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Overview
Whether or not we believe in religion, many of us feel drawn toward a spiritual life. Maybe we love cathedral architecture, Mozart's Requiem, or Buddhist literature.
The School of Life is a secular organization fascinated by the gaps left in modern society by the gradual disappearance of religion. They're interested in how hard it is to find a sense of community, why rituals are dying out, and when we crave the solemn quiet only found in religious buildings. This book lays out how we might absorb the best lessons of religion, update them for our times and incorporate them into our daily lives and societies-without taking on the theological or doctrinal elements.
- A SECULAR GUIDE TO FINDING SPIRITUALITY
- EXPLORES HOW ART, PSYCHOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY can fill the void of religion in modern life.
- PART OF A SERIES OF GIFTABLE ESSAYS FROM THE SCHOOL OF LIFE, including What is Psychotherapy?, How to Find Love, and Self-Knowledge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781912891030 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The School of Life |
| Publication date: | 07/07/2020 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 869,751 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.31(w) x 7.13(h) x (d) |
About the Author
The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.
The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 174,000 Instagram followers and 166,000 Twitter followers.
The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.
Read an Excerpt
II. The Ills of Modernity
We situate the need for a replacement for religion in a variety of psychological and emotional problems (unwittingly and unknowingly) generated for us by secular life. The conditions of modernity are in many ways profoundly better than those under which the vast majority of humanity lived for more or less the whole of history. But along with its manifest benefits, modernity has brought a special range of troubles into our lives which we would be wise to try to unpick and to understand.
Without as yet pushing in detail for what the solutions might be, we identify eight central ills stemming from certain of modernity’s leading ideas - and to which any replacement for religion would have to locate responses.
1. Perfectibility
A fundamental tenet of modern societies is that perfection is within our grasp. Science, that most prized of contemporary tools, seems to guarantee us that we will, eventually, be able to overcome all that bedevils us, the pain, stupidity and error which make us so much less than we might be. It is simply a matter of time.
Our societies stress that it is within our capacities - individually and collectively - to aim for perfection. The modern era was founded upon the experience of astonishing improvements across almost every field of endeavour: we learnt to heat our houses, to feed and clothe ourselves adequately, to criss-cross the globe, to defeat disease and to introduce reliable mechanisms for learning, law and justice.
Our many improvements have imbued us with an unparalleled confidence, resulting in a notion that progress should be deemed a preordained and general rule of existence. We know that we may of course, right now, be facing considerable challenges and reversals and that there is much evidence of our ongoing proclivity for stubbornness and stupidity. But we refuse to hold our sorrows as inevitable: they are, rather, a sign of interrupted and delayed progress. Even death may one day be solved.
A problematic result of this grand vision of human progress is that our ongoing imperfections weigh upon us all the more heavily: we are prone, more than our forebears, to feel profoundly frustrated, impatient, cursed and betrayed with all that continues to defy our will.
We respond to political or economic stagnation with rage at the stupidity of those who lead us; we are unwilling to countenance (as our ancestors once did) that human societies are hugely complex machines. The unhappiness of relationships is quickly ascribed to being with the wrong person - as opposed to the result of the inherently arduous goal of trying to be happy in multiple dimensions with another person over a lifetime. We are no less ambitious around our labour. We look askance at the previous, routine assumption that our jobs would always, in some ways, be something of a curse: we no longer work merely for money, we work to fulfil our souls. As for our psyches, we believe ourselves capable of overcoming any confusion or compulsions generated in our childhoods and of mastering our minds through the insights of therapy.
For most of history, we lived with a degree of reconciliation to the idea of ongoing woe and turmoil. With modernity was born the beautiful and fateful notion that this world could through the application of intelligence be rendered conclusively saner, more manageable and kinder. The origins of this attitude were immensely noble, but the results have been strange and unexpected. We have too often come to despise and lament the actual conditions of our lives.
Table of Contents
I: Introduction: The Death of GodII. The Ills of Modernity
III. Consolations
IV. Credo
V. Architecture
VI. Art
VII. The Priestly Function
VIII. Community
IX. Saints
X. Rituals