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By Terry Eagleton
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This is an extract taken from a speech given by Terry Eagleton at the Theos annual lecture in October 2016.
What Nietzsche was the first to see was not only that God was dead on his feet, but that it was the stout bourgeois himself, not some bunch of long-haired leftie atheists, who had done him in. It was the inherently rationalist, pragmatist, utilitarian logic of the marketplace that had rendered such high-sounding notions implausible—which is to say, in an arresting irony, that the material base of middle-class society was busy undermining its own ideological superstructure. The faithlessness of advanced capitalism is built into its routine practices, rather than in the first place a question of the skepticism of its individual citizens. The market would continue to behave faithlessly even if every one of its participants were a born-again evangelical. The stout bourgeois is a true believer in his church or in the bosom of his family yet a rank agnostic in his counting house, and it was he who was putting himself ideologically out of business.
God was dead, but though many did not believe in him anymore, they needed to convince themselves that they did…It was necessary to pretend that God was still alive, keep him on a life-support machine, not least since he seemed to provide the underpinnings of bourgeois morality, which in turn formed one of the foundations of middle-class political power…Though the economy may be a rank atheist, the state which stands guard over it needs, so far at least, to be a true believer—if not in theological terms then in metaphysical ones. And the two can't help entering into a certain embarrassing conflict with one another.
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Nietzsche's own solution to this contradiction was hair-raisingly radical. If the metaphysical superstructure no longer works, if you keep subverting it by your own profane activity, then accept that you don't need it anymore and just chuck it away. Accept that God is dead and seize advantage of his absence to manufacture your own values in the manner of the Übermensch. It was far too radical a proposal for his time, when grand narratives of one kind or another were still in order, but it became more and more feasible as capitalism evolved into its advanced or postmodern phase. In fact, postmodernity might be described, a little rashly to be sure, as the first thoroughly atheist civilization, abandoning not only foundations, grand narratives, transcendental signifiers, absolute values and the like but even in a certain sense subjectivity itself, at least of the kind of depth where religious faith might germinate.
And what was the next enormous irony to happen along at just that point? Two aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center. And a new, full-bloodedly metaphysical grand narrative, that of the conflict between advanced capitalism and a certain reading of Islam, was launched with a fanfare, at just the point where the end-of-history merchants in the West, giddy with triumphalistic fantasies inspired by the West's victory in the Cold War, had declared all that tedious stuff to be over and done with. Once the Cold War had been won, the West, or so some of its apologists considered, no longer stood in need of ardent convictions, fundamental truths, grand narratives and sizeable doctrinal systems. And this was convenient, since they didn't fit well at all into the post-ideological climate of advanced capitalism. It's all very well for American politicians to talk about God, the Family, This Great Nation of Ours and Our Brave Men and Women in Uniform (the U.S. is ideologically exceptionalist in this respect), but you can't really get away with it in the more cynical, hardboiled milieu of Paris or London, where people will simply stare at their feet and wait for it to stop, as a friend of mine does whenever Schoenberg comes on the radio.
Anyway, the irony was that no sooner had a thoroughly atheistic culture arrived on the scene, one which was no longer anxiously in search of this or that placeholder for God, than the deity himself was suddenly back on the agenda with a vengeance. Not, however, this time on the side of civilization, not a suitably blue-blazered, short-haired, white-collar, golf-playing God, but a God who had shifted over to the side of so-called barbarism, a wrathful, alien, brown-skinned deity. The Almighty, it appears, was not safely nailed down in his coffin after all. He had simply changed address, migrating to the hills of Montana and the souks of the Arab world. And, despite his premature obituary notice, his fan club is steadily growing, not least in the evangelising of Latin America.
Fundamentalism has its source in anxiety rather than hatred. It is the pathological mind-set of those who feel washed up and humiliated by the brave new world of advanced capitalism and who might conclude that the only way to draw attention to their undervalued existence is to blow the heads off small children in the name of Allah or blow up playschools in Oklahoma City. What had happened was that smaller, weaker nations that had suffered under the West's new post-Cold War triumphalism finally unleashed a backlash in the form of radical Islam. (At this point in the argument, spokespersons for the British media invariably ask whether you're not somehow justifying terrorism by such remarks, obtusely confuse explaining with excusing. ) And this meant that the closing down of one grand narrative—the so-called end of history—simply served to open up another, the so-called War on Terror. It was not, to be sure, the first time that a declaration of the end of history had proved a little premature. Hegel believed with attractive modesty that history had now culminated in his own head, but this only generated more history in the form of vigorous rebuttals from a series of subsequent thinkers. The act of blowing the whistle on history and calling the whole thing off is itself a historical act, and to that extent self-refuting. Much the same is true of the early-20th-century avant-gardes, which in seeking to eradicate all previous history and create a luminous space for their own projects simply succeeded in heaping a little more history on what was there already.
A further irony of the whole affair was that the liberal agnostic West actually had a hand in bringing this illiberal, theocratic antagonist into existence, even if it still refuses, in Prospero's words about Caliban at the end of The Tempest , to acknowledge this thing of darkness as (in part, at least) its own. An agnosticism designed to ward off fanaticism actually succeeded in stoking it through its predatory foreign policies. So the West has helped to spawn not only secularism but fundamentalism as well, a most creditable piece of dialectics. In the earlier decades of the 20th century, the rolling back of liberal, secular and left-nationalist forces in the Muslim world by the West for its own imperial purposes (it supported the massacre of half a million leftists in Indonesia, for example) created a political vacuum in that vital geopolitical region into which Islamism was able to move, though you won't read much about that in the newspapers or on the BBC.
What we have, then, is a world divided between those who believe too much (fundamentalists of various stripes, whether Texan or Taliban) and those who believe too little (chief executives, technocrats, Robbie Williams and other hirelings of the inherently faithless social order of advanced capitalism). To paraphrase W.B. Yeats, there are those who lack all conviction and others who are full of passionate intensity. Moreover each camp contributes to reinforcing the other. The unity implicit in the term nation-state splinters apart into a narrow ethnic particularism on the one hand and an abstract globalism on the other. As Western politics is reduced to administration, the manufacture of consensus and conflict management, it ceases to provide a language for various issues which are accordingly driven out of the political sphere or symbolic in order to take up home in the monstrous, pathological dimension of the Real—terrorism etc.—so that one form of anti-politics generates another.
When it comes to belief, however, the West is now at a distinct disadvantage, since in yet another irony it engaged in a kind of ideological disarmament in its post-Cold War, postmodern years. . It is true that the West continues, formally at least, to believe in God, Freedom, Democracy and so on; it's just that these convictions have to survive in a culture of skepticism which gravely debilitates them, which is not by and large the case in the Muslim world. The West is caught in what the linguists would call a performative contradiction between what it actually does and what it says it does – between its routine practices and the way it explains those practices to itself. If you really want to know what someone believes, however, look at what they do, at the beliefs spontaneously embodied in their routine behaviour, not at what they say. It is thus that men and women may not actually believe in God but think that they do.
Terry Eagleton is a celebrated literary and cultural theorist. He is distinguished professor of English Literature at Lancaster University and Emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.
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