Four years later, Mumford published The Culture of Cities, which looked at the history of the city.94 Beginning around 1,000 AD, when Mumford said the city revived after the Dark Ages, he defined cities according to the main collective dramas they played out. In mediaeval cities this was the market, the tournament, and the church’s processionals. In the Baroque city, the court offered the best drama, and in the industrial city the station, the street, and the political meeting were what counted.95 Mumford also distinguished six phases of city life: eopolis – village communities, domestication of animals; polis – an association of villages or blood groups, for defence; metropolis – the crucial change to a ‘mother city,’ with a surplus of regional products; megalopolis – beginning of decline, mechanisation, standardisation (a megalopolis was characterised by the lack of drama, replaced instead by routine); tyrannopolis – overexpansion, decadence, decline in numbers; nekropolis – war, famine, disease. The two last stages were predictions, but Mumford thought that megalopolis had already been reached in several cases, for example, New York.96 Mumford believed that the answer to the crisis of the alienation and poverty that characterised cities was to develop the regions (although he also considered garden cities). Here too Mumford was prescient; the last chapter of his book is almost wholly devoted to environmental and what we would now call ‘quality of life’ issues.
Despite his focus on the environment and the effects of technology on the quality of life, Mumford was not anti-science in the way that some others were. Even at the time that people like Freud and Mead and Johnson thought science could provide answers to society’s ills, sceptics thought that every advantage of science was matched by a corresponding disadvantage. That was what gave it such a terrible beauty. Also, religion may have taken a battering at the hands of science, but it had not gone away, not by a long chalk. No doubt chronic unemployment had something to do with the scepticism toward science as a palliative, but as the 1930s progressed, religion reasserted itself.
The most extraordinary element in this reaffirmation of religion was a series of lectures given by Ernest William Barnes, the bishop of Birmingham, and published in 1933 as Scientific Theory and Religion.97 Few readers, picking up a book by a bishop, would expect the first 400 pages to consist of a detailed discussion of advanced mathematics. Yet Ernest Barnes was a highly numerate scientist, a D.Sc., and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In his book he wanted to show that as a theologian he knew a great deal about modern science and was not afraid of it. He discussed all the recent developments in physics as well as the latest advances in geology, evolution, and mathematics. It was a tour de force. Barnes without exception endorsed the advances in particle physics, relativity, space-time, the new notions of an expanding universe, the findings of geology about the age of the earth and the record of life in the rocks. He was convinced of evolution.98 At the same time, he dismissed various forms of mysticism and the paranormal. (Incidentally, despite its panoramic survey of recent twentieth-century science, it made not a single mention of Freud.)
So what would the bishop say about God? His argument was that there is a Universal Mind which inhabits all matter in the universe, and that the purpose of the universe is to evolve consciousness and conscience in order to produce goodness and, above all, beauty. His view on immortality was that there is no such thing as a ‘soul,’ and that the goodness and beauty that people create lives on after them. But he did also say that he personally believed in an afterlife.99
A copy of the book was sent to another eminent theologian, William Ralph Inge, dean of St Paul’s and the man who had quoted Rupert Brooke’s poems during his sermon on Easter Sunday, 1915. When he received Barnes’s book, Inge was already correcting the proofs of a book of his own, God and the Astronomers, which was published later that same year, 1933. It too had started life as a series of lectures, in Inge’s case the Warburg lectures, which he gave at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel in London.100 As well as being dean of St Paul’s, Inge was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Hertford College, Oxford, and well known as a lecturer, writer, and intellectual. His provocative views on contemporary topics had already been published as Outspoken Essays. God and the Astronomers tackled the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, and evolution. For Inge these fields were linked fundamentally because each was about time. The idea of a universe being created, expanding, contracting, and disappearing in a final Götterdämmerung, as he put it, was clearly worrying, since it raised the idea that there is no such thing as eternity.
The chief effect of evolution was to demote ideas in the past, arguing that more modern ideas had ‘evolved’ beyond them.101 Inge therefore deliberately made widespread use of the ancient philosophers – mainly Greek – to support his arguments. His aim was to show how brilliant their minds were, in comparison to those of the present. He made several references to ‘dysgenic’ trends, to suggest that evolution did not always produce advances. And he confessed that his arguments were intuitive, insisting (much as the poets were doing in Weimar Germany) that the very existence of intuition was a mark of the divine, to which science had no real answer.102 Like Henri Bergson, Inge acknowledged the existence of the élan vital and of an ‘impassable gulf between scientific knowledge and God’s existence. Like Barnes, he took as evidence for God’s existence the very concept of goodness and the mystical experiences of rapture that, as often as not, took place during prayer, which he said could not be explained by any science. He thought that civilisation, with its pressures and pace, was distancing us from such experiences. He hinted that God’s existence might be similar to the phenomenon that scientists call ‘emergent property,’ the classic example here being molecules of water, which are not themselves liquid in the way that water is. In other words, this was a scientific metaphor to support the argument for God.103 Inge, unlike Barnes, was unable to accept recent scientific advances: ‘It is a strange notion that God reveals himself more clearly and more directly in inanimate nature than in the human mind or heart…. My conclusion is that the fate of the material universe is not a vital question for religion.’104 Like Barnes, Inge made no reference to Freud.
A year after Barnes and Inge had their say, Bertrand Russell published a short but pithy book, Religion and Science. Russell’s relationship with religion was complicated.105 He had a number of friends who were religious (in particular Lady Ottoline Morrell), and he was both envious of and irritated by them. In a letter written in January 1912 he had said, ‘What we know is that things come into our lives sometimes which are so immeasurably better than the things of everyday, that it seems as though they were sent from another world and could not come out of ourselves.’106 But later he added, ‘Yet I have another vision … in this vision, sorrow is the ultimate truth … we draw our breath in pain … thought is the gateway to despair.’107