Mass Observers Making Meaning

Religion, Spirituality and Atheism in Late 20th-Century Britain

James Hinton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350274518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

What do people believe about death and the afterlife? How do they negotiate the relationship between science and religion? How do they understand apparently paranormal events? What do they make of sensations of awe, wonder or exceptional moments of sudden enlightenment? The volunteer mass observers responded to such questions with a freshness, openness and honesty which compels attention. Using this rich material, Mass Observers Making Meaning captures the extraordinarily diverse landscape of belief and disbelief to be found in Britain in the late 20th-century, at a time when Christianity was in steep decline, alternative spiritualities were flourishing and atheism was growing. Divided as they were about the ultimate nature of reality, the mass observers were united in their readiness to puzzle about life's larger questions. Listening empathetically to their accounts, James Hinton – himself a convinced atheist – seeks to bring divergent ways of finding meaning in human life into dialogue with one another, and argues that we can move beyond the cacophony of conflicting beliefs to an understanding of our common need and ability to seek meaning in our lives.

1 Introduction

I

It is a characteristic, perhaps a defining characteristic, of human brings that they seek meaning in life. Beyond our extraordinary capacity to engage in practical ways with the world about us, we have a hankering for the metaphysical.¹ Which is not to say that we are all aspiring philosophers. Immersed in the everyday routines of getting and spending, of work and play and family life, most of us most of the time appear indifferent to any larger meaning to our existence. Adolescents may agonize about existential meaning, and old people may review their lives in search of it, but by and large adult life, cluttered with the practical and the mundane, manages without metaphysics. Nevertheless the need for meaning is there in the background, as much a matter of feeling as of thought. A sense that life is meaningful, despite our inability to articulate what the meaning might be, is essential to psychological well-being. More or less consciously we work at meaning all the time, rehearsing it through the stories we tell ourselves about who we are – as individual personalities, as members of particular social groups, as human beings. We are meaning-making animals, ‘suspended in webs of significance we ourselves have spun’.² These processes of making meaning are never finished, the webs are never complete, but it is in the spinning that we find ourselves. When meaning is absent we feel disoriented, at odds with our selves and the world, dissatisfied, unfulfilled. To the extent that it is present we feel together, whole, united within ourselves and with the world.

Sometimes the sense of meaning erupts joyfully into consciousness: in moments of intense emotion evoked by childbirth, by sexual passion, by natural or artistic beauty, by sudden revelation or enlightenment. On such occasions there is no need to put words to the meaning: it just is. At other times, shocked out of routine by some perceived injustice, some personal betrayal or defeat, by the death of a loved one or a catastrophic public event we are provoked to metaphysical speculation: Why am I here? Does life have a purpose? How should I live? But what we seek has less to do with philosophical coherence than it does with groping for words that reverberate with intuitions fashioned in obscure regions beneath consciousness.

When the mass observers write about their attitudes towards the big existential questions we can do no more than guess at the feelings underpinning their attitudes. The sense of meaning we find in our lives can never be reduced to a series of propositions. The feeling that life is meaningful is something which normally hovers on the fringe of consciousness, a product of largely unconscious processes.³ You can reason about your beliefs, but you cannot reason your way to a sense of meaning. The sensation comes first, and the reasoning limps along behind. Wittgenstein remarked that religious believers offer proofs of God’s existence in order to give themselves intellectual legitimacy, but ‘they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs’.⁴ Much the same could be said of the faith that some non-believers place in the sovereignty of human reason. This is a study, not of the sense of meaning itself, but of the varieties of ways in which people in late 20th-century Britain, more or less, puzzled about the big existential questions, tried to find language adequate to express sensations that were, in the final analysis, inexpressible, ineffable.

For the best part of two millennia, in the West, Christianity had appeared to offer more or less coherent answers to the puzzles of existence. If human life was embedded in a cosmos created for humankind, meaning was everywhere and everything had a spiritual dimension. However impossible it might be to understand God’s purpose for humankind, faith could connect you to the divine, bathing your life, with all its ups and downs, in his care, and love. Although you might choose to disregard the metaphysical in everyday life,⁵ the supernatural was all around, and God was there when and if you needed him. Today faith in a personal God is no longer in the air that we breathe. We live in a universe disenchanted by the findings of modern science, and in social orders legitimized by notions of human rights rather than divine sanction. In our secular age, the languages in which we seek to express our sense of meaning have diversified and become more problematic.

II

When the mass observers were writing in the late 20th century, Christianity was in rapid retreat. Between the 1950s and the 1970s the proportion of British adults professing belief in a ‘personal God’ fell from 43 per cent to 32 per cent. Thereafter it stabilized, before falling again to around 25 per cent during the first decade of the 21st century.⁶ Between the 1980s and 2017 the proportion of the population defining themselves as belonging to no religion increased from a third to a half.⁷ As belief in God declined, people looked elsewhere for a language in which to express their sense of meaning. But contemporary Western secular culture is built on Christian foundations, and traces of its origin are to be found everywhere. At the turn of the century most of those who defined themselves as belonging to no religion continued to embrace belief in the existence of supernatural forces. Throughout the late 20th century belief in the existence of some kind of transcendent ‘spirit or life force’, as distinct from belief in a personal God, held steady at around 40 per cent.⁸ The diffusion of alternative, countercultural, ideas of spirituality since the 1960s helped to sustain such beliefs, and to deepen their influence on everyday life. Increasingly in the late 20th century, ‘religion’ came to be seen as a matter of dogma and ritual imposed on the individual from without by the authority of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. ‘Spirituality’, by contrast, described an inward journey, a search for the deepest meaning and significance of life authenticated not by any external authority but by each individual in their own fashion. Such journeys might involve Christian residues, ideas borrowed from esoteric and occult traditions, Eastern religions (especially Buddhism), Native American and shamanistic beliefs, or a reimagined pagan past. Alongside ongoing processes of secularization, what Britain had been experiencing since the cultural upheavals of the 1960s was, in the words of one historian, ‘an enormous increase in the range of beliefs and world-views accessible to the majority of the population … As Christianity lost a large part of its privileged position, the options in matters of belief … were open to a degree that they had not been for centuries’.⁹ This openness is apparent in the variety of ways in which the mass observers sought to articulate their feelings about life’s larger existential questions.

Alongside hankerings for the transcendent, many subscribed to belief in the paranormal. In the 1990s, opinion polls suggest that around a quarter of the British population took horoscopes seriously, a third believed that dreams could predict the future and fully half subscribed to the view that clairvoyants could do so.¹⁰ Unlike religion, belief in the paranormal was not in decline. According to Gallup polls, the proportion of people believing in ghosts more than tripled between 1950 and 1995, from 10 per cent to over 31 per cent, and polling in the first decade of the new century showed ghost belief higher still, approaching 40 per cent of the population.¹¹ Between 1975 and 1998 the proportion of people claiming to have actually seen a ghost tripled from 5 per cent to 15 per cent, and many others, to judge from the testimony of the mass observers, could cite such experiences reported by people they knew and trusted. What this growth reflects is probably not any increase in the extent to which people sensed the presence of the dead – let alone an actual proliferation of ghosts – but broader shifts in the culture which made it more acceptable to ascribe one’s experience to supernatural forces. ‘Historically’, wrote Gillian Bennett at the turn of the century, ‘we seem to be dealing with a major discursive shift since the mid-century: one which tends to legitimate supernatural beliefs, while religious belief is falling away.’¹²

If such a shift did occur, it may be reflected in the mass observers’ testimony, most of which was written in the 1990s. Since the millennium, however, while belief in ghosts remains widespread, the appeal of a non-religious spirituality appears to have substantially weakened. A 2013 survey suggested that the number of believers in a spirituality without a personal God, which had held steady at around 40 per cent throughout the late 20th century, had halved; and amongst those who continued to believe only a minority affirmed the existence of ‘a universal Spirit, life-force or energy’, while most subscribed to the vaguer view that there is ‘something there’.¹³ Meanwhile atheism advanced. The number of people telling pollsters that they did not believe in God increased from 10 per cent in the 1960s to 27 per cent in the 1990s. By 2013, 35 per cent denied the existence of ‘God or some higher power’, or thought it improbable.¹⁴ Only a minority of these people, however, described themselves as ‘convinced atheists’ – 8 per cent of the population, according to a survey conducted for the BBC in 2000, growing to 19 per cent according to a YouGov survey in 2015.¹⁵ But the appeal of the New Atheism promoted in the early years of the 21st century by Richard Dawkins and others remained limited.¹⁶

III

As belief in a personal God declined, people looked elsewhere for answers to the existential questions that religion had traditionally sought to answer. Optimists of the European Enlightenment, believing human beings to be both rational and virtuous by nature, imagined a future in which humanity, freed from irrational superstition, took conscious control of its own destiny. However frequently disappointed, the ideas of progress and of humanity’s capacity for rational collective action remain central to the modern secular imagination, not least when it comes to tackling the crisis of climate change. Modernity, however, was haunted by far darker visions. Because human beings no longer held a central place in a world objectified by science, the meaning of human existence became obscure. If, as the French biologist Jacques Monod wrote, humankind is ‘alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance’, where was meaning to be found?¹⁷ Some religious writers recognize the ‘heroism of unbelief … facing a disenchanted universe with courage and lucidity’.¹⁸ A stoic acceptance that we are no more than a cosmic accident ‘merits the deepest respect and, in fact, constitutes one of the most impressive attitudes of which man is capable’.¹⁹ But few could embrace the implacable logic of Bertrand Russell’s insistence that it was ‘only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair’ that ‘the soul’s habitation’ could ‘henceforth be safely built’.²⁰ More commonly, the disenchantment of the world led to nausea in face of the meaninglessness of merely contingent things.²¹ The most influential picture of a disenchanted world was provided by Weber’s account of a post-religious modernity in which individuals found themselves locked in an ‘iron cage’ of technology, instrumental rationality and bureaucratic regulation.²² Kafka supplied the fictional apotheosis of this vision.²³

Powerful though they are, neither the optimistic nor the pessimistic accounts of the consequences of religious decline tell the whole story. While an Enlightenment belief in the intrinsic rationality of human beings is difficult to sustain, it is manifestly not the case that non-religious people in modern societies live with a permanent crisis of meaninglessness.²⁴ There are sources of meaning operating independently of either religion or rationalism.

The processes by which we construct meaning are largely unconscious. Our deepest beliefs, acquired by inheritance as we find our feet in the world though childhood and adolescence, are resistant to change. Meaning, wrote William James, belongs to intuitions that ‘come from a deeper level of [our] nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits’:

Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.²⁵

As reasoners, we are drawn to evidence that confirms our beliefs, preferring rationalization to the rigours of attempted refutation.²⁶ The slow, patient, scientific work of analysis and empirical testing which underpins the technological basis of our culture has little impact on our beliefs or the meanings we attribute to our lives. ‘Science’, wrote Durkheim, ‘is fragmentary and incomplete; it advances but slowly and is never finished; but life cannot wait.’ Unable to tolerate such incompleteness ‘the theories which are destined to make men live and act are … obliged to pass science and complete it prematurely’.²⁷ The human brain was not evolved to tolerate uncertainty, to accept contingency or to understand statistical probability.²⁸ We are constantly trying to make sense of experience, and where science or practical reason fail we fill the gap with explanations drawn from the cultures we inhabit.

Durkheim’s characterization of religion as a ‘premature completion’ of science implied the positivist assumption that, in the long term, science would eventually come to hold sway over the whole of human understanding. But science can do little to answer the human need for meaning. It is in sociality that we spin the webs of significance that sustain us, linking our sense of who we are to something larger than ourselves. Our beliefs and our values are shaped by our membership of a family, a class, a nation and the multitude of other identities available in a pluralistic society. To the extent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Belief and disbelief
• 3 Death and afterwards
• 4 Religion and science
• 5 Uses of the paranormal
• 6 Moments out of time
• 7 A pagan priestess
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix The supernatural: What do you believe?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Mass Observers
• Copyright Page