“I was interested in the concept of faith in something. This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t. I’ve known people who have put their faith in religion and in fortune tellers. So it occurred to me that that was a good character for a movie: a woman who everything had failed for her, and all of a sudden, it turned out that a woman telling her fortune was helping her. The problem is, eventually, she’s in for a rude awakening.”
Interviewer: "What seems more plausible to you, that we’ve existed in past lives, or that there is a God?" Allen: "Neither seems plausible to me. I have a grim, scientific assessment of it. I just feel, what you see is what you get." The interviewer alluded to his Jewish heritage, and he replied: “I don’t follow it. I wish I could get with it. It would be a big help on those dark nights.”
The riches of that heritage abandoned! What a loss! A loss that goes deeper than the functional atheism that the psalms and the prophets expose in condemning those who exploit their fellows. This is of a metaphysical kind. However, the "cosmic insignificance" that Allen "champions" is one of the elements that make the Bible such a living text, reflecting what is universal in the ebb and flow of history. This is expressed in Psalm 39:
Each man that stands on earth is only a puff of wind,
every man that walks, only a shadow,
and the wealth he amasses is only a puff of wind -
he does not know who will take it next.
So Allen, the "nomad like [his] ancestors" is one of the mass today who, having lost a sense of each person being in a relationship with a personal God, struggles to find a centre in their person, to stay in balance with the world.
In contrast to Biblical history, today we see a "receding tide of faith" that leaves many people caught on an unmapped island, in unknown territory. The forces of consumerism and its concomitant pleasure-seeking, of individualism, and of utter skepticism, all have a role in diminishing faith, despite it being a vital component in human ecology. Above all, however, the impact of modern technology has handicapped our thinking:
"Techniques of applied science, and the attitudes behind them, appear to locate society wholly in the purview of human [author's emphasis] authority and disposal.... We tend to put our trust in the processes: the skills of the engineer, the surgeon, the expert. The changes induced in daily living by speed, mobility, invention, drugs, amenities and facilities, as furnished by technology, are - it would seem - humanly contrived.
These, however, "off-load their results - managerial, organisational, sexual, cultural - without reference to human meaning and significance. Indeed, they may end in questioning whether there is a dependable, constant human significance at all".
"Clearly it is the technicians who call the tune, who assign society to the behests, the vagaries, even the potential enslavements, of expertise. The present and the future are wards of technology operating as an end in itself. Effective means supplant verified ends."(*)Belief in God, then, is a factor of investing in a counter-culture, the giving of space to, at first, the possibility of belief; also to the cultivating of a climate of mind within which the human spirit can once again be free from the material, the humanly "wise", and soar. The effort is to identify the territorial markers of what it is to be human. This is why I am interested in Allen's film.
(*)Cragg, Kenneth 1988, Readings in the Qur'an, London, Collins
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