The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now ed. by George Levine (review)

Marianne Moore wrote that satisfaction was a “lowly thing” compared to joy and suggested that the absence of the former was a necessary condition for the latter. The least satisfying of these essays are concerned with identifying secular “satisfactions” to rival or replace religious ones: the very procedure is a technique employed by the functionalist, instrumental reason that marks one of secularism’s limits. But the best of these essays—and there are many outstanding ones—are aware of Moore’s distinction. Indeed, the feelings expounded in them are not the ones generally associated with the sense of mastery attending Enlightenment rationalism—power, control, and self-assertion. Instead one finds an affirmation of feelings and emotional states that might seem to belong to the domain of religion—helplessness, gratitude, wonder, and the pleasures of being overwhelmed. Maintaining a distinction between these and their religious cousins depends on what one does with them (for instance, an awareness of our fundamental “helplessness,” one essays contends, should not be mistaken for a Pauline affirmation of “weakness”) and on how one understands their source or object (is wonder generated by the sentiment of logos in the world, or by the unpredictability of the world’s fecund, aimless becoming?). Several essays point to a blurring of creedal boundaries and to the possibility of shared experiences that do not stand or fall depending on the interpretive frame in which they occur. Many suggest that that secular “enchantment” is more akin to a kind of pagan piety than to a rationalist “secular humanism,” but there are some who want to have their purpose-thwarting polytheistic cake and eat their rational progressivism too. I do not think that is possible to do, but this book shows, at the very least, that secularism is more emotionally varied and robust than its critics think.