What do you believe?
Christopher Booker
A few weeks ago, Patrick Marnham contributed an article to these columns entitled 'What Do Christians Believe?'. He poured robust scorn on the present apparent state of disarray among Christians as to precisely what they do believe. He asserted that Christianity had once put forward a whole range of 'impossible' propositions — the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection and so forth — to which it has become increasingly difficult for those who still call themselves Christians to give literal assent. And in general he reflected the widespread view that the chief factor in the decline of Christian belief in the past few centuries has been the subjecting of Christian doctrines to an entirely new kind of testing, for their literal, historical or scientific truth. If something is not literally true, runs the assumption, then it cannot be of value and must be discarded.
Now, as I read Mr Marnham's article, I found myself wondering just how rigorously this principle really is applied in the modern world. Perhaps an even more interesting question today than 'What Do Christians Believe?' is 'What Does Everyone Else Believe?'. For although Marnham modestly suggests that the old Christian certainties about the nature of man and existence have given way to 'systematised uncertainty', it cannot be denied that the world is still full of people expressing the most dogmatic beliefs about everything under the sun. How rigorously do these people examine the basis of their certainties? Let us just consider two small examples which might give us cause to doubt the proposition that, in this hardheaded, rationalistic age, only those things which can be shown to be literally true have any validity.
Last Saturday, in an article in the Guardian about the showing on West Germany of the TV series Holocaust, James Fenton claimed that 'it was probably only through such a medium that the extermination of the Jews could become a reality for a large proportion of the viewers' (my italics). Now the one thing which no't even the most fervent defenders of Holocaust have ever claimed is that it was factually accurate in detail. It has been exhaustively shown how the series not only 'fictionalised' all sorts of things which did happen, but also included all sorts of things (e.g. how the Final Solution policy came to be adopted) which were simply made up by the scriptwriters. Even Fenton himself gave one small instance, of how the scene showing the burning down of a wooden synagogue in a field in Poland was based, if it was based on anything historical at all, on the burning down of a church in France. In this sense, Holocaust could no more be described as literally or historically true than Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yet many people, including Fenton, have been perfectly happy to claim that this conveyed the 'reality' of what happened in Hitler's Europe. In other words, they accepted that a thing may convey 'reality' in some important way, without being literally true.
My second, quite different and rather more important example arose from a recent conversation with the poet Christopher Logue, who was expressing admiration for the BBC's series on Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. Out of curiosity, I asked him whether viewers might have been left at the end with the impression that Darwin's theory of natural selection was still generally accepted as valid. 'Of course,' Logue replied, 'does anyone question it any longer?'. It had clearly never even remotely impinged on him that even Darwin himself had virtually been forced to abandon natural selection as an explanation for the evolutionary process — let alone that, over the past century, the theory has been so utterly discredited as illogical, irrational and unscientific that it would take an act of sheer superstitious faith to continue to uphold it. And yet Logue is by no means alone in his irrational faith. Two weeks ago, when David Attenborough launched his mammoth television series Life on Earth, he began by trotting out the theory of natural selection precisely as though it was, as we say, 'gospel truth', which had never been doubted or questioned for a moment.
Now, before the Spectator is deluged with letters from enraged Old Believers, let me just say that I intend to return to this extremely revealing instance of our modern propensity to superstition next week. But what I believe it demonstrates (and one could pick countless othe examples) is the way in which, far from being the hardheaded rationalists they like to suppose themselves, most people nowadays have their heads stuffed with all sorts of assumptions about the nature of the world, constituting their 'beliefs', which are no more based on 'literal, factual truth' than the legend of St Ursula and her Eleven Thousand Virgins. Despite their professions of 'scepticism', 'rationality' and 'open-mindedness', they are no more prepared to subject the fundamental basis of their beliefs to rigorous scrutiny than would have been the most benighted mediaeval peasant — usually because they are not even remotely aware of what those foundations are. The one thing one can say with absolute certainty is that they have not come by their beliefs through any process of conscious choice — which is why one must look else where for the real reasons why people come to hold the beliefs about the nature of the world that they do.
Just before Christmas, I wrote an article here, under the title 'Christmas 1978 AD', in which I argued that one of the most fundamental and universal of human needs was the need for 'myth'. I claimed, among other things, that the reason why Christ was transformed over the centuries into the most important symbolic figure in the history of mankind was not because he was a historical figure or the author of a few memorable parables and moral homilies, but precisely because he became the centre of a 'myth', a figure of world-transcending stature through whose story and imagined presence thousands of millions of people had found a framework and sense of meaning for their lives.
My insistence that Christ was a 'myth' deeply incensed at least one Christian reader, Mrs Caroline Ackroyd, who wrote an indignant letter, resting her case on the definition of a myth as something that is 'entirely fictitious'. Now, I know that this is a common enough usage of the term 'myth' nowadays (one supported indeed by the OED). But it might have puzzled Mrs Ackroyd more than it did that I was obviously not using it in that sense, and indeed it is not a definition which in any way allows for a great many of the more interesting implications of the term 'myth', nor helps us in any scientific way whatever.
It is, for instance, one of the curious ironies of history, which I have never seen remarked on, that when the great body of Greek myths began to lose their symbolic hold over the lives of men in the six centuries before Christ, one of the more influential points made to diminish their importance was not that they were just 'fictions', but that they need not be taken account of any longer because they might be literally true. Around 300 BC, Euhemerus claimed that the heroes and heroines of Greek myth, even perhaps the gods and goddesses themselves, were just inflated recollections of true historical figures who had lived in the long-distant past. In other words, because the stories relating to Perseus, Aphrodite and Co. did have a historical basis, they should no longer be regarded as having 'mythic' importance. It was in some ways precisely the opposite process to that which accompanied the decline of the Christian 'myth' two thousand years later when one of the most powerful factors influencing that decline was the growing suspicion that a great many elements in the Christian story (e.g. the Creation, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Birth) might not be historically true.
It is undeniably the case that in our civilisation over the past few hundred years we have come to place unprecedented faith in 'scientific', empirically verifiable knowledge as the only knowledge which has true validity. But it is my thesis, firstly, that we have in the process been indulging in a gigantic act of self-deception, in that we do in fact accept and believe in all sorts of things which are not scientifically true: and secondly, that in derisively losing sight of the crucial part that 'myth' plays in men's lives, far from abandoning myth, we have simply taken on a whole lot of new pseudo-myths, without being aware of the fact. And over the coming weeks, I would like to subject some of the more popular of those pseudo-myths of our time to closer examination.
As I argued in my Chrstmas article, the function of a myth is to provide a framework for people's view of themselves and the nature of existence. There are certain crucial questions, for instance, to which the Christian myth offered answers. How did the world come to be? How did evil come into the world — i.e. why do human beings appear to make such a mess of things? What can be done about this mess? What should I do about this mess? What is my real nature and identity, as an individual organism? What does the future hold, both for me and the world? To all these questions, Christianity gave its adherents answers. And over the next few weeks, it will be my thesi§ that, with the decline in force of those Christian answers, not only have the questions remained just as urgent as ever before, but that we have evolved new myths to answer them which, firstly, are no more based on 'scientific provability' than anything Christianity ever taught— indeed are in many cases quite demonstrably absurd, even though they are implicitly believed by enormous numbers ofpeople; and, secondly, that these are infinitely less effective than the old Christian answers in terms of their impact on people's inner lives, and in many cases deeply damaging.
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