Politics After the Death of God

9/23/2018—If you had to use one word to describe politics today, angry would be pretty accurate. This anger has no real content. As the 1976 movie Network predicted, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.” A lot of people have said that Network predicted the Age of Trump. But what is most poignant about the movie is that those people shouting out their windows at the end of the movie had no idea of what their problem was and could not have described it. In the words of the headline in the New York Review of the new Network play, Mad As Hell About What? It isn’t obvious what we are mad about and the usual bromides are irrelevant. The people who say we’re mad about some issue or other are wrong.

We are not angry about some issue—government spending, taxes, the environment, social issues. None of those things could account for this kind of anger.

It would be closer to the actual phenomenon to say, we’re mad as hell that we’ve been robbed. We have lost something crucial and necessary. We know that. We sense something to which we feel entitled, though we cannot say what it is exactly that we have lost.

I believe we have lost the solidity and reliability of the good universe. At least my suggestion reaches the depth that is obviously driving us.

You can put that suggestion any way you like—we have lost God; we have lost meaning; we have lost purpose. It makes you furious and, as Fintan O’Toole noted in that same New York Review story, this kind of fury is “dangerously satisfying and…treacherously entertaining.” Especially is this so in a world in which there is nothing else other than passionate intensity. Our anger is its own justification.

How do we escape this anger? The only way out is to rediscover real purpose, real meaning, real value, in the universe. The greatest danger of the materialism that replaced God, which insists that science does not incorporate truths revealed by religious experience, is that it leads to the view that “the universe provides no normative values to guide the future course of civilization.”

Griffin believes that we are simply mistaken. The universe does provide normative values to guide us. And that guidance is not supernatural. Since that is the case, we don’t have to hate each other. We can sit down together to discover how this is so and what we are being taught. Then we would have a politics that would work again. We could still be angry, but not about everything.