In the summer of 2003, I began filming the series
"Atheism, a Rough History of Disbelief".
As part of the process
I talked to a number of writers, scientists, historians and philosophers.
Having secured their cooperation
I was very embarrassed to find that a large proportion of what went on
ended up in the cutting room floor,
simply because the series would have lasted 24 hours otherwise.
But as it happens, the BBC agreed with me
that the conversations were too interesting to be junked,
and with these 6 supplementary programmes,
they made the extremely unusual decision
to go back to the original material and to broadcast at length
some of the conversations which I had.
Conversations with people such as the English biologist, Richard Dawkins,
the American philosopher, Daniel Dennett,
the Cambridge theologian, Denys Turner,
the American playwright, Arthur Miller,
the English philosopher, Colin McGinn,
and the American Nobel-prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg.
In his long professional life
as one of America's most distinguished playwrights,
Arthur Miller has brought warmth, wit and intelligence
to bear on the American scene.
When I met him in his New York apartment,
I asked him about his early life,
about his attitude to Judaism,
and the extent to which he felt that there has grown up in our time
a strange association in the Christian mind between Judaism and disbelief -
the idea that there's something peculiar about the Jews
which makes them peculiarly susceptible to profane disbelief.
Well, of course, anti-Semitism goes under a thousand disguises,
and one of them is certainly that the Jews are atheists at heart.
Of course, they don't believe in Christ.
And that makes anybody, if not an atheist, then pretty close.
A heathen, perhaps.
When you were a boy in Brooklyn,
were you in an orthodox or observing family?
They were observing two or three times a year.
Apart from that, they were busy trying to make a living and the rest of it.
We were not... They were...
If they were anything, they were observant or orthodox.
But that only occurred during the "high holidays".
The rest of the time, they were free to do whatever they wanted.
They didn't go to the synagogue every Saturday, they didn't pray.
It was a kind of... obedient nod
in the right direction.
But as a child of that type of family,
which I suppose in some way, was similar to mine,
though it was perhaps less observant than the one you describe,
did you yourself begin to differ
from the orthodox background from which you came?
Well, I tried to be a religious person when I was 12, 13, 14.
It lasted about two years.
And then, it simply vanished.
I simply lay down one evening to go to sleep,
and woke up the next day and it wasn't there any more.
And I guess it was part of my growing up
that I would be searching for my roots somewhere.
And I found them elsewhere.
I couldn't find them in religion because religion,
especially in the Depression '30s,
seemed absolutely absurdly irrelevant.
We were in the midst of a terrific social crisis and the religious,
in general, had nothing to say about it.
But were there other reasons,
apart from the political irrelevance of religion?
Did you have, as it were, other reasons -
say, rational reasons - for thinking...?
Of course, I no longer could believe...
I quickly, at some point in my late teens,
began reading and surmising that the idea of religion
was a creation of man's longing to signify,
to be a permanent part of the universe.
And as I've grown older,
I have to respect some of the religious... people
because some of them, as you know,
during the struggles that we've had have been terrific.
And they've been motivated by religious principle in many cases.
And therefore, I don't dismiss the whole thing by any means.
But myself, personally, I don't have the talent to believe.
That's the way I look at it, I simply haven't got...
I keep seeing my grandfather, instead of God.
And... it doesn't work any more.
But philosophically, if I can use that word,
it just seems to me so patent that what man has done
is to project himself into the heavens
where he can be all-powerful, as he is not here,
and moral and decent and vengeful,
and all the things he's not allowed to do on Earth,
and to don that white garment and the beard
and be what he wished in his dreams he could be.
And I just... I can't get past that.
These childhood memories prompted another thought
about the extent to which religious scepticism amongst certain Jews
was associated with left-wing sympathies.
So I asked Arthur Miller if he thought that this supposed association
had any part to play in the development of 20th century anti-Semitism.
There is an undoubtedly close relationship
between Jews and the left.
And also a sort of trio of beliefs -
disbelief in God,
Judaism and affiliation with the very political movements
which might have to be the ones which are recruited
in order to bring about a solution to the problems that you've described.
- Yes. - So, why do you think that is?
Well, for one thing, the Jews felt...
That was a different period than now in one respect...
The anti-Semitism in the United States was rampant.
It was open.
For example,
many people had to go to Europe to become doctors.
They weren't admitted to Columbia University...
Almost all American universities had a quota on Jews,
and it was very small.
There was the largest radio audience in the United States
was for a man who was quoting Goebbels all the time.
- This was Father Coughlin. - Father Coughlin.
He had the largest audience excepting for FDR.
He was saying how wonderfully the Nazis had dealt with unemployment,
how fine it was that they were defending their racial purity -
this from a Catholic priest!
I remember walking down the street in Brooklyn one day -
a hot day in the middle of July -
and all the windows were open.
I think it was on a Sunday afternoon, and in one house after another,
you could hear that voice.
And it was sneering, raucous...
He was a real rabble-rouser.
He blamed the Jews for the Depression.
That was the fundamental thing.
That the money lenders had been thrown out of the temple,
but they were back in.
And they controlled the currency, they controlled the big corporations,
they controlled everything... secretly.
They were the secret demon underlying the troubles of the state.
I was a worker in those days,
I was out driving trucks and the rest of it.
And you could cut it with a knife.
It was brutal.
And it was open. There was no question about it.
So, Jews were already positioned, vis-à-vis the society, as being...
They weren't being killed.
They were simply being gently and firmly kept out of the mainstream.
No big corporations had Jewish executives.
It was unheard of.
So one understood what persecution might be.
And therefore, you were driven to the left.
Cos the right was not interested in these problems,
nor were most liberals.
It was too dangerous.
After all, a shipload of Jews from Germany
arrived in New York harbour and was not permitted to land.
And these were not impoverished desperate people.
These were middle-class people...
to have had the money to make this trip,
and to pick all their stuff and move out of Germany.
And they were sent back.
It was called... The name of the ship was the St Louis.
Then, they went from here to Cuba...
where, from the studies I've read,
the Americans did not want the Cuban government,
which was then a dictatorship of the right,
to let them in, lest they show up what we had done...
and reveal the cruelty of what we had done.
Nobody was interested in confronting this thing.
And they were sent back to Germany. I presume they were all killed.
Well, I remember talking to a Polish intellectual,
and him saying, "We can accept the idea that Jesus was a Jew...
"but what sticks in our throat is the idea that the Holy Mother was Jewish."
Oh, God, it's exhausting just to think about the...
Where to begin to throw light on this whole thing.
I wrote a play called "The Creation Of The World And Other Business",
which is about Genesis.
And I didn't mean to, but I got involved with the Bible
in a way that I never had before.
It's very interesting that the old rabbis,
whoever put the Bible together,
which was obviously written by different people at different times in history,
chose... They could have chosen any book to start the Bible...
No doubt, the whole thing was lying on a table in front of them.
Some editor had to say, "This is the opening."
And they opened with a fratricide.
And the fratricide was there, I suppose,
because that's the worst thing that can happen -
two brothers, one of them is killed by the other brother -
because it doesn't involve the outsider.
And yet it does. You see, I remember reading this book
by Ruth Mellinkoff called "The Outsider".
And it's a collection of images in art history of the representation
of these various figures in the Bible.
And in the early years of the 16th century,
Kane is Jewish, Abel is gentile.
- How did that happen? - Just the way...
In order to get round the problem of the fratricide,
they had to somehow retrospectively identify the villainous Jew.
Isn't that wonderful?
It's quite extraordinary. In some of these early German pictures,
you see this blonde Abel...
- and this ringletted and bearded Kane. - I'll tell you a quick story.
In the early '50s, I was travelling with a friend of mine in Foggia,
because he was looking for an aunt he'd never met who was a school teacher
in the city of Foggia.
And we found her. He was Italian-American and Catholic.
And she was curious to know what I was and he said, "He's ebreo - Jewish."
And she looked surprised.
And he said, "You know, the people in the Bible."
And she said, "Oh, yes...
"Well, as long as they believe in Christ."
Of course, I suppose...
... it's inevitable, and will always be to some degree,
that one's own group, being most familiar, is less dangerous...
than an out-group,
which is always menacing because it's strange.
They look different, they don't speak the way we do,
they break their boiled egg in the narrow end instead of the broad end.
This is going to go on forever, but...
when politicians seize upon these differences,
- or these apprehensions... - Particularly religious differences.
and when they make religious differences
the centre of the political programme,
that's when the end is nigh.
Well, the end certainly felt a bit nigh when we met,
as the war in Iraq was already well under way.
So I asked Arthur why it was that scepticism
is increasingly seen by many Americans as politically incorrect,
as subversive, unacceptable and, of course, unpatriotic.
I get the impression that from the vantage point of Europe,
that for the last 18 months at least, and perhaps before,
that atheism or disbelief or scepticism
is seen by many Americans
as politically incorrect, as subversive and unacceptable.
Am I right in thinking that?
Eh... it's probably the case.
Certainly the religious overlay of patriotism
has come into fashion.
It's always there, of course, in this country.
More people go to church here than, I think, anywhere.
But it's gotten heavier now.
They invoke God at any...
at any opportunity, whether it's buying an automobile...
Is that since 9-11, or do you think...?
It was always here, but it's gotten thicker, heavier...
because it's such an easy way to cuddle up
to what they think the majority is about...
which is this slavish kind of worship of something.
- And it's a political event. - But it is the first time for many years
that you've had a government - a president...
I don't recall it ever being the government itself doing this.
It could've happened, but I'm not aware of it.
I mean, I never heard of a government calling upon faith-based agencies
taking care of the sick and the unemployed and the rest of it.
Formerly, the government simply did these tings, as much as they ever did.
One also gets the impression that the enterprise in Iraq
had a sort of faith-based patriotism.
It wasn't just patriotic - it was Christian and patriotic.
Of course, in war-time...
I suppose we did that in the Second World War to a degree,
but it was never laid on with a trowel this way.
I think Roosevelt called upon God occasionally,
but it didn't bother him too much.
Did you ever get the impression that although he called upon God,
which he might have done nominally,
did you ever get the impression that he was, in fact,
a Christian beyond the call of duty?
He was not using it. This is now being used as a means of persuasion.
It's patent, it's obvious.
They call upon God to initiate a programme, whatever it may be -
a civil programme of some sort.
And they lard it over with some religious verbiage
to make it seem as though if you oppose this, you oppose the Lord.
There are a lot of Americans...
I think they're a minority, but they're very vocal,
who are really aching for an Ayatollah.
I think they would love to have a department of religion,
we go back to the early 17th century, perhaps, and have a church...
an official church...
but they've convinced a lot of people to forget that this country was founded
by people who were really escaping
the domination of a governmental religion...
...and who breathe freely here with great gratitude
that they didn't have to obey a churchly government.
But they then became as theocratic as the people that they left.
It seems to be something that has to be resisted on principle
from one generation to another.
At the moment, it's tougher than ever
because the government itself is blatantly on the side
of an official religion, I think.
What is bothering me about the whole thing is that...
we are now more and more confronting a real issue in this country
about the attempt of the so-called religious -
cos I'm not sure they ARE religious.
I think they are very nationalist people.
And the wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal...
in my opinion.
If you look at... I suppose, every violent conflict in the world now
is being led by priests, rabbis or Muslim clerics.
It's quite amazing.
I wonder whether it ever happened or if it has happened
in hundreds and hundreds of years.
It's the church militant in all these religions.
They've added that lethal mixture of religion and nationalism
to the programmes that they sell.
And the reason it's lethal is because to believe in a religion
means that you don't believe in a different religion.
You can't believe in two religions.
You've got to believe in one, and the other ones are wrong.
And often to be destroyed.
And deserve to be combated and destroyed.
I mean, it's implicit in the whole idea of religious belief, I think,
in the normal way that religious belief is thought of.
You can't be both a Catholic and a Protestant.
Now, there seems to be this -
what would previously have been almost inconceivable -
this unholy alliance between...
fundamentalist evangelical Christians in the United States,
- and Orthodox Jews... - Yes.
- ...who are combining to support the... - The Christian zealots believe
that Christ will return when the Jews become Christians.
This news is gonna come
with a shock to most of the Jews that are here,
but that's the programme -
that Armageddon comes,
at which point, the Jews become believers in Christ,
and Christ returns and we're off to the races.
It's pretty heady stuff.
And it's become particularly virulent in the last two or three years.
It's a form of intellectual bankruptcy which is, I think,
has taken over a lot of the political space.
Well, although he's considerably older than I am,
it's fair to say that neither Arthur Miller nor myself
could be described as spring chickens,
so it seemed reasonable to ask him
what he felt about the prospect of a life after death.
Everything I say, which is very sceptical, if not worse,
is conditioned by one thing,
and that is, we don't know where life started... or how.
Nobody really knows that.
And that death, the end of consciousness, is the awesome mystery
that anybody who's lived through it all knows he has no answer to.
The idea that that consciousness could vanish -
be no more -
is unacceptable.
It simply cannot...
- I have no way of accepting this. - Well, in your refusal to accept it,
are you tempted to assume that in some mysterious way,
that it continues after some sort of...
as it were...
- vacation? - That's right.
- That it will resume somewhere? - That's what I find myself hoping.
- Really? - Oh, yeah.
And then, I think, well...
it does continue in art.
And that the artist finally...
leaves us with his consciousness.
So that your work will outlast you. But do you feel, in any way,
tempted to believe or hope,
that in addition to the work in which your memory will be preserved,
that you yourself, in some alternative version,
unembodied, will continue to exist?
I can't... I no longer can contain that idea. No.
But for others... For instance, my wife of 40 years died
about a year-and-a-half ago.
And I'm surrounded by all her stuff,
of her life.
And the idea that she's not here is still...
defeats some impulse to recreate her.
But I know what that impulse is.
It's simply the inability to accept this absurdity.
That all that consciousness and all that beauty...
simply isn't there any more.
And you don't, obviously as believers do,
Christians perhaps more than Jews,
that there will be some sort of rendezvous?
No, this is beyond me.
I don't have that at all.
I don't believe... I think, as I said, if there is memory,
cos what we're talking about is a form of remembrance,
if there is that, it's in the deeds that one did
or the art that one created,
or in some cases, perhaps, in the children.
- But no more. - So you can't, as I can't,
make sense of the idea of a continuing consciousness
which outlasts the death of the body
in which that consciousness would, as it were, identify itself as...
Wouldn’t it be lovely?!
Well, do you think it would be lovely?
Well, of course, there would be so many of us...
it'd be a rather crowded area, I think.
It would be like the subway at five o'clock in the evening.
You'd wish you could get off.
But in addition to, as it were, the population problem...
The urge is always there, I think. The urge to preserve this thing.
And if you're not careful, I suppose you could venture into everlasting life.
But as I said earlier,
death is the ultimate perplexity.
And particularly... Not the body so much as the consciousness.
The ability to observe, to talk,
to store up images...
We spend 60, 70, however many years accomplishing.
And in a breeze, it blows away.
I think, though, we're stuck with the Earth
and with the lives we've got.
And the immortality notion
is simply past my capacity to really believe in.
I never could figure out what we Jews believe about an afterlife.
I have the feeling that it doesn't quite exist.
It's a sceptical area.
I'm always told by people who know, or seem to know,
that it's not altogether different from a seminar at Columbia -
that you, in fact, go to...
- You enrol! - You enrol and...
Moses teaches you to infinity the finer points of the law.
And there's no way out of it.
That seems like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.