I once heard of a conference of psychoanalysts where the ‘meaning’ of the Fifth Symphony by Romantic composer Gustav Mahler was to be explained. (That’s the kind of conference I would pay money not to attend.) Mahler’s Fifth is a monumental work, no doubt. Fun fact: it was the first symphony to call for trombones in the brass section. The fourth movement is said to be a love letter to Mahler’s wife, Alma. (No trombones in that movement, by the way.)

  The story of the composer’s turbulent personal and professional life (including the fact that he revised his Fifth Symphony every time he conducted it) is fascinating and may help to explain the emotional intensity and depth of the work. But its meaning? In the case of that fourth movement, surely Alma didn’t need a group of psychoanalysts trying to put into words the devotion her husband had so eloquently and movingly expressed in his music.

  When you hear Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion sung in the original German, you don’t need a translation to explain why you are moved to tears by the final chorus. I used to sing in a chamber choir that performed many works in languages other than English. Naively, I once asked our conductor during a rehearsal what the song we were singing (also in German, I think) was all about. The meaning of the words was explained to me, and it made absolutely no difference to my appreciation of the sublime music.

  Were I to stand in front of English landscape painter John Constable’s The Hay Wain or Australian impressionist Tom Roberts’s Shearing the Rams, I would wish simply to allow myself to be drawn into the scenes—calm and bucolic in one case; sweaty and active in the other; visually beautiful in both. It would only detract from my simple enjoyment of the paintings to have their possible—especially their ‘political’—meanings explained to me. Was Constable celebrating the importance of family-based agriculture in English life as a form of protest against the enclosure of common land and the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century? Was Roberts, as the website of the National Gallery of Victoria suggests, ‘reflect[ing] the emergence of a national identity defined through heroic rural activity and the importance of the wool industry’ in the Australian colonies? Was Shearing the Rams mere propaganda, intended to promote the myth of the authentic Aussie as a ‘bushie’ when the overwhelming majority of the population were townsfolk? If that’s the case, I’m suddenly less interested in it—or at least I’m interested in it in a different way.

  A bit of historical or cultural context can be interesting if you’re looking for some information that frames or helps to explain your personal response to the work. But what’s wrong with simple enjoyment, unalloyed?

  The experience of viewing abstract art can be more complex, but it’s still about our emotional response (or lack of response, if the work leaves us cold). When I look at US painter Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles in the National Gallery of Australia, I simply respond to the painting’s visual grandeur and complexity. Is it, as some would say, a message from Pollock’s unconscious? I suppose it is, if you think of our imagination as the voice of the unconscious—but so what? I don’t need to invade the privacy of Pollock’s unconscious mind in order to appreciate his work.

  When Susan Sontag spoke of ‘the revenge of the intellect’, perhaps she was suggesting that a mind too highly tuned to the rational might be offended when confronted with something as ineffable as a symphony, a painting, or even a poem that doesn’t quite seem to ‘make sense’. I certainly don’t look at a painting like Blue Poles and exclaim, ‘Yes, but what does it mean?’ That would indeed seem like the revenge of the intellect—a way of questioning the value of the work; even of putting the artist down.

  I’m never sure whether to regard sport as an art form—professional sport is certainly an arm of the entertainment industry—but I recently heard a prominent Australian basketballer say that, from now on, her team would be playing ‘meaningful basketball’. It sounded very earnest. Did she mean that, until now, it had all been meaningless? It’s a serious question if you’re engaged in the mad hunt for meaning in everything.

  Meaningful basketball? That sounds a bit like analysing the meaning of Mahler’s Fifth. Just run up and down the court, will you, and try to put the ball through the hoop more times than your opponents do, in ways that are legal, and you’ll win the game. The win might ‘mean a lot’ to the players and spectators, but can basketball—or cricket, or tennis, or football, or synchronised swimming—be inherently ‘meaningful’? And, as a spectator, or even as a player, could I tell the difference between meaningful and meaningless basketball?

  What’s the meaning of a poem that amuses or provokes me? What’s the meaning of a novel I can’t put down? Yes, poets and novelists try to convey meaning via the words they use, though the meanings we readers attach to them might be rather different from those intended. But my overall response to reading such works is about more than the sum of those words; more ephemeral, more subjective, less precise than anything we might normally call ‘meaning’.

  Of course we have to interpret allegories, parables and metaphors. We have to interpret each other’s nods and winks. As a social researcher, I spent my working life trying to make sense of what I was hearing from respondents. And, yes, parts of this book involve the interpretation of other people’s words (though perhaps we wouldn’t think of most quotations as works of art, except those that come from poems, novels, plays or songs).

  When it comes to art, I’m with Susan Sontag. Don’t kill the joy, or the pain, or even the bewilderment of our direct emotional response to art by trying to intellectualise it. I prefer my Mahler, like my basketball, to be meaningless, thanks.

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  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … It is the opium of the people

  Karl Marx

  German philosopher, journalist and social revolutionary (1818–1883)

  We’ve probably all heard Karl Marx’s assertion that ‘religion is the opium of the people’. And we’ve probably assumed that he was being dismissive of religion, as though it were merely an opiate, a bromide, a way of insulating ourselves from harsh realities. While it’s true that Marx, the philosopher considered the father of communism, thought religion would ultimately become unnecessary once the oppressed workers were freed from their chains, he was more sympathetic to the role of religion than is popularly thought.

  Reading his description of it as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’, we realise he placed a very high value on religion as a coping mechanism for victims of inequality and injustice. This is, indeed, a significant part of the role religion has played throughout history.

  When people are enslaved, persecuted or otherwise oppressed, religion in its various forms has been a source of comfort, consolation and hope. America’s 250-year history of enslaving African people produced powerful religious songs, the ‘spirituals’ like ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ and ‘Steal Away’ that expressed the religious faith of the oppressed and their hope for freedom in the world to come.

  Whether it was Moses leading the Israelites out of their bondage in Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE, or the Roman Catholic ‘liberation theology’ of the twentieth century that sought justice for poor and exploited South Americans through political activism, the connection Marx identified between oppression and religious faith is undeniable.

  At the individual level, too, those seeking the consolations of religion are more likely to be coming from a place of distress, woundedness or confusion than from a position of affluence and comfort. There are, of course, many affluent and materially comfortable religious believers, and we’ll come to them in a moment, yet who among us is not wounded? Who among us is not in need of consolation?

  What Marx could not have foreseen is that, as we move through the twenty-first century, and in spite of revolutions in many places that have often resulted in improved conditions for workers, religion is on the rise globally. Staggeringly so, in fact. You might not think so if you live in Scandinavia, some parts of Western Europe, or countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where church attendance is at an all-time low (though, in the case of Australia, about 60 per cent of the population still identifies with a religion). But the global picture is very different. Between 75 and 80 per cent of the world’s population identifies with one of the four great religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism (though many Buddhists object to that being called a religion, since it does not entail belief in a god). And then there are all the smaller religions: Judaism, Baha’i, Shinto, Taoism, and so on. It might have shocked Marx to learn that, after Joseph Stalin’s attempt to stamp out religion in the Soviet Union, it is now growing strongly in Russia.

  Might all of this mean that, if we accept the connection asserted by Marx, oppression is increasing around the world and religion is the refuge being sought by the downtrodden? It’s not that simple. There are many societies where religion thrives because of oppression of the poor and dispossessed—not surprisingly, Nigeria, where poverty and hardship remain widespread, has one of the highest rates of church attendance in the world—but there are many other societies where religious believers are committed to relieving poverty and suffering without necessarily having experienced it themselves.

  And ‘oppression’ can come in various guises. In some countries—such as Spain during the centuries of the punitive Roman Catholic Inquisition, and again in the twentieth century under the fascist regime of Franco, and in Ireland until very recently—institutional religion was actually a source of oppression while pretending to offer relief from its yoke.

  Perhaps Marx’s view was too narrow, influenced as it was by his conviction that an end to the class struggle was inevitable and that the workers would ultimately prevail in a new, classless, religionless world of economic and social freedom and equality. For many Marxists, communism itself became a kind of religion in its fervour, its hero worship to the point of idolatry, and its faith in a utopian future.

  Yet religion doesn’t merely persist; it thrives and has always thrived, one way or another. Why is that? The most obvious explanation is that we humans demand answers! We want explanations; we dislike unsolved mysteries. And so when it comes to ultimate questions—like ‘Why are we here?’, or ‘What happens when we die?’, or even ‘How should we live?’—many have turned to religion either to supply the answers or, at the very least, to provide a context for contemplating and living with the mysteries.

  For most religious believers in a wealthy society like ours, ‘oppression’ hardly comes into it. Yet religion does offer a safe haven—socially as well as spiritually. For some, it provides a vehicle for expressing our noblest impulses, especially to do with the relief of suffering among the poor, the marginalised, the abused and the disadvantaged. (Where would we be, in Australia, if faith-based charities did not do so much of that work?)

  Marx never thought that religion was irrational: indeed, he thought it a perfectly rational response to oppression. But it was more than that. His reference to ‘the heart of a heartless world’ chimes with the central message of the major religions—that love is the greatest thing in the world, eclipsing even faith and hope in its transformative power.

  The class struggle goes on. The downtrodden, marginalised and oppressed will continue to seek whatever consolations they can find—in escapist entertainment, sport, music, alcohol, opiates … and religion. But even for the economically secure, the embrace of religious faith and practice increases the chances of a social conscience being awakened and compassion being shown towards the disadvantaged.

  Perhaps that—as well as its attempts to deal with life’s mysteries—is the greatest contribution religion can make in a capitalist, neoliberal, secular West. Marx himself dreamt of a world in which each gave according to their ability and took according to their need. And don’t we all?

  13

  It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us

  Marianne Williamson

  American writer and political activist (born 1952)

  This is a brilliant but possibly puzzling piece of wisdom. Often mistakenly attributed to Nelson Mandela’s inaugural address on becoming president of South Africa, it was actually written by the US author and political activist Marianne Williamson. A couple of thousand years earlier, Plato is supposed to have said something similar: ‘We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.’

  Light. Darkness. We’re obviously in the realm of metaphor here. Light stands for something, but what? ‘Enlightenment’ is one obvious contender, but then you have to ask where enlightenment might come from: intelligence? Education? Experience? The power of reason?

  All those answers depend on the vagaries of genetic inheritance, or the trajectory of a particular life, or an insight that comes to some of us but not others. Surely Williamson and Plato were referring to something less accidental, something universal, something inherent in human nature.

  Stick with the metaphor for a moment. Think of light as the capacity for love that lies at the very core of our nature, simply because we’ve evolved into social beings whose primary duty to our species (right up there with reproduction and care of our habitat) is to create and maintain harmonious, cooperative communities. In fact, our ability to sustain communal life over millennia represents a strong argument in favour of love—in its many and varied forms—as the essential characteristic of humans.

  I can hear an immediate objection: what about all those people who seem to be motivated by hate, jealousy, revenge, or a desire to destroy or dominate? And surely none of us is only loving—aren’t most of us driven by base motives as well as noble ones?

  Stick with the metaphor. What do we know about light? It casts shadows. The ‘light’ of faith, for instance—whether it’s the faith of the believer in a god or the faith of the scientist in a new hypothesis—casts the shadow of doubt. The ‘light’ of hope, similarly, casts the shadow of fear. And those shadows create very convenient hiding places for people who are afraid of faith; afraid of hope.

  Yet how could members of a species like ours be afraid of something as beautiful, as energising, as potentially transformative as the power of love in their life?

  The melancholy truth is that many of us are frightened by the demands of living lovingly, when it sometimes seems easier to resort to negative, egotistical alternatives that beckon so seductively. If we acknowledge, as I believe we must, that the good life is the life lived for others, then we’re bound to falter sometimes; to wonder whether we have the courage or the energy for that kind of life; to doubt whether we can be that virtuous all the time. (And, yes, love’s work is often the hardest work of all.)

  Some of us even baulk at doing things that would allow us to blossom into the richness of our full potential. We fail to nurture our capacity for friendship. We’re too frightened to sing, to dance, to play, to draw, to write poetry, partly for fear of embarrassing ourselves in the eyes of others, but partly also because the prospect of ‘expressing ourselves’ may seem too daunting.

  (If you’re wondering whether you have the creative spark in you, just look back at some of the stories, poems or art you produced in primary school: it’s there, in all of us. In fact, our creativity is one of the loveliest ways we can connect with each other. Sometimes, of course, creative self-expression can be an intensely private, personal thing, but mostly it’s an act of sharing.)

  In the same passage as the ‘light and darkness’ reference, Williamson also wrote: ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’ We hide behind claims of modesty or shyness or inadequacy: Oh, I couldn’t do that! But what if ‘that’ is something that could bring you into the light—something that might allow you to flourish as a loving, giving human?

  Maybe you should apply for that dream job. Ask that person who’s ‘too good for you’ out on a date. Write that story. Knock on that neighbour’s door and say hello. Offer to help that person in distress. Don’t give in to the fear of rejection or of looking stupid.

  Carl Jung wrote: ‘As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.’ Mere being! Who wants that?

  For people of mystical or religious inclination, the light may be interpreted as the ‘divine spark’ within us all. If your preference is for a more prosaic or secular world-view, then perhaps you could simply acknowledge the obvious point that the world would be a far better place if we all acted out of positive, loving motives and refused to retreat into the darkness of negativity, pessimism, cynicism or despair.

  Let me invite you to ponder this beautiful line from the English poet Philip Larkin: ‘What will survive of us is love.’ Who wants to be remembered for having hidden in the darkness, afraid even to love?

  Love is like the sun at the centre of our being—the source of both light and warmth. If we don’t let that light shine through our every act, our every interaction, our every intention, then we diminish ourselves as surely as any light-dependent creature trapped in the dark.

  As long as we’re here, we’re influencing the world we live in, one way or another. We can choose, moment by moment, whether that influence will come from our light or our darkness. (Is that really a choice?)

  Faith. Hope. Love. The three most reliable sources of the light that sustains the human spirit. Don’t be afraid of faith: it’s a bulwark against despair. Don’t be afraid of hope: it drives out fear. Above all, don’t be afraid of love: loving—and being loved—is how we become our best selves.

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