Taken from k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), original blog post archived here, September 26, 2009
Atwood has said that one inspiration for the creation of the eco-religion was “the death of her father and mother […] and the necessity to choose hymns for their funerals that would have been acceptable to them: both were scientists.” It’s easy to sneer at the difficulty that Atwood touches upon here, and the familiar problems of reconciling religion and science may ultimately be less intractable than the issue of symbolic deficit in contemporary secularism that she is pointing to. Atheism has yet to come up with rituals that can muster the symbolic weight of religion, and there are strong reasons to suspect that the failure is more than a contingent one. That’s because Atheism typically construes the death of God in terms of a disavowal of the Symbolic (=big Other) itself. There’s a close fit between this quintessentially postmodern disavowal — where official denial of the existence of the big Other is combined with a de facto observance of the symbolic at another level — and capitalist realism. As Althusser realised, the rituals of capitalist ideology function all the better for not being acknowledged as rituals at all. In place of the intransigent solemnity of the religious ritual, postmodern secularism presents us with either an eschewal of ritual altogether (no need for any kind ceremony), or “write-your-own-vows” personalisation, or a kind of ersatz humanist-kitsch, in which religious form is preserved even as belief in a supernatural God is denied. The problem is not a secular “lack of meaning”, but almost the opposite: it is religious rituals’ very meaninglessness, their lack of personal significance, which gives them much of their power. Partly, as Jameson suggests in his LRB piece on The Year of the Flood, the problem is time: any new “belief system” “demands a supplement in the form of deep time, ancient cultural custom, or revelation itself”. Time precisely allows a ritual to become a custom, an empty form to which the individual is subjected — and, very far from being a disadvantage, this is what yields funeral rites much of their power to console.
Mourning and loss are not only at the origins of religion, but also, it goes without saying, at the root of much of its continuing appeal. One of the most contentious — and borderline acrimonious — discussions amongst students that I’ve seen for a while came up in a session on Philosophy of Religion that I taught earlier this year. What prompted the controversy was my contention that atheism has far more of a problem with evil and suffering than religion does — not least because of the suffering of those who are now dead. Ivan Karamazov’s howl of anguish can be directed at the atheist architects of the radiant city as much as at God, since what can any revolutionary eschatology, no matter how glorious, do about the agonies of those who are long dead? No amount of secular good will can guarantee any correlation between virtue and happiness, as Kant argues in an incendiary passage of “The Critique of Teleological Judgment”:
Deceit, violence, and envy will be rife around [the righteous non-believer], even though he himself is benevolent. Moreover, as concerns the other righteous people, he meets: no matter how worthy of happiness they may be, nature, which pays no attention to that, will still subject them to all the evils of deprivation, disease, and untimely death, just like all the other animals on the earth. And they will stay subjected to these evils always, until one vast tomb engulfs them one and all (honest or not, that makes no difference here), and hurls them, who managed to believe that they were the final purpose of creation, back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos of matter from which they were taken.
Note also that Kant’s argument here applies equally well to the neopaganism of God’s Gardeners as it does to “righteous non-believers”, for Kant absolutely refuses the equation of nature with beneficence that the Gardeners preach. On the contrary, Kant argues, God is necessary to make good a nature characterised by amoral purposelessness. The true atheist must be able to look this “vast tomb”, this “abyss of purposeless chaos”, full in the face — whereas I suspect that most (of us) non-believers manage only to look away from it. But Kant’s moral argument is less easily dismissed than it would appear, because it is far harder to eliminate belief in a providential structure of the universe than we first imagine — precisely because this kind of belief lurks far beneath anything that we would admit to accepting. (Watch an edition of Deal or No Deal, though, and it’s clear that many openly evince such a belief.) Perhaps it would indeed take a Crake’s genetic tinkering to eradicate it.
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But the principal failing of The Year of the Flood’s anti-capitalism consists in its inability to grasp the way in which capitalism has absorbed the organic and the green. Some of the strongest passages in Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce keep reiterating this message. (One of my favourite lines in the book: “Who really believes that half-rotten and overpriced ‘organic’ apples are really healthier than the non-organic varieties?”) Needless to say, while any credible leftism must make ecological issues central it is a mistake to seek out an “authentic” organicism beyond capitalism’s simulated-organic. (Another of my favourite lines in First As Tragedy: “if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that, precisely, mother earth now no longer exists.”) Organicism is the problem, and it’s not some eco-spirituality that will save the human environment (if it can be saved), but new modes of organisation and management.