Abstract
Brian R. Clack, Love, Drugs, Art, Religion: The Pains and Consolations of Existence, Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vt., 2014; 206 pp.: 9781409406754, £65.00/$109.95 (hbk), 9781409406761, £19.99/$39.95 (pbk)
Brian Clack argues that life is unbearable and that to get through it we need palliatives such as drugs, love, art and religion. He distinguishes these from mere distractions like sport or shopping, in that they can be systematically taken up to stop us cracking up completely. The subject is serious and it contains some good practical wisdom. The thesis though interesting is unpersuasive, however, and it is far too heavily dependent on great chunks of Freud. Clack says sensible things about drugs, quoting that stern moralist Kant’s praise of drinking in public which ‘opens the heart and is an instrumental vehicle of a moral quality, namely frankness’. He is also sensible about love, rejecting the wilder claims of romantic love to bring about an eternal unity in favour of what George Eliot in Adam Bede described as the greatest thing for two human souls, which is ‘to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain’.
When it comes to religion, Clack has been seduced by Freud’s powerful prose and has fallen for the thesis that religion is only wishful thinking. There is a psychological explanation for Freud’s attitude to religion, however, which lies in the close relationship he had with his devout Catholic nurse who was taken away from him, a thesis which Clack does not discuss. The truth is that Freud, like Clack, rejects the claims of religion on general grounds, and then looks for a psychological rationale of the phenomenon. Moreover, a wish for something to be true, whether conscious or unconscious, in itself sheds no light on whether it is in fact true or not.
There is also a big difference between religion, love and the arts, on the one hand, and intoxicants, on the other. The use of either drugs or drink is a conscious choice, the former all come with a claim. They take hold in some mysterious way. In the end, after what he admits is a very negative chapter on religion, Clack comes to a use for it as a palliative. Stripped of all truth claims it enables us to live with humility and acceptance, as we contribute our own little verse to the ongoing story of humanity, And humour is a help, so Woody Allen is appealed to: ‘Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber at weekends.’ But this raises a big question. If so many of the people we admire, many of whom are non-believers, feel, in Ronald Dworkin’s words, that it is important that we live well, does this not suggest that something big is at stake in human life? Why do most people go on going on rather than commit suicide, and go on with a sense of the moral importance of doing so? This points up why Clack is so disappointing in his chapter on the arts, limiting their role to preparing us for the worst that life has in store for us. Yet the importance of the arts, like the importance we attach to living well, is something that claims us, and what claims us are the values of truth, artistic integrity and even beauty.
A final criticism of this book has to do with the whole search for palliatives, especially through religion. In may be that the proper role of religion is not to help us accept life but to arouse our anger at the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be, and to drive us to narrow that gap.