I have a book out this week and, as always, it’s a torrid time, alternating between delight at good reviews (A.N. Wilson in this magazine) and despair at the massacres (the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton in the Guardian). It was just after one such dark assessment of my future that happier news arrived from an unexpected source. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, had just read the book (it had only been out two days) and tweeted his assessment to his 153,000 followers: ‘Just read Religion for Atheists. Great writing, thoughtful, disturbing. Highly recommend.’ At once, pandemonium broke out: Murdoch’s account is followed by pretty much every newspaper in the world. Journalists were calling from LA to Auckland — and my wife had to swing into her characteristic crisis-management mode, explaining that I was sadly on a plane to Newfoundland and couldn’t comment.
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The real value of the tweet is what it tells us about one of the most powerful newspaper proprietors of the age. First, he reads and (without blowing any trumpets at all; Eagleton has smashed those up for me) not wholly unambitious works. Second, he is interested in how the world might function better by drawing on the lessons of religion. We’re dealing with a theologically alive mind. And third, he feels; he gets disturbed by books, he cares about ideas. None of this should be surprising, but people get so abstracted when you hear about them only from newspapers, you forget they are three-dimensional beings all along. The tweet also threw up one of those classic moral dilemmas: someone many of whose actions you haven’t approved of (Fox News) turns around and decides they like you (they might even invite you for dinner). What do you do? Remain ‘pure’ and maintain steadfast opposition? Or enter into a dialogue? Fortunately, I’ve read enough about the history of the Jesuits to know. Start to talk, find common ground and then slowly, subtly, draw your interlocutor towards the Good. Fox News is evidently not beyond redemption.
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I took the brave step of leaving London and went to stay with some new friends in Gloucestershire. One evening, after a requisite amount of wine, we went around the table revealing our frailties. I mentioned my cowardice, anxiety and narcissism, but three of my fellow males admitted they’d recently come through profound periods of internet porn addiction — not the mild curiosity one can expect, the sort where you can’t wait to get home to look up the latest offering and are up till 3 a.m. every night. This makes me think that nowadays, only religions really still take sex seriously, in the sense of properly respecting its power to turn us away from our priorities. Only religions see it as something potentially dangerous and needing to be guarded against. We may not sympathise with what they want us to think about in the place of sex, but we can — though perhaps only after killing heaven-knows how many hours online — appreciate that sexual images can overwhelm our rational faculties with depressing ease. Secularists scorn religions for the way they get women to cover themselves up. Would a rational adult man really turn his life upside down because he caught a glimpse of a pair of knees? And who but a mental weakling could be seriously affected by the spectacle of a group of half-naked teenaged girls sauntering down the beachfront? Well, quite a lot of us. We may not want to go so far as to veil people, but perhaps we can come to see the point of reducing the unchecked flow of pornography down our fibre-optic cables. Even if we no longer believe in a deity, we may have to concede that a degree of repression might be necessary for the functioning of society. Repression is not just for Catholics, Muslims and the Victorians, but for all of us.
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Authors tend to get asked ‘what they’re working on now’, which is an elegant way of covering up that the questioner has never read anything you’ve ever written. At the moment, I tell them I’m writing a novel about marriage, with a particular focus on the challenges and joys of the married state. If my wife is anywhere nearby, people immediately offer sympathy and Charlotte will pull one of her most winsome and sympathetic smiles, which makes many want to rescue her from life with the beastly writer. When I protest and say that my book is a novel and has nothing to do with my life, no one believes me. I hope they will: the novel involves untimely death, religious doubt, adultery, professional failure and the death of a critic.
Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists is published by Hamish Hamilton.
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