Sources of the Sublime

This morning, I watched this discussion between Peter Hitchens and a pantheist philosopher. Peter Hitchens has settled firmly into his "grumpy old codger" phase and now regularly turns up to interviews but refuses to defend his beliefs, insisting that he's not trying to convince anybody of anything. It reminds me of Fr. Fredrick Copleston's famous retort to Bertrand Russell, when Russell denied that the universe needed an explanation: "If you refuse to sit at the board you can't be checkmated."

But that's by the by. The part of the inteview that prompted this blog post was where the philosopher claimed that various highly secularized society have been shown to be the happiest, while many religious societies are less happy.

This is the sort of statistic that used to bother me when I was an agnostic seeker. It doesn't really bother me anymore, for several reasons:

1) I'm increasingly sceptical of these findings. Social science is incredibly ideological and I simply don't have faith in its claims. I would have to examine the methodology of every single study to accept them, and even then, how can I know that the results weren't faked? Should the citizens of the Soviet Union have believed the social science produced by their universities?

2) Even if it's true, what is happiness? It's a big question. Hitchens opposes happiness to pleasure in his own answer. That's one criticism. I think there are others.

I like Nietzsche's line: "Man does not seek happiness. Only the Englishman does". (This was  swipe at English utlitarian philosophers.)

Obviously, misery is not desirable and people need a base level of happiness for any kind of human flourishing to be possible. But I think that there are a lot of things which we believe we would be happier without, but whose loss would actually grieve us-- over time.

Which brings me to my actual point-- the sublime. I think that many conservatives (myself included) are motivated by a desire for the sublime-- for themselves and for others.

(The sublime is actually difficult to pursue on your own. The achievement of the sublime is generally collaborative, both in the present and over generations).

I think that many of the things that liberals are now seeking to erode are sources of the sublime:

1) Organized religion, even for non-believers. Liturgy, feasts and fasts, hymns, ceremony, hierarchy, religious taboos, the sense of the sacred, all of that.

2) Masculinity and femininity.

3) National traditions and national identity (as well as ethnic traditions, regional traditions, etc.)

4) Marriage and the family.

5) Childhood innocence.

6) Inconvenience. Society is, in many ways, becoming ever more convenient and the gain in convenience is often outweighed by the loss of the sublime, even if it's a mild form of the sublime. Think of how people get nostalgic about camping and all the discomforts attendant upon that. Or how some streaming services have gone back to releasing TV series through weekly episodes, rather than all at once, to retain the pleasure of a communal experience rather than individualized binge-watching. (Admittedly, it's not really liberals who are pushing for this one, and they are often on Team Tradition in this case.)

7) The reading of poetry, and the enrichment of ordinary language and thought which is brought about by lots of people being familiar with a substantial corpus of poetry. (Again, conservatives are just as much to blame as liberals here.) 

Here's a simple example. In old books one frequently comes across this line from Browning: "But a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?". It's one of dozens or perhaps hundreds of lines of poetry which it was simply assumed the reader would recognize.

Another example. On a long-ago episode of The Late Late Show, Ireland's oldest TV programme, I remember the host Gay Byrne talking about some old department store and saying: "Generations have trod, have trod, have trod." He could simply assume that a large amount of viewers would recognize this was a quotation from Hopkins. It added a certain elevation to his patter. I can't imagine the current host doing this.

Is it possible I'm projecting my own sensibilities onto other people? Yes. But I'm increasingly convinced of the opposite: that everybody really does care about the sublime, and become very nostalgic and regretful when one of its sources are removed.