Religion Without God by Ronald Dworkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Enchantment

One of the consequences of language, perhaps the most important but least recognised, is that the world becomes symbolic. Things stand for other things, things they are not. Symbols, including words, are not like things that are not symbols. Although it gets very complicated, what it comes down to is that while they have no value in themselves, symbols connote value. ‘Food’ is good; ‘poison’ is bad. The symbol for the highest good (and bad) is what constitutes the divine. Words in particular tend to become sacred. Value, and therefore God, is inherent in language-using. We extol religion every time we open our mouths to speak.

The source of religion in language is not part of Dworkin’s analysis. But it should have been. It would clarify his opinion that “religion is deeper than God.” As it is, Dworkin narrows himself unnecessarily into religion as a “worldview,” an attitude which relies on a belief in “the full, independent reality of value.” For him, value exists in a sort of Platonic realm as an ideal to which we commit ourselves as if to another person.

Dworkin’s position resolves itself into a sort of poetic pantheism: “I shall take these two—life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life.” Really? Intrinsic meaning and beauty? Such belief, such faith, has fundamentalism written all over it. What on Earth could an otherwise intelligent human being have been thinking? Meaning only exists in the language that expresses it. And nothing of intrinsic value exists within language.

Dworkin is afraid that some people consider values as illusory. I understand his concern. But the way to contest this opinion is not to argue about their reality, much less their permanence, but simply to point out that ‘illusory’ is a term denoting value for the people who use it. They make his argument for him if only he would have listened. His worry was one typical of those intellectuals who mistake the map of reality with the journey of life.

Value, like language, is a social phenomenon. Both are real but not because they exist in some other spiritual world. They certainly are beyond us as individuals; they are a crucial part of our lives that we cannot control; and they make the communal lives we have possible. But neither value nor language is intrinsic to the world aside from our creating it. Both change incrementally whenever they are employed. They are neither subjective nor objective, but reside in that fascinating intermediate universe of the inter-subjective, where all existence is shared. One can remain enchanted with these things, and the world, without claiming more for them than they deserve or demand.

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Forever Flowing by Vasily Grossman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Experience of Exile

Homer got it wrong in the Odyssey, at least for modern folk. The real suffering and trauma of exile occurs not in the time away from one’s homeland but upon return. Living with fixed memories, no matter how accurate, means disappointment in proportion to the time away, for both the traveller and the keepers of the hearth. Stay away long enough, say thirty years or so, and whatever commonality that existed is dissipated by the winds of unshared experience. No energy remains in old relationships. What does remain is a designation empty of any real meaning - countryman, neighbour, friend, relative have no pragmatic import.

Thus whatever it was that ‘kept one going’ in the trials of exile, voluntary or not, is a self-preserving fiction. It may be necessary for psychic survival but it becomes more false by the day. The quantum of change is too small to be noticed on a trip away from home to the shops or the daily commute to work; but the effect emerges into the macro-world when things seem different at home upon returning from holiday or visiting from university. The rooms seem smaller, the conversations less interesting, the family squabbles more annoying. These are not inaccurate sensations. They are the result of becoming incrementally more objective about life. The rooms are small, the conversations banal, and the family insufferable, just as the returning prodigal appears alien and incomprehensible.

The trauma of return is therefore not just experiential, it is existential. Exile may threaten one’s life; return compromises one’s identity. Survival is likely to be a matter of physical endurance; psychic integrity is more likely to depend on entirely unrecognised and unused aspects of character. The home-comer is a threat to those he returns to because they imagine how they appear to him; they thereby become marginally more objective about themselves. This is never flattering. Weaknesses ignored, guilt denied, knowledge of betrayals suppressed, all bubble into consciousness.

The returning exile can also see what others can’t, the lost potential of not just the people he knows but of an entire society. Unknown even to him, he has been creating expectations, extrapolating improvements. None of these have materialised. His insight about lost opportunities causes everyone pain. He therefore must be kept in exile even at home. This is something Odysseus apparently never was forced to endure. Grossman’s Ivan, that is to say Grossman himself, is the truly tragic modern figure of those for whom home has disappeared entirely.

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