AS IF… (USEFUL FICTIONS)

I’m going to adopt a god for a month, or maybe three, or longer. I’m going to picture this unnamed being as having the energy of Shiva/Dionysius and the compassion of Christ.

I can’t continue to “shake off illusions and yet remain passionately in love with life, even after its great futility has been revealed.” (Safaranski, echoing Nietzsche’s view, in A Philosophical Biography.) No Superman then! Being a strict Nietzschean comes at a terrible cost, making the daily struggle to fulfil dozens of small purposes more arduous because you must remain aware of the overarching spectre of meaninglessness, yet push it from your mind in order to muster the energy each task requires.

Banishing illusion may satisfy some kind of intellectual vanity, but is the price (in terms of stress and endless mental “noise”) really worth paying? The whole point about Sisyphus is that he was not happy!

The truth-value of religion is the least of its value. Easily dismissed but vital to reckon with is its moral function and as a tool for social control, one which politicians have vainly been trying to replace for years. No, “community” just doesn’t cut the mustard, does it? This was clear from a reality TV show I caught this week, where the police in Aylesbury and Essex were struggling against hopelessly out-of-control and abusive late night drinkers, in a weekly ritual. My friend remarked that these people didn’t know how to behave. I said how sad they must be with their lives.

By contrast, my experiences living in religion-mad Ghana were of a society really at ease with itself, though where grinding poverty was an everyday reality. And the unforgettable friendliness and lack of suspicion that impressed me immediately about Ghanaians was a sign of something else too: contentment.

For religion provides useful psychological fictions that most of us continue to preserve anyway: a grounds for optimism (“it’ll all work out”; “everything is meant to be”; “it’s all part of a bigger picture”) a belief in the unity of the Self, a belief that doing good is ultimately worthwhile. What it all amounts to is comfort.

Contentment and comfort: easy for Nietzsche and the very young to sneer at, but how wonderful they are to have and how sadly missed when they are gone!

For me, adopting a god won’t be like trying to pretend Santa gives me my presents any more than it will involve taking on obscure metaphysical baggage. It will be more like what Tony Blair did with the WMD - a strange analogy, I know. For reasons of his own, he convinced himself these were real. He believed what evidence there was to support his view and gave little weight to the opposite opinion. People do this all the time, trying to convince themselves about one thing or another. It isn’t exactly lying; it is keeping the useful fiction alive because of the rewards it brings. (In Blair’s case, the uncertain reward might be something to do with UK access to dwindling oil reserves, but that’s another story.)

This theistic experiment will involve looking inside (some kind of meditation and even prayer), thinking of things as being part of a beautiful pattern, and acting as if someone was – in some way that I can’t explain – protecting me.

Even Nietzsche, at root, was deeply theistic. By the end of his life, his concept of the Will To Power was godlike in its universal explanatory reach. And here he is from The Birth of Tragedy in a passage of the kind he later scorned, but is among the most beautiful he ever wrote:

“The bond between one person and another is forged once more by the spell of the Dionysian… Now… each person finds himself not only united, reconciled and blended with another but altogether fused, as though the veil of maya had been torn apart and was only fluttering in shreds before the primordial mysterious unity.”

A mystical vision par excellence!