Willingly Cuffed: Shedding Idealism

Ex-Scientologist Paul Haggis, director of the Oscar-winning movie Crash, complains that “We lock up a portion of our own mind. We willingly put cuffs on. We willingly avoid things that could cause us pain, if we looked. If we can just believe something, then we don’t have to really think for ourselves, do we?” Which religion is not like that?

Indeed, but I’m wondering more and more which society is not like that?

I very much understand that living in a society involves trade-offs. To live together in relative peace and benefit from the positive sum gains of specialization and trade, not to mention security, involves forfeiting one’s right to murder, steal, rape, and slander. That is all for the best.

However, in a recent book titled The Hedonist Manifesto, Michel Onfray described what he considered the difference between Christian atheism and post-Christian atheism. It was an idea that had been independently floating around in my own mind for a while, but without a label or vocabulary to discuss it very clearly.

A Post-Christian Atheism 

The expression “post-Christian atheism” might strike you as redundant. The substantive alone leads you to believe that one has already gone beyond Christianity and that one is now down off the hill of religion. But by virtue of the Judeo-Christian impregnation of our episteme, atheism itself is forged in the Catholic fire, so much so that there is a Christian atheism and the very term, oxymoronically, characterizes a real conceptual object: a philosophy that clearly denies the existence of God, but also adopts the evangelical values of the religion of Christ. 

Thus, the death of God sometimes goes hand in hand with the morality of the Bible. Those who adopt this option deny transcendence and in the next breath defend Christian values in isolation from their theological legitimizations—values that are preserved and honored by virtue of sociological legitimacy. Heaven may be empty, but the world would be better off with the love-thy-neighbor mentality, forgiveness, charity, and other virtues like generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, prudence, temperance, and so forth. 

A post-Christian atheism emphasizes the principle of the dangerousness of God. It does not deny his existence, but reduces him to his essence: fabricated alienation; a hypostatization of humans’ own impotence; the imagination of an essence outside of oneself; and a projection of essence into an inhuman force. Like Madame Bovary, people do not want to see themselves the way they really are: limited in terms of life span, power, wisdom, and ability. Therefore, they conjure a conceptual personage that possesses the attributes they lack. Thus, God is eternal, immortal, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and so forth. 

As soon as God’s mystery is dispelled, post-Christian atheism makes a second pass, and with the same fervor, it dismantles the values inherited from the New Testament, which impede any real individual sovereignty and limit the vital expansion of subjectivity. Our morality has filled the cemeteries of World War I and has given us the monstrosity of Nazi death camps, Stalinist Gulags, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki; State terrorism of Western fascism and Eastern communism; Pol Pot, Mao, and the Rwandan genocide; and everything else that stains the twentieth century with blood. We cannot keep calling on a beautiful but inactive and impotent Soul, since its incarnation is impossible and it offers no truly attainable effects. We should elaborate a morality that is more modest but that can have real effects. Let’s abandon the ethics of heroes and saints and follow the ethics of the sage.

Onfray, Michel. A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) (pp. 34-36). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

I think the above passage illuminates exactly what it is that we continue to “willingly cuff” ourselves with. There are so many culturally built norms, mores, and expectations of individuals that simply make zero sense in an atheist, liberal, materialist world. Onfray does a great job detailing many of the values that would change or be rethought and reconstructed given you take the world as it is and not how religion or ideology want it to be.

It will remain forever strange to me that the original sin in Judeo-Christian beliefs was eating from the tree of knowledge and that upon doing so worldly pleasures were equated with sinfulness. This leads naturally to the idolatry of suffering that crystallized so perfectly with the passion of the Christ. There is a lot of suffering in the world, but much of it is our own doing, particularly when we make it an object of worship and disdain pleasure as its better half of life.

I think it’s well past time that we simply stop helping the world by adding to the amount of suffering and simply work to create a world with as much happiness as possible, without fear or disgust at the thought of pleasure. Pleasure isn’t wrong. Enjoy it while it lasts. We get about 80 years to do so, some of which we will spend sick and infirm.

​A Minimal List of Pleasures for All

1. Comfortable sleep
2. Good food
3. Clean water
4. Vigorous exercise
5. Access to learning/reading
6. Creating and sharing positive work of value
7. Social relatedness and closeness with friends and loved ones
8. Quality sex
9. Beautiful environments

Living with and engaging in the available pleasures outlined above is most of what we can ask for from daily life. If we add a sense meaning and purpose to the simple pleasures, we are ninety nine percent of the way to a well-lived life. Let’s take of the cuffs and leave the Christian atheism behind. We have all the power needed to create a world from critical reflection if we just decide to live without the Platonic idealism of the past 2,500 years. 

The costs of idealism seem to continually rise, with the list of atrocities by Onfray above being just the tip of the iceberg. A turn to liberal, hedonist, utilitarian, materialism promises to be a life full of greater well-being, happiness, and satisfaction, with less pain, suffering, and death.