Doubt, Compromise, and Doublethink: Transcendence in a Secular Age

A hundred years ago, Émile Durkheim (1995 [1912]) argued that the origin of humanity begins with the distinction between sacred and profane. All human societies make use of this distinction, though the cultural forms used to enforce it vary widely across different human communities. Why must the distinction be enforced? Why must human societies worry about what is sacred and what is profane? It is telling that most people—at least most modern, secular people—would say that the distinction is in fact quite unnecessary. Why indeed must the tribesman gather around his totem pole and beat his drum? Or lest the question appear too ethnocentric, why must the Catholic believe that the bread is the body of Christ? Referentially speaking, such beliefs are absurd. The totem is a piece of wood. The bread is not the body of Christ, it is bread. We usually associate this kind of reaction with hardheaded Voltaire types—people like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, for example. Let’s call them the scientific fundamentalists. What is their point? Their point is the same as that made by the Enlightenment philosophes, who held that humanity wouldn’t be free until the last king was strangled in the entrails of the last priest. (I’ve seen this line attributed variously to Diderot, Voltaire, and Jean Meslier—no matter, it nicely captures the attitude of scientific fundamentalism.) Basically, the idea is that once liberated from the superstitions legitimating the tyranny of kings and priests