Maclean's Interview With Julian Barnes

This week's Maclean's (Nov 10th issue) features an interview with Julian Barnes, author of Nothing to be Frightened of, a memoir/essay about death without God. In the interview, Kenneth Whyte asks Barnes about his atheism, among other things. Unfortunately, the interview isn't available online (yet?), but I've transcribed some of the relevant parts below:

Q: Your first line is, "I don't believe in God, but I miss him."

A: That's right, yes. I just found myself saying that when I was on some public stage and someone said, "Do you believe in God?" and that was my instant response, and it was one that on reflection I thought was true. I grew up in a family where, probably from the point when my grandmother lost her Methodist faith and became a Communist - or socialist - nearly, oh, 90 years ago, there hasn't been anything that you would call faith in the family, let alone church attendance. But, you know, when a great story ends I think we all miss it, and it was a great story. There were aspects of it that leave a sense of want. One is that if life is a mere prelude or preparation for something else, then life becomes both more trivial and more important, and if not then we can grow to our full height but that height is comparatively dwarfish. If this is all there is and this is all we are then it's a bit disappointing.

Q: You do talk about various writers and friends contemplating death and contemplating heaven and I can't recall one depiction of heaven being the least appealing.

A: Well, you sound a bit like my brother. I regard myself as a rationalist, but my brother - who's spent his life teaching ancient philosophy - is a super-rationalist and makes me seem sloppy and barely reasonable, and so part of the book is a friendly fraternal argument with my brother. He says, "I'd hate to have to spend eternity in the presence of saints and martyrs," and I say, "Well, actually, saints weren't just pious, boring fellows. They were often at the cutting edge of social change and they had often very interesting deaths, as well. And in medieval times they're probably some of the most intelligent, sophisticated people on earth. After all, Dom Pérignon - after whom the champagne is named - was a monk." I don't see why you should think that heaven must be infinitely boring.

Q: You write elsewhere that we have replaced our traditional ideas of heaven with a secular, modern heaven of self-fulfillment, where it all comes down to development of the personality and having a high-status job and pursuing material goods, which sounds, relative to what you've described, rather grim.

A: I think as modern society has become more secular we sell ourselves a sort of junior version of paradise. We too often need someone else to define what it is that we want, and in the old days religion did that for us, and nowadays it's multinational corporations trying to sell us stuff, or tone our bodies, or make us forget about death, so I don't think it's a substantial improvement.

Q: You quote somebody - I think it might have been Robespierre - on atheism being...

A: Aristocratic. Yes, that's Robespierre. I find that the hardline atheist's dismissal of people's religious beliefs as merely stupid and primitive is arrogant. And, you know, I agree with them that this life is all we have in all probability, but I don't believe that people who have a religious faith are necessarily either bigots or idiots. What I'm saying is that I find the spiritual or religious impulse in people to be natural and to be respected, even if the doings in the name of churches are often nefarious and oppressive.

Q: There seems to be most certainty about atheism in the U.K., when in a lot of the rest of the world we're seeing something of a revival in religious fervour.

A: Yes. The Brits, after all, gave Darwin to the world. I think in Europe the retreat of the traditional religions is strong. The collapse of religion in Ireland, for example, and France, and to a lesser extent Italy has been quite spectacular.

Q: America being one grand exception.

A: America is one grand exception indeed. America manages to combine extreme materialism with extreme religiosity, and it is a bizarre thought that in this presidential cycle, we could have had a woman in the White House, we might have a black man in the White House, but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell, all too literally.

[...]

I found Barnes' thought process interesting, so I'll try to get a hold of his book as soon as possible, and hopefully, I'll be able to update this post with a link to the whole interview. He's a good antidote to Hitchens' kind of atheism, so I definitely look forward to hearing more from him in the near future.