Peter Watson, The Age of Nothing.

 

- This is a huge book in more ways than one. It was published in 2014 and within its dense 600 pages noted British historian Peter Watson has assembled a vast panoply of insights into many of life's deepest and intriguing questions that the process of secularisation, the end of religious dominance, has thrown up over the last 150 years. In lucid prose and clear exposition, and quoting hundreds of Western civilisation's greatest thinkers, he tells the story of the birth of secularism. 

- The 30 page Introduction alone is a fabulous overview of the book's central concerns. We're introduced to Frederich Nietzsche and his ‘death of god’ pronouncement in 1883. His core insight - and the most dangerous - was that there does not exist any perspective external to or higher than life itself. There cannot exist any privileged viewpoint, any abstraction or force outside the world as we know it; there is nothing beyond reality, beyond life itself, nothing 'above'; there is no transcendence, nothing metaphysical. 

- Since Nietzsche's groundbreaking proclamation humankind has been searching for meaning and ‘community’ in the non-religious world. Breakthrough thinkers like Freud, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Darwin, as well as highly influential 20th century philosophers, psychologists, writers, poets, artists and composers like Joyce, Sartre, Camus, Eliot, Lawrence, Wolff, Matisse, Mallarme, Wallace Stevens and many contemporary intellectuals have been attempting to define what really gives our lives meaning. Secular theologians who emerged mainly in America in the 1960's and became hugely influential, such as Harvey Cox, Paul Van Buren and Paul Tillich are also interrogated.   

- Watson liberally quotes from many of the writings of all these key voices. In fact quotes  probably take up two thirds of the book, and provide much richness to the exposition overall. 

- Here's an interesting and refreshing paragraph from the conclusion of the book:

Nietzsche called truth a woman; James Joyce foresaw, with pleasure and optimism, a world where hope lay with the female side of men. Andrea Dworkin has emphasised that the world we have now is 'man-made', a term by no means complimentary. Wallace Stevens admonished us to 'embrace an idea like a woman'. Politically, too, this is a highly relevant issue; who can doubt that one of the ways in which Islam is most backward is in its (often disgraceful) treatment of women.