{"id":7898,"date":"2012-03-06T09:23:17","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T13:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=7898"},"modified":"2012-03-06T09:23:17","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T13:23:17","slug":"de-bottoning-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/de-bottoning-out\/","title":{"rendered":"de Bottoning Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

…& as we’re on religion, here’s a follow-up that has nothing to do with Karl or Jesus. It is a critical take on Alain de Botton’s proposal for a “temple for atheists” in his latest book Religion for Atheists<\/em> by Caspar Melville writing in the\u00a0New Humanist<\/strong><\/a>. Christopher Hitchens, where are you now that we need you! Opening paras below:<\/p>\n

\n

Caspar Melville<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n
Portrait of Alain de Botton by John Reynolds<\/span><\/caption>\n
\"Alain<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\u201cEven if religion isn\u2019t true can\u2019t we enjoy the best bits?\u201d So asks the glossy advertising campaign for Alain de Botton\u2019s new book Religion for Atheists<\/em>. His answer, if you\u2019ll excuse the spoiler, is yes. The book is packed full of proposals for how this secular asset-stripping of religion might be achieved. One of which, at least, you will no doubt already have heard. De Botton\u2019s canny wheeze of building a 46-metre atheist \u201ctemple to perspective\u201d in the City of London got a big splash in the media, complete with quotes denouncing it from Richard Dawkins and the British Humanist Association\u2019s Andrew Copson \u2013 atheists already have all the temples we need was the message \u2013 and welcoming noises from some quarters of the Church of England, glad that the godless were finally coming around to the need for spiritual symbolism.<\/p>\n

But does he really mean it? In the days following the announcement of his godless tower, de Botton fired emails out to those who had criticised the idea, including Copson and the prominent sceptic Richard Wiseman, denying that he actually intended to build the temple and suggesting that the\u00a0Guardian\u00a0had concocted the story that he had already raised half the \u00a31million it was going to cost. He had, he claims, no specific plans for a temple, he merely wanted to stimulate architects to copy what was best about religious architecture.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s done this before, reacting instantly, and sometime intemperately, to criticism. He famously told the author of a critical\u00a0New York Times\u00a0review \u201cI will hate you till the day I die\u201d \u2013 something he has publically regretted since \u2013 and got into a graceless spat with the blogger Nina Power when she criticised his book\u00a0The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. He is consequently often depicted as thin-skinned, and certainly seems prone to temper tantrums. But looked at more kindly this is all part of his unique persona as a public philosopher, someone whose aim is to push ideas, both theoretical and practical, out into the world to stimulate debate and even (that thoroughly unphilosophical thing) action. \u201cIt\u2019s okay for people to disagree,\u201d he told me, when I met him in his writerly North London apartment, \u201cto say, \u2018This idea\u2019s good but that one\u2019s crap.\u2019 I\u2019d be very happy with that. I want the debate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new book offers plenty to debate, and, as with his previous books about Proust, work and architecture (he\u2019s working on one about sex), offers it in the form of somewhat self-helpy proposals. De Botton is an unabashed fan of psychotherapy and he sets himself, as few philosophers have dared to, the task of trying to make us all better, happier people and the world a nicer place. This instrumental, neo-therapeutic public philosophising has its origin in a crisis of conscience he suffered as a Cambridge graduate student, contemplating, without relish, a life as an academic philosopher. \u201cMy own intellectual trajectory had been a very elite education, in elite institutions. Then in my mid-20s I felt I wasn\u2019t being honest. I was going to live a lie, faking interest, faking complexity, faking meaningfulness.\u201d He turned away from the arcane language and technical concerns of academic philosophy toward \u201cthe vulgar\u201d in an attempt \u201cto speak to everyone in a language they could understand\u201d.<\/p>\n

(ctd. here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…& as we’re on religion, here’s a follow-up that has nothing to do with Karl or Jesus. It is a critical take on Alain de Botton’s proposal for a “temple for atheists” in his...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,61,108],"tags":[1170,1169],"class_list":["post-7898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellectuals","category-journalism","category-whatever","tag-alain-de-botton","tag-caspar-melville"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7898"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7904,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7898\/revisions\/7904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}