Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy. Rod Liddle
our behaviour do we have? Dawkins’s ten commandments? Or Christopher Hitchens’s injunction to turn off that fucking mobile phone? I’m sorry Richard, but it won’t wash. Where is the power and the resonance, the force?
My point here isn’t to insist from an a priori position that God exists; hell, I don’t want you to think that I’m a weirdo like my lovely mother-in-law, who keeps averring, with a strange look in her eyes, that we’re all drenched in the blood of Christ. In the sense I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter if God exists or not. What matters is that our deference to something beyond ourselves, something real or strongly imagined – the feeling within us that we should not be quite so fucking pleased with ourselves, so confident of our decisions and our ideologies – has diminished hugely over the last half-century, and particularly rapidly over the last dozen or so years. Of course, Richard Dawkins, and any decent scientist, would be forced to admit that he could not say for sure whether or not God exists, and so would be left to mumble an embarrassed ‘Uh, s’pose it COULD be, but I don’t think so, we have no scientific evidence.’ But, this being the case, why continue with the frenetic flailing, the adverts on the sides of buses, the polemics? What exactly is it that you are flailing at? ‘The irrational, the superstitious,’ Dawkins would reply, and point you towards creationist mentalists teaching kids that dinosaurs walked the earth with man on a planet formed 4,500 years ago. Yes, OK, fair enough – I’m with him on the creationists, and I’ll sign up cheerfully enough to Charles Darwin for the time being, until science decides that actually he got some of it wrong, which is what of course will happen: all manmade certainties end up being knocked down, as Ptolemy will tell you. But the mentalists promulgating creationism are no more representative of those who believe in God than are Pons and Fleischmann, the proponents of that berserk but alluring notion ‘cold fusion’, representative of science. If religion is nothing more than a ‘meme’, an idea which replicates itself ‘like a virus’, synchronically and diachronically, as Dawkins has suggested, then it still might be a meme worth clinging to, for all that.
Nor do I want to trawl through that futile little argument that hinges upon the damage done to the world through religious ideology versus the damage done to the world as a consequence of atheistic ideologies. The jihadists, with the bombs strapped to their guts, the pogroms, the annihilations, the death camps, the ethnic cleansings, the gulags, the Lubyanka, the inquisitions, the foam-flecked imam urging the destruction of the Jews and the little foam-flecked Austrian Nazi urging the same thing – all that stuff. Was National Socialism an atheistic ideology? Was Stalinism? Stalin seemed to think it was. Marxism? It seems to me, from an admittedly unscientific weighting exercise, that in this argument the scores stand at about one all, with extra time now being played. Maybe I’m wrong.
The more important point is that religion has retreated, and with it deference. I don’t mean deference simply towards God, regardless of whether He exists or not. But deference to something. Because once you chip away at deference to God, then all deference becomes much easier to do away with. You end up deferring to nothing.
Like the majority of kids growing up in the middle 1960s, I went to Sunday school every week. I did not much enjoy this. On one occasion, when I was about nine years old, I was sent to Sunday school on a morning that my parents were themselves ‘too busy’ to attend church. This struck me as grotesquely unjust and hypocritical. I was so angry, so fuelled up with resentment, as I made my way to church that morning, that I kicked Gary Lewis’s head in halfway there. He had come out of his house to laugh at me dressed up in my Sunday school attire – a ridiculous fucking tweedy jacket with matching tweedy shorts set off by a white nylon poloneck jumper. The gobby little child stood on the other side of the road hooting with mirth and shouting insults. I can’t remember what, exactly. Something like ‘Fucking poof,’ I suspect. So I ran across the road and punched him hard in the mouth, something which, as a habitual coward, I would never normally do. Gary was a big, gangling, cheerful kid, if a bit thick – I suppose the sort of person who might now be a presenter on BBC Three. His dad came out to see what the fuss was about, and to his eternal credit shepherded the two of us into their backyard to slug it out properly, while he watched and occasionally commented with admirable neutrality. Reader, I won that fight. It was the anger that did it – not the anger at Gary, but at my mother and father. Gary was just the unfortunate recipient.
Until about 1972 my family went to church every Sunday, almost without fail. I suppose mine was a slightly more religiously inclined household than most at the time, although there probably wasn’t much in it. While church attendance in Britain began to dwindle after the Second World War – fairly rapidly in the case of the non-conformist faiths, of which my family were part, less so in the case of Roman Catholics – even by the mid-1960s more than 50 per cent of parents still sent their kids to Sunday school. Whether or not the parents themselves could be arsed to turn up to church and sing absurd and didactic Victorian hymns when they could be digging the garden, they still felt that it was somehow ‘right’ that their kids should be properly indoctrinated – not so much into a faith, but into a system of mores which were, more or less, shared by the country as a whole. Along with Sunday school came injunctions against criminality – an absolutist, simplistic, Manichean divide between right and wrong – and various other strictures which would today, I suppose, be seen as somewhat right-of-centre and de trop: work hard, save money, don’t shag around, marry for love and for life, don’t get pissed, don’t gamble, do as you’re fucking told – despite the fact that the church I attended, the Methodists, had long been regarded as left-leaning. Attending Sunday school was also a conscious sacrifice, something one did because it was apparently the right thing to do, and there’s an end to it, even if I hated it, most of the time. I’m not so daft as to suggest that if kids still went to Sunday school there’d be no criminality, no private debt, and everyone would love one another. Even by my standards, that would be overstating the case a little. But the decline of religious belief is in the mix, somewhere, as both a cause and a symptom.
Of course, the decline of a sort of semi-conscious adherence to organised religion has not been without its benefits. My point is not that the increasing irrelevance of God has been an unequivocally bad thing. One of the problems we have today is a sort of shrill infantile absolutism, which you will encounter on several occasions within this book. It is largely the construct of the libtard authoritarian left, but, frighteningly, those from beyond that smug and uniquely metropolitan middle-class tradition also succumb to it, often as a consequence of the public opprobrium whipped up by these intolerant and narcissistic monkeys, howling their outrage on the messageboards and the blogs.
Take the example of the decline of religious observance, which we will call ‘x’. I am suggesting that certain other stuff, which we might call a, b and c, has occurred as an unintended consequence, or partial consequence, of x, and that we might wish that this had not happened – an overweening narcissism, for example; and the loss of the notion of deferred gratification; the growth of moral relativism; an increase in what, pace Durkheim, we might call anomie; and a society in which the collectivist approach is increasingly rejected in favour of the individualistic, and a concomitant absence of something we might call ‘spirituality’. Even here, not all of these unintended consequences have been wholly bad – it is merely that something has been lost along the way, and that it would be better if we still had it, whatever it is. The problem with the liberal faux left is that in this instance – as in many others – it tends to deny that a, b and c have happened at all, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Because, for them, the decline of organised religion is a good thing per se, nothing bad can ever come of it, and any suggestion that bad stuff has happened must be denied outright. We will meet more of this witless and totalitarian argument later, especially when dealing with women’s rights.
To be clear, there are important caveats. Adherence to organised religion inculcated in the lower orders a mute quiescence and a refusal to ask difficult questions of their economic and political masters. Its strictures on marriage and sexual freedoms made the lives of many people more miserable than anyone, other than a thug, might have wished. There was an anti-intellectual narrowness about its multifarious certainties. And there was other stuff. It meant we couldn’t go shopping on a Sunday, or indeed do much else on a Sunday for that matter. (Hell, I wasn’t