We would be wise to locate ideas of perfection in another world altogether: Jan Brueghel the Younger, Paradise, c. 1620. (illustration credit 6.1)
4.
It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships. We should cease to view the pessimism of religions as belonging to them alone, or as indelibly dependent on hopes for salvation. We should strive to adopt the acute perspective of those who believe in paradise, even as we live out our own lives abiding by the fundamental atheistic precept that this is the one world we will ever know.
5.
The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.
Christian and Jewish marriages, while not always jovial, are at least spared the second order of suffering which arises from the mistaken impression that it is somehow wrong or unjust to be malcontent. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan.
Notwithstanding their practical approach, these religions do recognize our desire to adore passionately. They know of our need to believe in others, to worship and serve them and to find in them a perfection which eludes us in ourselves. They simply insist that these objects of adoration should always be divine rather than human. Therefore they assign us eternally youthful, attractive and virtuous deities to shepherd us through life, while reminding us on a daily basis that human beings are comparatively humdrum and flawed creations worthy of forgiveness and patience, a detail which is apt to elude our notice in the heat of marital squabbling. ‘Why can’t you be more perfect?’ is the incensed question that lurks beneath a majority of secular arguments. In their effort to keep us from hurling our curdled dreams at one another, the faiths have the good sense to provide us with angels to worship and lovers to tolerate.
The faiths have the good sense to provide us with angels to worship and lovers to tolerate. (illustration credit 6.2)
6.
A pessimistic worldview does not have to entail a life stripped of joy. Pessimists can have a far greater capacity for appreciation than their opposite numbers, for they never expect things to turn out well and so may be amazed by the modest successes which occasionally break across their darkened horizons. Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, generally fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise.
Accepting that existence is inherently frustrating, that we are forever hemmed in by atrocious realities, can give us the impetus to say ‘Thank you’ a little more often. It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude: we no longer offer up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. On a superficial level, we might suppose that this is because there is no one to say ‘Thank you’ to. But at base it seems more a matter of ambition and expectation. Many of those blessings for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted. Is there really any need, we wonder, to carve out a moment of gratitude in honour of a sunset or an apricot? Are there not loftier goals towards which we might be aiming?
Seeking to induct us in a contrary attitude of humility, the Jewish Prayer Book of the United Congregation commends a specific prayer to be said on the occasion of ‘eating a seasonal fruit for the first time in the year’, and another to mark the acquisition of ‘a new garment of significant value’. It even includes a prayer intended to prompt admiration for the complexity of the human digestive system:
‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who formed man in wisdom and created in him many orifices and cavities.
It is revealed and known before the throne of Your glory that were one of them to be ruptured or blocked, it would be impossible to survive and stand before You.
Blessed are You, Lord, Healer of all flesh, who does wondrous deeds.’
7.
Religions have wisely insisted that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always slowly dying.
They have also, of course, in many cases believed in the possibility that a deity might be able to help us. We see this combination of despair and hope with particular clarity at Jerusalem’s Western or Wailing Wall, where since the second half of the sixteenth century, Jews have gathered to air their griefs and to beg their creator for help. At the base of the wall, they have written down their sorrows on small pieces of paper, inserted these into gaps among the stones and hoped that God would be moved to mercy by their pain.
The Wailing Wall, Jerusalem. (illustration credit 6.3)
Remove God from this equation and what do we have left? Bellowing humans calling out in vain to an empty sky. This is tragic and yet, if we are to rescue a shred of comfort from the bleakness, at least the dejected are to be found weeping together. Only too often, in bed late at night, we panic at sorrows which seem devilishly unique to us. No such illusions are possible at the Wailing Wall. It is clear that the whole race is forlorn. The Wall marks out a locus where the anguish we otherwise bear silently within us can be revealed for what it truly is: merely a thimbleful of sorrow in an ocean of suffering. It serves to reassure us of the ubiquity of disaster and definitively corrects the smiling assumptions unwittingly made by contemporary culture.
Among the advertisements for jeans and computers high above the streets of our cities, we should place electronic versions of Wailing Walls that would anonymously broadcast our inner woes, and thereby give us all a clearer sense of what is involved in being alive. Such walls would be particularly consoling were they able to afford us a glimpse of what in Jerusalem is reserved only for the eyes of God: the particulars of the misfortunes of others, the details of the broken hearts, dashed ambitions, sexual fiascos, jealous stalemates and ruinous bankruptcies that normally remain hidden behind our impassive fronts. Such walls would lend us reassuring proofs that others too were worrying about their absurdity, counting how few summers they had left, crying over someone who abandoned them a decade ago and dynamiting their chances of success through idiocy and impatience. There would be no resolutions on offer in these venues, no end to suffering, only a basic — and yet infinitely comforting — public acknowledgement that we are none of us alone in the extent of our troubles and our lamentations.