within Western universities during the second half of the nineteenth century. The newfound prestige of novels and poems was based on the realization that these forms, much like the
Gospels, could deliver complex moral messages embedded within emotionally charged narratives, and thereby prompt affective identification and self-examination. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1922,
George Gordon, Merton Professor of Literature, emphasized the scale of the task that had fallen to his field: ‘England is sick, and … English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature now has a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.'

4.
Claims that culture could stand in for scripture – that
Middlemarch
could take up the responsibilities previously handled by the
Psalms, or the essays of Schopenhauer satisfy needs once catered for by
St Augustine's
City of God –
still have a way of sounding eccentric or insane in their combination of impiety and ambition.