Edge in the News: 2008

Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks's new book, "Gross National Happiness," advances the provocative hypothesis that conservatives are happier than liberals: "Political conservatives take the happiness prize hands down." Why? For one thing, they are more likely to be married, which generally correlates with happiness. (Although having children does not.) Also, they are more likely to be religious, which, Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens/Sam Harris notwithstanding, has its own rewards.

More to the point, conservatives like things the way they are. The status quo is perfectly all right with them, although the status quo ante would be even better. Haven't you noticed that right-wing lunatics like Rush Limbaugh affect a jolly, contented tone, while left-wing lunatics like Al Franken always sound angry? Look at our current president: distanced, out of it, but smugly satisfied with his disengagement. It may be that his last day in office will be the happiest day of his life. Ours, too.

What is it with happiness, anyway? It's like being thin; everybody wants it, no one can have it. Happiness, of course, is the animal that disappears in the pursuit. "Those only are happy," John Stuart Mill wrote, "who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness."

I keep an eye on the nebulous science of happiness, or "hedonometrics," which is not so unlike the nebulous science of political polling, or of bunting with men on second and third and one out. Happiness studies prove to be a full-employment program for economists, psychologists, and psychiatrists offering pabulum for people almost as miserable as they.

So who's happy? Not people in midlife, according to data extrapolated from 500,000 responses to the General Social Survey in America, and from the Eurobarometer across the Atlantic. In a paper posted on the National Bureau of Economic Research website, economists David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of Warwick University report that "well-being reaches a minimum, on both sides of the Atlantic, in people's mid to late 40s." After that, the U-shaped index rises again.

Their paper also shows that, generation after generation, Americans (like Japanese) are becoming more unhappy. De Tocqueville knew as much more than 150 years ago: "So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance." With Europeans, it is the opposite; the younger ones enjoy more "well-being" than their parents.

What about the undeserving rich? Research shows that it's better to be middle class than poor. Things get complicated as you move further out on the "swinishly wealthy" axis, because $100 million doesn't buy a hundred times the pleasure of $1 million. Best-selling happiness monger ("Stumbling on Happiness") Daniel Gilbert compares accumulating wealth to eating pancakes. "The first one is delicious, the second one is good, the third OK," he told Harvard magazine. "By the fifth pancake you're at a point when an infinite number more pancakes will not satisfy you to any degree. But no one stops earning money or striving for more money."

The hedonometricians even came up with the notion of a "hedonic set point," or baseline. This is like the body weight set point, meaning that if you weigh 175 pounds now, you will probably weigh about that much for the rest of your life. Hedonically speaking: This is about as happy as you will ever be.

Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff has asserted that this happiness baseline notion is wrong: "Personality is much less stable than body weight, and happiness levels are even less stable than personality." So, there is an upside: A certain number of people can become more happy. But wait! "For every person who shows a substantial lasting increase in happiness, two people show a decrease," Etcoff wrote on a website called edge.org.

Suddenly, this is an ethical dilemma. For me to be happier, both you and your friend have to bum out. Of course, your being unhappy might raise my spirits. Speaking of which, I think I'll have that second Negra Modelo.

I'm OK, but you two are not. I am happy with that.

On this subject

I know, I am becoming like a broken record on the subject of Justin Cartwright. But his 2004 novel, "The Promise of Happiness," is very good. Stewart O'Nan can pull this off, too, writing about intimacy and family dynamics in a non-syrupy fashion. Hie thee to the library, or to the internets. I think you'll be happy that you did.

...This is not the first intellectual iconoclasm of a practical science. In the early nineties, the so-called Third Culture arose under the patronage of New York literary agent John Brockman. Since then, in bestsellers and in the online magazine Edge.org, scientists have begun to conquer the realm that traditionally belonged to philosophy and theology. With enormous success, Steven Pinker destroyed the great myths of the Enlightenment with his book The Blank Slate, Daniel Dennett reduced free will to biological processes, and Richard Dawkins supported the core beliefs of millions with his onslaught against religious faith in The God Delusion. ...

Wer erinnert sich noch an die «dritte Kultur»? Das Schlagwort, das der amerikanische Literaturagent John Brockman vor bald anderthalb Jahrzehnten zum Markenzeichen zu promovieren versuchte, war eine Mogelpackung. Es knüpfte an die von C. P. Snow 1959 in Umlauf gebrachte Rede von den zwei intellektuellen Kulturen an, die einander fremd und verständnislos gegenüberstünden. Die Kluft zwischen der literarisch-geisteswissenschaftlichen und der technisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Denkungsart, so suggerierte das heute kaum noch benutzte Etikett, werde von einer dritten überbrückt.

Dialoge, Blickwechsel

Doch die vorgeblich dritte hatte entschieden mehr mit der naturwissenschaftlichen als mit der geisteswissenschaftlichen Weise gemein, Mensch und Welt, Natur und Gesellschaft in den Blick zu nehmen. Alles in allem lief das Unternehmen darauf hinaus, einem in der Tendenz naturalistischen Weltverständnis im intellektuellen Diskurs und in der öffentlichen Meinungsbildung mehr Geltung zu verschaffen. Das lässt sich auch an dem Web-Journal «Edge» ablesen, das – einer anspruchsvollen Wissenschaftspopularisierung verpflichtet – von der Kampagne von einst noch übrig geblieben ist (www.edge.org). Manche Anzeichen, nicht zuletzt der um sich greifende Hirn-Talk, sprechen dafür, dass der Naturalismus in vielerlei Spielarten tatsächlich zu einer Weltanschauung von erheblicher Schubkraft geworden ist.

Auf dem weiten, von Erdspalten durchbrochenen Feld der Zwei-bis-drei-Kulturen-Debatte bewegt sich auch ein neues Projekt aus dem Hause Suhrkamp. Der Frankfurter Verlag hat eine Buchreihe aus der Taufe gehoben, die sich (in Partnerschaft mit «Spiegel online») erklärtermassen von der «Deutungshoheit» herausfordern lassen will, die die Naturwissenschaften im intellektuellen Raum mittlerweile erlangt hätten. Die Reihe trägt den Namen des einstigen, vor wenigen Jahren verstorbenen Verlegers. Zwar hat Siegfried Unseld sich persönlich nicht mit Erkundungsgängen auf jenem weiten Feld der zwei oder mehr Kulturen hervorgetan, doch immerhin ein Faible für Goethe gehabt. Als Fingerzeig auf eine goetheanische, auf eine ganzheitliche Natur-und-Geist-Wissenschaft der «dritten» Art wird man dies aber nicht missverstehen wollen. Es ist, wie Ulla Unseld-Berkéwicz in der Vorschau zum ersten Programm der «edition unseld» andeutet, eher um Dialoge und Blickwechsel zwischen Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften sowie darum zu tun, das «Für und Wider einer naturalistischen Weltsicht» zu erörtern.

Die ersten acht Bände der neuen Edition sind seit gestern auf dem Markt. Ausser dem handlichen Format und der Bezeichnung der Reihe erinnert äusserlich wenig an die vor fünfundvierzig Jahren begründete «edition suhrkamp». Auch die von Band zu Band wechselnden bunten Farben tun es nicht, denn sie fächern sich nicht im Spektrum des Regenbogens auf. Was indes die Themen und Gehalte angeht, so wären einige der jeweils zehn Euro kostenden booklets ohne weiteres in der altehrwürdigen und gleichwohl immer wieder auf die Kammhöhen der Zeit strebenden «edition suhrkamp» gut aufgehoben – und die restlichen passten womöglich in Suhrkamps Wissenschaftstaschenbücher («stw»). Gegen Aufmerksamkeitserzeugung durch Reihenvermehrung ist, andererseits, wenig einzuwenden.

Die «eu»-Nummer eins trägt ein Gedankengang der in Pittsburgh arbeitenden Wissenschaftsphilosophin Sandra Mitchell. Dessen Titel ist, wie es sich ziemt, anfänglich und programmatisch ausgefallen: «Komplexitäten. Warum wir erst anfangen, die Welt zu verstehen». Die Autorin wirbt für einen «integrativen Pluralismus» der Perspektiven und Prinzipien. Freilich hat sie kein «Anything goes» im Sinn. Wissenschaftliche Erklärungen und Theorien sind für Mitchell, wenn gut belegt, nach wie vor «repräsentative Abbilder der Welt». Die Philosophin hält lediglich die – in den Wissenschaften allerdings gängige – Annahme für verfehlt, es könne nur die eine und einzig wahre Erklärung geben. Depressionen beispielsweise seien nur als «komplexe Kombination aus biochemischen, neurologischen, psychischen und körperlichen Zuständen» begreifbar. Deutlicher als die Antwort auf die Frage, wie das Zusammenspiel verschiedener Erklärungsmodelle im Einzelnen aussehe, konturiert sich der antireduktionistische Impetus, der den wissenschaftlichen Willen zur Komplexität befeuert.

Beschränkungen der Forschungsfreiheit

In der theoretischen Physik, die nach elementaren und elementarsten Teilchen sowie nach den Grundkräften fahndet, die die Welt zusammenhalten, hat der Reduktionismus naturgemäss nach wie vor eine Heimstatt. Eine antireduktionistische Gegenbewegung macht sich indes seit einiger Zeit bemerkbar. Robert B. Laughlin hat sich mit seinem «Abschied von der Weltformel» (dt. Piper 2007) an deren Spitze gestellt. Der in Stanford lehrende Nobelpreisträger ist in der «edition unseld» jedoch mit einem anderen Thema vertreten. Er schlägt sich in seinem Essay «Das Verbrechen der Vernunft» mit den Beschränkungen herum, die die sogenannte Wissensgesellschaft dem Wissenserwerb und der Wissensverwertung auferlegt – um der Sicherheit oder um der ökonomischen Verwertbarkeit willen. Es geht also um Forschungs- und Informationsfreiheit, um geistiges Eigentum, Patent- und Urheberrecht; und manches geht – eine eigene Form der Komplexitätssteigerung – auch durcheinander.

Weniger komplex, konzentrierter nämlich ist das Gespräch geartet, das der Frankfurter Neurophysiologe Wolf Singer und Matthieu Ricard, einstmals Molekularbiologe, seit langem aber buddhistischer Mönch, führen. Es entspricht dem Dialog-Auftrag der neuen Edition am ehesten. Die «kontemplative Wissenschaft» der Meditation und die analytische der Hirnforschung sind bei der Erkundung ihrer Gemeinsamkeiten und ihrer Unterschiede allerdings bisweilen so konzentriert, dass sie auf der Stelle treten.

Der Münchner Zoologe und Ökologe Josef H. Reichholf prangert falsche Vorstellungen von «natürlichen» Gleichgewichten an, die in unseren Köpfen herumspukten. In der Natur herrschten allenfalls Fliessgleichgewichte, in denen sich Ungleichgewichte zeitweise stabilisierten. Sein munteres Plädoyer für eine «Ökologie der Zukunft» operiert mit methodisch wenig kontrollierten Verschränkungen sozialer und ökologischer Perspektiven; auch das mag eine Möglichkeit sein, die Kluft zwischen den Denkkulturen zu schliessen: «Die Natur braucht Ungleichgewichte, damit Neues entstehen kann. Die Gesellschaft auch!»

Noch skizzenhafter und spekulativer präsentiert sich eine maschinenstürmerische «Streitschrift» von Dietmar Dath, dem vielseitigen Autor und ehemaligen «FAZ»-Redaktor. Deren diagnostischer Kernsatz lautet: «Wir leben, wie wir leben, nur, weil es Maschinen gibt, aber wir leben gleichzeitig so, als könnten wir dem, was sie tun, keine Richtung geben.» Ob die Richtung aber tatsächlich mit der Reaktivierung eines – im Vagen bleibenden – sozialistischen Gedankenguts gefunden und gegeben werden kann? – Auch der Pariser Kulturwissenschafter Bernard Stiegler, der offenbar Wert darauf legt, dass seine Leser wissen, dass er von 1978 bis 1983 wegen bewaffneten Raubüberfalls im Gefängnis sass, nimmt fatale Auswirkungen der Technologie ins Visier und registriert – gleichfalls ein wenig altmodisch erscheinend – den «Verlust der Aufklärung durch Technik und Medien». Triebgesteuerte, unkonzentrierte, ichschwache, unmündige Wesen würden durch den Kurzschluss von psychischem und elektronischem Apparat gezüchtet.

Die Überraschung: Descartes

Erfreulicheres weiss von der Mensch-Maschinen-Schnittstelle Rolf Landua vom Europäischen Laboratorium für Elementarteilchenphysik (Cern) in Genf zu berichten. Einem Besucher erläutert er in seinem fiktiven Dialog «Am Rand der Dimensionen», zwar vermöge kein Einzelner den Grossapparat eines Beschleunigers zu überschauen, aber das Kollektiv – und nur es – sei «in der Lage, ein solches Gerät zu verstehen und richtig zu nutzen». Die wissenschaftliche Grossforschung, so spekuliert der Physiker – und der Leser fühlt sich an Teilhard de Chardin erinnert –, markiere vielleicht so etwas wie «den Beginn der nächsten Stufe» der kosmischen «Bewusstseinsentwicklung». Dass sogar Gott im Cern Platz finden kann, wundert darum nicht.

Auch das Haus der Edition Unseld hat viele Zimmer. Der Passepartout, der sie dem Leser allesamt öffnete, ist am Portal allerdings nicht hinterlegt worden; man muss ihn erst noch finden. In einem Gelass unterm Dach hat der Dichter und Essayist Durs Grünbein sein Schreibpult aufgestellt und drei «lockere Meditationen» zu Descartes zu Papier gebracht. Auf mitunter überraschende Weise bricht er dem Gedanken Bahn, ausgerechnet mit diesem Renatus Cartesius, dem unter Naturfreunden schlecht beleumundeten Philosophen des Leib-Seele-Dualismus, lasse sich die «Kulturdichotomie» zwischen Poesie und Wissenschaft «spielerisch» aufheben.

Nicht alle der acht ersten Bände der «edition unseld» zeugen von einem souveränen spielerischen Intellekt, nicht alle sind ausgegoren, keiner ist unentbehrlich – und doch hat ein jeder Kontakt mit dem, was an der Zeit wäre.

This is where big brains hang out online. Its membership includes 'some of the most interesting minds in the world' debating intellectual, philosophical and artistic issues. Sounds heavy, but it's always full of wise words to steal.

Tajik Muslims praying. Photograph: Alexei Vladykin/AP

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why.

The abrupt shift in the perception of religion is only partly explained by terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as martyrs in a religious tradition, and western opinion has accepted their self-image. And there are some who view the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a danger comparable with the worst that were faced by liberal societies in the 20th century.

For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history, right up to the present day. The urgency with which they produce their anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as significant as the rise of terrorism: the tide of secularisation has turned. These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase. In the 19th century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable assumption. Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence.

It is true that religion has declined sharply in a number of countries (Ireland is a recent example) and has not shaped everyday life for most people in Britain for many years. Much of Europe is clearly post-Christian. However, there is nothing that suggests the move away from religion is irreversible, or that it is potentially universal. The US is no more secular today than it was 150 years ago, when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its all-pervading religiosity. The secular era was in any case partly illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.

As in the past, this is a type of atheism that mirrors the faith it rejects. Philip Pullman's Northern Lights - a subtly allusive, multilayered allegory, recently adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster, The Golden Compass - is a good example. Pullman's parable concerns far more than the dangers of authoritarianism. The issues it raises are essentially religious, and it is deeply indebted to the faith it attacks. Pullman has stated that his atheism was formed in the Anglican tradition, and there are many echoes of Milton and Blake in his work. His largest debt to this tradition is the notion of free will. The central thread of the story is the assertion of free will against faith. The young heroine Lyra Belacqua sets out to thwart the Magisterium - Pullman's metaphor for Christianity - because it aims to deprive humans of their ability to choose their own course in life, which she believes would destroy what is most human in them. But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity.

Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody. To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.

A curious feature of this kind of atheism is that some of its most fervent missionaries are philosophers. Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon claims to sketch a general theory of religion. In fact, it is mostly a polemic against American Christianity. This parochial focus is reflected in Dennett's view of religion, which for him means the belief that some kind of supernatural agency (whose approval believers seek) is needed to explain the way things are in the world. For Dennett, religions are efforts at doing something science does better - they are rudimentary or abortive theories, or else nonsense. "The proposition that God exists," he writes severely, "is not even a theory." But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories. The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory.

The notion that religion is a primitive version of science was popularised in the late 19th century in JG Frazer's survey of the myths of primitive peoples, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. For Frazer, religion and magical thinking were closely linked. Rooted in fear and ignorance, they were vestiges of human infancy that would disappear with the advance of knowledge. Dennett's atheism is not much more than a revamped version of Frazer's positivism. The positivists believed that with the development of transport and communication - in their day, canals and the telegraph - irrational thinking would wither way, along with the religions of the past. Despite the history of the past century, Dennett believes much the same. In an interview that appears on the website of the Edge Foundation (edge.org) under the title "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion", he predicts that "in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe that it does today". He is confident that this will come about, he tells us, mainly because of "the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television)". The philosopher has evidently not reflected on the ubiquity of mobile phones among the Taliban, or the emergence of a virtual al-Qaida on the web.

The growth of knowledge is a fact only postmodern relativists deny. Science is the best tool we have for forming reliable beliefs about the world, but it does not differ from religion by revealing a bare truth that religions veil in dreams. Both science and religion are systems of symbols that serve human needs - in the case of science, for prediction and control. Religions have served many purposes, but at bottom they answer to a need for meaning that is met by myth rather than explanation. A great deal of modern thought consists of secular myths - hollowed-out religious narratives translated into pseudo-science. Dennett's notion that new communications technologies will fundamentally alter the way human beings think is just such a myth.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins attempts to explain the appeal of religion in terms of the theory of memes, vaguely defined conceptual units that compete with one another in a parody of natural selection. He recognises that, because humans have a universal tendency to religious belief, it must have had some evolutionary advantage, but today, he argues, it is perpetuated mainly through bad education. From a Darwinian standpoint, the crucial role Dawkins gives to education is puzzling. Human biology has not changed greatly over recorded history, and if religion is hardwired in the species, it is difficult to see how a different kind of education could alter this. Yet Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out. This is a view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist theology than with Darwinian theory, and I cannot help being reminded of the evangelical Christian who assured me that children reared in a chaste environment would grow up without illicit sexual impulses.

Dawkins's "memetic theory of religion" is a classic example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is applied outside its proper sphere. Along with Dennett, who also holds to a version of the theory, Dawkins maintains that religious ideas survive because they would be able to survive in any "meme pool", or else because they are part of a "memeplex" that includes similar memes, such as the idea that, if you die as a martyr, you will enjoy 72 virgins. Unfortunately, the theory of memes is science only in the sense that Intelligent Design is science. Strictly speaking, it is not even a theory. Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors.

Dawkins compares religion to a virus: religious ideas are memes that infect vulnerable minds, especially those of children. Biological metaphors may have their uses - the minds of evangelical atheists seem particularly prone to infection by religious memes, for example. At the same time, analogies of this kind are fraught with peril. Dawkins makes much of the oppression perpetrated by religion, which is real enough. He gives less attention to the fact that some of the worst atrocities of modern times were committed by regimes that claimed scientific sanction for their crimes. Nazi "scientific racism" and Soviet "dialectical materialism" reduced the unfathomable complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific formula. In each case, the science was bogus, but it was accepted as genuine at the time, and not only in the regimes in question. Science is as liable to be used for inhumane purposes as any other human institution. Indeed, given the enormous authority science enjoys, the risk of it being used in this way is greater.

Contemporary opponents of religion display a marked lack of interest in the historical record of atheist regimes. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand scale, but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do with their ideology of "scientific atheism" - what was wrong with their regimes was that they were tyrannies. But might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison", would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies. It is true he was worshipped as a semi-divine figure - as Stalin was in the Soviet Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what happens when atheism becomes a political project. The invariable result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical means.

Something like this occurred in Nazi Germany. Dawkins dismisses any suggestion that the crimes of the Nazis could be linked with atheism. "What matters," he declares in The God Delusion, "is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does." This is simple-minded reasoning. Always a tremendous booster of science, Hitler was much impressed by vulgarised Darwinism and by theories of eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of materialism. He used Christian antisemitic demonology in his persecution of Jews, and the churches collaborated with him to a horrifying degree. But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history. Hitler's world-view was that of many semi-literate people in interwar Europe, a hotchpotch of counterfeit science and animus towards religion. There can be no reasonable doubt that this was a type of atheism, or that it helped make Nazi crimes possible.

Nowadays most atheists are avowed liberals. What they want - so they will tell you - is not an atheist regime, but a secular state in which religion has no role. They clearly believe that, in a state of this kind, religion will tend to decline. But America's secular constitution has not ensured a secular politics. Christian fundamentalism is more powerful in the US than in any other country, while it has very little influence in Britain, which has an established church. Contemporary critics of religion go much further than demanding disestablishment. It is clear that he wants to eliminate all traces of religion from public institutions. Awkwardly, many of the concepts he deploys - including the idea of religion itself - have been shaped by monotheism. Lying behind secular fundamentalism is a conception of history that derives from religion.

AC Grayling provides an example of the persistence of religious categories in secular thinking in his Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West. As the title indicates, Grayling's book is a type of sermon. Its aim is to reaffirm what he calls "a Whig view of the history of the modern west", the core of which is that "the west displays progress". The Whigs were pious Christians, who believed divine providence arranged history to culminate in English institutions, and Grayling too believes history is "moving in the right direction". No doubt there have been setbacks - he mentions nazism and communism in passing, devoting a few sentences to them. But these disasters were peripheral. They do not reflect on the central tradition of the modern west, which has always been devoted to liberty, and which - Grayling asserts - is inherently antagonistic to religion. "The history of liberty," he writes, "is another chapter - and perhaps the most important of all - in the great quarrel between religion and secularism." The possibility that radical versions of secular thinking may have contributed to the development of nazism and communism is not mentioned. More even than the 18th-century Whigs, who were shaken by French Terror, Grayling has no doubt as to the direction of history.

But the belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism. Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal - a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.

The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics. In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society. Slavery was abolished in much of the world during the 19th century, but it returned on a vast scale in nazism and communism, and still exists today. Torture was prohibited in international conventions after the second world war, only to be adopted as an instrument of policy by the world's pre-eminent liberal regime at the beginning of the 21st century. Wealth has increased, but it has been repeatedly destroyed in wars and revolutions. People live longer and kill one another in larger numbers. Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.

Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it. This is what Nietzsche did when he developed his critique of Christianity in the late 19th century, but almost none of today's secular missionaries have followed his example. One need not be a great fan of Nietzsche to wonder why this is so. The reason, no doubt, is that he did not assume any connection between atheism and liberal values - on the contrary, he viewed liberal values as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that reason. In contrast, evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms - rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them.

Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only the French writer Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of departure. In some ways, Onfray's In Defence of Atheism is superior to anything English-speaking writers have published on the subject. Refreshingly, Onfray recognises that evangelical atheism is an unwitting imitation of traditional religion: "Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy." More clearly than his Anglo-Saxon counterparts, Onfray understands the formative influence of religion on secular thinking. Yet he seems not to notice that the liberal values he takes for granted were partly shaped by Christianity and Judaism. The key liberal theorists of toleration are John Locke, who defended religious freedom in explicitly Christian terms, and Benedict Spinoza, a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic. Yet Onfray has nothing but contempt for the traditions from which these thinkers emerged - particularly Jewish monotheism: "We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God," he writes. "But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people." Here Onfray passes over an important distinction. It may be true that Jews first developed monotheism, but Judaism has never been a missionary faith. In seeking universal conversion, evangelical atheism belongs with Christianity and Islam.

In today's anxiety about religion, it has been forgotten that most of the faith-based violence of the past century was secular in nature. To some extent, this is also true of the current wave of terrorism. Islamism is a patchwork of movements, not all violently jihadist and some strongly opposed to al-Qaida, most of them partly fundamentalist and aiming to recover the lost purity of Islamic traditions, while at the same time taking some of their guiding ideas from radical secular ideology. There is a deal of fashionable talk of Islamo-fascism, and Islamist parties have some features in common with interwar fascist movements, including antisemitism. But Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists. Islamist techniques of terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

The influence of secular revolutionary movements on terrorism extends well beyond Islamists. In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens notes that, long before Hizbullah and al-Qaida, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered what he rightly calls "the disgusting tactic of suicide murder". He omits to mention that the Tigers are Marxist-Leninists who, while recruiting mainly from the island's Hindu population, reject religion in all its varieties. Tiger suicide bombers do not go to certain death in the belief that they will be rewarded in any postmortem paradise. Nor did the suicide bombers who drove American and French forces out of Lebanon in the 80s, most of whom belonged to organisations of the left such as the Lebanese communist party. These secular terrorists believed they were expediting a historical process from which will come a world better than any that has ever existed. It is a view of things more remote from human realities, and more reliably lethal in its consequences, than most religious myths.

It is not necessary to believe in any narrative of progress to think liberal societies are worth resolutely defending. No one can doubt that they are superior to the tyranny imposed by the Taliban on Afghanistan, for example. The issue is one of proportion. Ridden with conflicts and lacking the industrial base of communism and nazism, Islamism is nowhere near a danger of the magnitude of those that were faced down in the 20th century. A greater menace is posed by North Korea, which far surpasses any Islamist regime in its record of repression and clearly does possess some kind of nuclear capability. Evangelical atheists rarely mention it. Hitchens is an exception, but when he describes his visit to the country, it is only to conclude that the regime embodies "a debased yet refined form of Confucianism and ancestor worship". As in Russia and China, the noble humanist philosophy of Marxist-Leninism is innocent of any responsibility.

Writing of the Trotskyite-Luxemburgist sect to which he once belonged, Hitchens confesses sadly: "There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb." He need not worry. His record on Iraq shows he has not lost the will to believe. The effect of the American-led invasion has been to deliver most of the country outside the Kurdish zone into the hands of an Islamist elective theocracy, in which women, gays and religious minorities are more oppressed than at any time in Iraq's history. The idea that Iraq could become a secular democracy - which Hitchens ardently promoted - was possible only as an act of faith.

In The Second Plane, Martin Amis writes: "Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally." Amis is sure religion is a bad thing, and that it has no future in the west. In the author of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million - a forensic examination of self-delusion in the pro-Soviet western intelligentsia - such confidence is surprising. The intellectuals whose folly Amis dissects turned to communism in some sense as a surrogate for religion, and ended up making excuses for Stalin. Are there really no comparable follies today? Some neocons - such as Tony Blair, who will soon be teaching religion and politics at Yale - combine their belligerent progressivism with religious belief, though of a kind Augustine and Pascal might find hard to recognise. Most are secular utopians, who justify pre-emptive war and excuse torture as leading to a radiant future in which democracy will be adopted universally. Even on the high ground of the west, messianic politics has not lost its dangerous appeal.

Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise. In the 20th century, when it commanded powerful states and mass movements, it helped engender totalitarianism. Today, the result is a climate of hysteria. Not everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence. There is an inheritance of anthropocentrism, the ugly fantasy that the Earth exists to serve humans, which most secular humanists share. There is the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically. Nobody should be allowed to curtail freedom in these ways, and no religion has the right to break the peace.

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

· John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia will be out in paperback in April (Penguin)

ON HIS website, www.edge.org, John Brockman has been asking his contributors an annual question and publishing the results in book form. This year's question is: what are you optimistic about? The new offering collects almost 150 contributions from an array of Nobel laureates, professors, Pulitzer Prize winners and bestselling authors. Global warming, space travel, international terrorism, religious intolerance, stay-at-home dads, the increasing numbers of women in politics and other harder-to-understand medical and technological advances are some of the topics covered in this impressive book.

One of the most interesting developments of the last sixty years in the popularization of intellectual concerns and higher culture has been the appearance of “public intellectuals.” They are, for the most part, academics who use a variety of means of access to a wide audience to disseminate ideas that are sometimes an integral part of their expertise, and sometimes very far from their professional field.

There were, indeed, at an earlier time, occasional purveyors of scientific ideas either to a cultured public or as part of a conscious attempt to educate the working class. Thomas Henry Huxley was not only a major popularizer of Darwin for an educated English reading public in the 1860s, but also gave workingmen’s lectures on various biological questions. In pursuit of his own ideological program,  J.B.S.Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary genetics in the 1930s, wrote on science for the British Daily Worker. In the more conventional press, the feuilleton pages of French and Italian newspapers have long been the outlet for occasional articles on scientific and cultural issues by prominent academics. It has only been since World War  II, however, that there has arisen a moderately large class of academics for whom a major preoccupation has been the popular explication and interpretation of either their body of technical knowledge or their theories about almost anything.

The rise of the public intellectual as a regular career category, bringing esoteric knowledge and overarching theories to a wide audience, as well as fame and fortune to the practitioner, began when the most esoteric science intruded itself onto the public consciousness with a very loud bang on July 16, 1945. In high school I was a typically nerdy science enthusiast, part of a small, more or less socially isolated coterie that met after school to trade Freudian interpretations of our dreams at the local soda fountain. But when the school year began in the fall of 1946 I found myself on the assembly hall platform, a public-intellectual-in-training, explaining the mysteries of nuclear physics to an audience of the entire school.

The Manhattan Project and the development of radar during World War  IIprovided the impetus for a major reorientation of the relationship between the state and the academic world. It became obvious to policymakers like Vannevar Bush, head of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, that a regular major investment in scientific research would be necessary for the future security and financial prosperity of the country and that, given the competitive demands for profit, private capital could not be adequate for the purpose. The result has been that the annual federal expenditure for research and development (in constant dollars) has been multiplied by a factor of ten since 1947. The relevance of this immense increase in the funding of science to our understanding of changes in culture is twofold.

First, universities and colleges have been a major beneficiary of the investment in science, their total share having risen …

In its roundup of best books of 2007, The Economist claimed that "there is something for everyone" -- but there wasn't.

There was not a single science title, which is curious, even for a business and political affairs periodical, given not only the technology-invention-business connection but also the fact that we are currently in a golden age of literary science writing.

That we are is affirmed by British science journalist Matt Ridley in his introduction to a recent collection of essays on evolution. Scientists, says Ridley, "(are) writers and their currency (is) words: poetic flights of fancy, ample use of metaphor, and personal appeals to the reader."

Many editors, reviewers and other publicists don't seem to have heard the news, however. Not only The Economist but also the Globe & Mail and the New York Times snubbed 2007's science titles.

In Britain, 2007 saw the release of Richard Mabey's well-applauded Beechcombings: the Narratives of Trees, Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places and Roger Deakin's Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, all of which combine autobiography, history and travel with nature literature.

These writers are actually heirs to the tradition of the Nature Poets, otherwise known as "the Romantics," and they all warn that we are still shooting the albatross by polluting, clear-cutting and overpopulating our planet.

The "romance" of science itself is their other subject, and this is just what some reviewing organs have missed, still thinking "science book" means dry, technical and difficult. Yet many readers have discovered the lyrical interdisciplinary pens of Steve Jones (Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise), J.M. Adovasio and Olga Soffer (The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory), and Piotr Naskrecki (The Smaller Majority). The small majority are the 99 per cent of animal species smaller than a human finger. Naskrecki provides more than 400 images revealing the wonders of insects, worms, pond and tidepool creatures and others that live in fur, soil and plants.

New Canadian science books include the paperback edition of Candace Savage's revelatory Crows: Encounters With the Wise Guys of the Avian World and Stephen Marshall's Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity, which won the latest Canadian Science Writers' Association's "Science in Society Book Award."

Quill & Quire's Top 10 Canadian 2007 titles included only one science book, and that a practical manual rather than a literary work. Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services is itself recyclable right down to its binding, and that is the kind of detail it focuses on in an effort to help people take small steps toward environmental responsibility.

B.C.'s notable 2007 nature books include Operation Orca, by Daniel Francis, editor of Harbour Publishing's Encyclopedia of British Columbia (2000). This describes the two juvenile whales, Springer and Luna, who appeared off our coast in 2000 and 2001, alone and lost. Francis tells the inside stories behind the efforts to help them -- the planning of biologists and the scheming of interest groups, the arrival of tourists and media and the human jostling and bumbling that followed.

While humans squabbled Luna met his end at the propeller end of a boat. Operation Orca goes from this to the sordid beginnings of whale capture off B.C. in 1965, and refers to other abuses that characterize our interaction with these fellow-mammals, such as how we inundate their underwater world with the sonar booms of naval traffic and pollution from spills and industry.

Also unnerving but more poetically presented is Terry Glavin's Waiting for the Macaws, and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions. Glavin tells us that one fifth of bird species existing 20,000 years ago are now extinct, and he makes us feel the pathos of it by describing the fate of the crested mynah, which a few decades ago flourished in Vancouver. Thanks to habitat loss, by 2003 only one pair was left, and then one of those was hit by a car "at 2nd Avenue and Columbia Street." The other kept a faithful vigil for two weeks until it too was hit by a car, "and then there were none."

In his Christmas Day sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury praised his compatriot Richard Dawkins for expressing humanity's "amazement and awe" at nature, and urged people to treat nature with "reverence." It seems that for some, the famous long cultural war between science and the humanities can now be over, and that "science literature" can now be literature.

That is certainly the opinion of editor John Brockman whose exhilarating science site "edge.org" profiles dozens of groundbreaking scienists by asking them an annual New Year's Big Question. This year's is "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?"

Their answers add up to, roughly, "everything." That is what science frees thinkers to do: change their theories as new evidence comes in. Most responders one way or another emphasized the ethical demands of good science, and described scientific work as subjective, dynamic and creative -- rather like the humanities, in fact.

Contemplating species extinctions, Terry Glavin emphasizes this by urging that we "reclaim the legacy of the Enlightenment" and "strengthen conditions for the diversity of living things" by preserving multiplicity and diversity in our ideas.

For a guiding principle he quotes a poet, William Blake: "Everything that lives is holy."

Barbara Julian is a freelance writer who suspects her Fairfield house might be an ecosystem.

TITLES MENTIONED:

Beechcombings, by Richard Mabey; Chatto; 304 pages; $40

Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise, by Steve Jones; Little Brown; 256 pages, $24

Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World, by Candace Savage; Douglas & McIntyre; 120 pages; $19.95

Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services in Canada, by Adria Vasil; Vintage Canada; 333 pages; $24.95

Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity, by Stephen Marshall; Firefly Books; 736 pages; $95

The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory, by J.M. Adovasio & Olga Soffer; HarperCollins; 320 pages; $31.95

Operation Orca: Springer, Luna and the Struggle to Save West Coast Killer Whales, by Daniel Francis and Gil Hewlett; Harbour Publishing; 266 pages; $34.95

The Smaller Majority, by Piotr Naskrecki; Belknap Press; 288 pages; $29.50

Waiting for the Macaws, and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions, by Terry Glavin; Penguin Canada; 284 pages; $19

The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane; Granta; 352 pages; $40

Wildwood: a Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin; Hamish Hamilton; 416 pages, $25

Diese Konferenz ist in ihrer Mischung einmalig. Im schmucken München trafen sich zum vierten Mal Internet-Unternehmer, Wissenschaftler, Künstler, Bosse und Blogger auf Einladung des kleinen Medienmoguls Hubert Burda zur DLD Conference (DLD=Digital, Life, Design), um nicht weniger zu tun, als die Welt zu retten. Oder um sie zumindest zu einem "better place" zu machen, wie man auf Englisch sagt, der offiziellen Tagungssprache. Der kunstsinnige und vielseitig neugierige Verleger von eher leichtgewichtigen Blättern wie "Focus" oder "Bunte" widmet sich mit seinen Gästen den richtig großen Fragen unserer Zeit. Und weil's München ist, wird das Ganze mit Bussi-Bussi-Schickimicki abgeschmeckt.

Der brasilianische Bestsellerproduzent Paulo Coelho erzählt, was ihn zu seinen Eso-Kitsch-Schwarten inspiriert. Der italienische Fotograf Oliviero Toscani verrät, warum er Models HIV-Tattoos aufmalt, um Pullis zu verkloppen. Wikipedia-Erfinder Jimmy Wales erläutert, weshalb er die geniale Erfindung der gemeinnützigen Internet-Enzyklopädie noch mal als Kommerzversion nachbauen will. Und der Boss der größten Werbeagentur der Welt, WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell, weshalb er heute in Bejing leben würde, wenn er noch mal 25 wäre. Die Konferenz brachte für drei Tage den Geist von Davos, wo gleich im Anschluss der Weltwirtschaftsgipfel stattfindet, und die ewig frische Aufbruchstimmung des Silicon Valley in die heimelige Heimatstadt von Laptop und Lederhose.

Immer ein Platz für Hubert frei

In der ersten Reihe wird immer ein Platz freigehalten für wahlweise "Hubert", "Dr. Burda" oder gar "Professor Burda". Amerikaner sprechen ihn mit dem Vornamen an, Deutsche und seine Angestellten mit dem akademischen Grad des promovierten Kunsthistorikers. Neben dem 67-Jährigen nimmt bei manchen Vorträgen seine 26 Jahre jüngere Gattin Maria Furtwängler Platz. Die Schauspielerin ist als "Tatort"-Kommissarin Charlotte Lindholm ein in Maßen glamouröser Fernsehstar. Neben ihrer Tochter sitzt sie würdevoll da. Frisch toupiert mit gerader Haltung, gar nicht so ungeschminkt burschikos wie in der Fernsehrolle. Ihren Gatten überragt sie deutlich. Immer wieder spielt sie mit ihrem Blackberry.

Der Patriarch von "Hubert Burda Media" und seine Familie halten Hof. Die teils ungeheuer geleckten jungen Mitarbeiter umschwirren Burda. Eine zweite Gruppe des DLD-Teams wirkt in grauen Kapuzenpullis dagegen sichtbar als legerer Teil der Generation Google. Alles wird fotografiert, gefilmt, gebloggt und quasi live ins Netz gestellt. Eine Konferenz in Echtzeit, die man zwar nur auf Einladung besuchen darf, deren Diskussionen man aber im Netz problemlos verfolgen kann.

Wenn auf dem Podium nicht alle Platz finden, schreitet der Patron schon mal persönlich ein. "Hier ist noch ein Stuhl", sagt er dann. In der Eröffnungsrunde der Konferenz mit schwerreichen, alten, weißen Männern freut sich Burda, dass ihn seine Kinder aus zweiter Ehe am Puls des digitalen Lebensstils ihrer Generation halten. Anekdoten darüber, wie man sich in Davos mal eine Stretchlimousine vom anderen gemopst habe, belegen nur eins: Wir sind etabliert, reich, und wir müssen nichts mehr beweisen.

Hubert Burda gönnt sich jährlich die DLD Conference© Alexander von Spreti/Action Press

Es muss ein befriedigendes Gefühl sein, sich so wie Burda ganz viele interessante Menschen einzuladen, die dann eine Art Studium Universale, einen Crash-Kurs in brennenden Themen von Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Technologie auf hohem Niveau abliefern.

Entzauberer und Entschlüsseler

Wenn Richard Dawkins, Evolutionsbiologe und Entzauberer des Gotteswahns, und Craig Venter, erster Entschlüsseler des menschlichen Erbguts, sich begegnen, fühlt sich der Zuhörer privilegiert, lauschen zu dürfen, und strengt sich an, den nicht ganz leichten Gedankengängen zu folgen. Die beiden Denker sind sich einig. "Genetik ist ein Teil der Informationstechnik geworden", erkennt Dawkins. Das wachsende Verständnis für die Zusammensetzung unserer Gene und deren komplexes Zusammenspiel sei "die größte Revolution in der Geschichte des Selbsterkenntnis des Menschen".