Recently a member of the InterSpiritual Agnostics & Seekers facebook group posted a link to Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto by Lesley Hazleton. I was immediately interested in this book, bought it and read it. Since my midlife crisis I have self-identified as an agnostic.
The title of the first chapter, BEYOND EITHER/OR, helped me to connect with the approach of Hazleton. In recent years I have learned to appreciate BOTH/AND thinking and I have become increasingly skeptical of EITHER/OR. Very roughly, either/or is western thinking and both/and is eastern.
I also liked the first two sentences of the book: “There are some four hundred houseboats in Seattle. Many, like mine, are little more than shacks on rafts, but this may be the only one with a mezuzah at its entrance.” This indicated to me that the author was taking a very personal approach to her subject matter, that she would be writing from personal experience.
And I soon began enjoying some of the content.
To be agnostic is to love… paradox.
...the inability to muster the honesty of the three words “I don’t know” only leads to a radical dishonesty.
At its best, however, agnosticism goes further: it takes a spirited delight in not knowing. And this delight is no boorish disdain for knowledge and intellect. Rather, it’s a recognition that we need room for mystery, for the imagination, for things sensed but not proven, intuited but not defined—room in which to explore and entertain possibilities…
“Spiritual but not religious” is an expression of a very human yearning for an opening of mind and heart—a sense of soul and spirit that enhances day-to-day experience...
So while I offer this book as an agnostic manifesto, I recognize that it’s a strange kind of manifesto indeed—one that makes no claims to truth, offers no certainties, eschews brashly confident answers to grand existential questions.
But I was disappointed with Chapter TWO - THE THREE-LETTER WORD. It was not the subject of the chapter, God, but the position of the subject in the book which discouraged me. Why are agnostics so quick to get into the controversial God matter? It is important, but it need not be our priority. I would have preferred this chapter to be near the end of this book.
That said, Hazleton did have some interesting things to say.
The anthropomorphic idea of God says far more about humans than about anything remotely transcendent.
By definition, something that’s ineffable is beyond words, so the use of words appears doomed to failure.
Names pin things down, confining them to a graspable conceptual space. They make things deceptively solid and thus create the illusion of understanding. Which is why naming God might be the trickiest business of all.
Chapter THREE - IN DOUBT WE TRUST gives us some important insights. It captures the reasons why I prefer to self-identify as an agnostic rather than an atheist. I have personally experienced the difficulty of getting along with dogmatic atheists, very difficult and unpleasant interactions.
Reality may require acceptance, but it does not require belief.
...when my belief is so adamantly held that it becomes central to my identity, your disbelief then undermines not only the assumed truth of what I believe, but me.
Belief is thus the product not of knowledge, but of uncertainty.
...certainty terrifies me. I recognize it in fanatics and fundamentalists of all religious stripes, in gurus and demagogues and dictators, in all those utterly convinced of their own rightness, their own inerrancy. In fact I find it hard—make that impossible—to trust anyone who never experiences doubt… Abolish all doubt, and what’s left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction, a blind and blinding refuge from both thought and humanity.
...when dogmatic atheists assume that science has all the answers, or imagine that it soon will, they are no more immune than the most literal religious fundamentalist to the deceptive enchantment of certainty.
Chapter FOUR - MYSTERY PLAY takes us into the world of writers, philosophers and others who travel in a territory beyond reason.
Can a firmly secular person have a religious experience?
...if this is illusory, it may be a necessary illusion.
I am very interested in the experiences of others, especially spiritual experiences and especially the spiritual experiences of unbelievers. Are they real or are they illusions? I do not know. But I do think that we should be very cautious about denigrating the lived experience of others. All I can say with confidence is that I have never had a transcendental experience of any kind myself.
...mystery defies the need to adhere to a single narrative and thus “make sense.” ...unencumbered by either the need to believe or the need to explain everything, the agnostic is free to experience awe without seeking to define it—to explore and interact with the world in ways that neither the rule-bound fundamentalist nor the dogmatic atheist ever dares dream of.
In chapter FIVE - MAKING MEANING Lesley Hazleton presents an excellent approach to life, one that I was very slow to learn.
There can be great beauty in the enterprise of making meaning, that very human desire to find significance in the world. But it seems to me essential that we be aware that this is what we are doing, and that we retain a certain sense of bemusement, even amusement, at our proclivity to translate the world into human terms. Aware, that is, of our own subjectivity.
Writing and sharing this book report gives me a feeling of significance. But, objectively, I know that this is a fleeting illusion. And I am at peace with the apparent contradiction.
I have seen people destroy the illusions of others, and it is not a pretty sight.
As Rebecca Goldstein succinctly puts it, “the will to matter is at least as strong as the will to believe.”
As an aside, Rebecca Goldstein is on my list of favorite atheists.
Instead of what’s the meaning of life, then, I’d rather ask what makes my life meaningful… I rejoice in there being no single meaning—in there being instead a multitude of meanings, an infinite number of ways in which we exercise our subjectivity and imagination, rendering meaningful what is objectively meaningless.
We live in a society where it is normal to ask someone “What do you do?” How we earn a living is indeed a big part of most lives. Asking “What makes your life meaningful?” seems awkward. Most people will not find meaningful work. But that does not mean that they cannot have deeply meaningful lives.
I was pleased to see chapter SIX - THE SENSE OF AN ENDING in this book. It is a subject few can comfortably talk about. But death, and the fear of death, must be faced as Hazleton does in order to live well.
...I HAVE BEEN close to my own death a number of times…
There appears to be a vast difference between imagining no human beings at all and imagining the absence of the one particular human being that is you.
Hazleton seems to have lived her life well. She has no need for prolonging her life or for an after-life. I share her view that the best response to the knowledge of death is to live as fully as possible.
But there is more that can be said. Hazleton does not focus on a great uncertainty that we all face. Most of us must live most of our lives with almost complete uncertainty of the timing of our own death. We often see premature death all around us. This is an easy matter to be in denial of.
And Hazleton also does not mention another important aspect of death. We can gain no knowledge of death from our own lived experience. We can gain no knowledge of death from the lived experience of others. A near death experience is not an experience of death. Try as we may, it is almost impossible to imagine our own transition to not being alive.
Chapter SEVEN - EVERY THING AND MORE will be delightful for mathematicians.
The basis of infinity is deceptively simple: there is no end to numbers. However large a number you can come up with, you can always add 1. Simple, but frustrating.
I have been amazed and amused by those atheists who mock the idea of eternal life given by an eternal God while embracing infinity without question.
Infinity... can absorb any number of other infinities, including an infinite number of them.
Infinity exposes the pathos of the illusion of knowing.
...mathematical language demands huge expertise, while religious language is readily available. Infinity is where physics veers into metaphysics, where mathematics becomes mystery.
The awareness of infinity is inexorably paradoxical, and this is what I love about it.
From beginning to end I enjoyed the attitude Haxleton unveiled in her book and it was on full display in chapter EIGHT - IMPERFECT SOUL.
There’s an icy starkness to perfection, a kind of echoing emptiness. Perfection, that is, is soulless. And lifeless… PERHAPS YOU HAVE to be slightly crazy to even try to talk about soul in secular terms.
Yet I persist, because I sense—and sense is the only word I can use here—that it’s important to reclaim soul from those who still conceive of it as a thing with an immortal life of its own, independent of the body.
I MAY WELL BE on a fool’s errand here… Better a fool for trying, however, than another kind of fool for not trying.
Two years ago I read Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction by Robin Le Poidevin. I wrote a short review of that book which was published by the Spiritual Naturalist Society. Robin Le Poidevinhas a very different style and he nicely complements Lesley Hazleton.
However, together these books still paint an incomplete picture of agnosticism.
For example, neither book addresses how unknowable the future is. The current pandemic makes that abundantly clear. Who, on December 31, 2019, accurately predicted what 2020 would be like? The only reasonable approach to thinking about the future is I DO NOT KNOW.
The last thought that I will express is that Lesley Hazleton seems to be the kind of person I would have liked to have known and be friends with.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesley_Hazleton
Lesley Hazleton (born 1945) is a British-American author whose work focuses on the intersection and interactions between politics and religion.