J. G. Ballard - The Life and Death of God

During the spring and summer of 1980 an extraordinary rumour began to sweep the world. At first confined to government and scientific circles in Washington, London and Moscow, it soon spread through Africa, South America and the Far East, and among people in all walks of life, from Australian sheep-farmers to Tokyo nightclub hostesses and stockbrokers on the Paris Bourse. Rarely a day passed without the rumour reaching the front pages of at least a dozen newspapers around the world.

In a few countries, notably Canada and Brazil, the persistence of the rumour caused a dangerous drop in commodity prices, and firm denials were issued by the governments of the day. At the United Nations headquarters in New York the SecretaryGeneral appointed a committee of prominent scientists, churchmen and business leaders with the sole purpose of restraining the excitement which the rumour was beginning to generate by the late spring. This, of course, simply convinced everyone that something of universal significance would soon be disclosed.

For once, the governments of the West were helped by the sympathetic attitude of the Soviet Union, and of countries such as Cuba, Libya and North Korea, which in the past would have seized on the smallest advantage the rumour offered them. Yet even this failed to prevent serious outbreaks of industrial unrest and panic-selling - millions of pounds were wiped off the London Stock Exchange after the announcement that the Archbishop of Canterbury would visit the Holy Land. A plague of absenteeism swept across the world in the rumour's wake. In areas as far apart as the automotive plants of Detroit and the steel foundries of the Ruhr, entire working populations lost all interest in their jobs and sauntered through the factory gates, gazing amiably at the open sky.

Fortunately, the rumour's effects were generally pacific and non-violent. In the Middle East and Asia, where it confirmed beliefs already held for centuries, the news raised barely a ripple of interest, and only in the most sophisticated government and scientific circles was there anything of a flurry. Without doubt, the impact of the rumour was greatest in Western Europe and North America. Ironically, it was most rife in those two countries, the United States and Britain, which for centuries had claimed to base their entire societies on the ideals expressed by it.

During this period one body alone kept aloof from all this speculation - the world's churches and religious faiths. This is not to say that they were in any way hostile or indifferent, but their attitude indicated a certain wariness, if not a distinct ambivalence. Although they could hardly deny the rumour, priests and clergymen everywhere recommended a due caution in the minds of their congregations, a reluctance to jump too eagerly to conclusions.

However, a remarkable and unexpected development soon took place. In a solemn declaration, representatives of the world's great religious faiths, meeting simultaneously in Rome, Mecca and Jerusalem, stated that they had at last decided to abandon their rivalries and differences. Together they would now join hands in a new and greater church, to be called the United Faith Assembly, international and interdenominational in character, which would contain the essential elements of all creeds in a single unified faith.

The news of this extraordinary development at last forced the governments of the world to a decision. On August 28th a plenary meeting of the United Nations was held. In a fanfare of publicity that exceeded anything known even by that organization, there was an unprecedented attendance from delegates of every member nation. As the commentators of a hundred television channels carried descriptions of the scene all over the world, a great concourse of scientists, statesmen and scholars, preceded by representatives of the United Faith Assembly, entered the United Nations building and took their seats.

When the meeting began the President of the United Nations called on a succession of prominent scientists, led by the director of the radio-observatory at Jodrell Bank in Britain. After a preamble in which he recalled science's quest for the unifying principle that lay behind the apparent uncertainty and caprice of nature, he described the remarkable research work undertaken during recent years with the telescopes at Jodrell Bank and Arecibo in Puerto Rico. Just as the discovery of radioactivity had stemmed from the realization that even smaller particles existed within the apparently indivisible atom, so these two giant telescopes had revealed that all electromagnetic radiations in fact contained a system of infinitely smaller vibrations. These 'ultra-microwaves', as they had been called, permeated all matter and space.

However, the speaker continued, a second and vastly more important discovery had been made when the structure of these microwaves was analysed by computer. This almost intangible electromagnetic system unmistakably exhibited a complex and continuously changing mathematical structure with all the attributes of intelligence. To give only one example, it responded to the behaviour of the human observer and was even sensitive to his unspoken thoughts. Exhaustive studies of the phenomenon confirmed beyond all doubt that this sentient being, as it must be called, pervaded the entire universe. More exactly, it provided the basic substratum of which the universe was composed. The very air they were breathing in the assembly hail at that moment, their minds and bodies, were formed by this intelligent being of infinite dimensions.

***

At the conclusion of the statement a profound silence spread through the General Assembly, and from there to the world beyond. In cities and towns all over the earth the streets were deserted, traffic abandoned as people waited quietly by their television sets. The President of the United Nations then rose and read out a declaration signed by three hundred scientists and divines. After two years of the most rigorous tests the existence of a supreme deity had been proved beyond a shadow of doubt. Mankind's age-old faith in a divine principle had at last been scientifically confirmed, and a new epoch in human history would unfold before them.

The next day the newspapers of the world bore a hundred variants of the same headline: GOD EXISTS Supreme Being Pervades Universe During the following weeks the events of ordinary life were forgotten. All over the world services of thanksgiving were held, religious processions filled countless streets. Vast gatherings of penitents thronged the sacred cities and shrines of the world. Moscow, New York, Tokyo and London resembled medieval towns on an apocalyptic saint's day. Heads raised to the skies, millions knelt in the streets, or walked in slow cavalcades, crosses and mandalas held before them. The cathedrals of St Peter's, Notre Dame and St Patrick's were forced to hold continuous services, so great were the crowds that flocked through their doors. Sectarian feuds were forgotten. Priests of the United Faith Assembly exchanged vestments and officiated at each other's services. Buddhists were baptized, Christians turned prayer-wheels and Jews knelt before the statues of Krishna and Zoroaster.

More practical benefits were to follow. Everywhere doctors reported a marked drop in the numbers of their patients. Neuroses and other mental ills disappeared overnight, as the discovery of the deity's existence worked its instant therapy. All over the world police forces were disbanded. Members of the armed services were sent on indefinite leave pending demobilization, long-closed frontiers were unsealed. The Berlin Wall was dismantled. Everywhere people behaved as if some immense victory had been won against an invincible enemy. Here and there, between particularly aggressive rivals, such as the United States and Cuba, Egypt and Israel, long-standing pacts of friendship were signed. Military aircraft and naval fleets were sent to the scrapyards, stockpiles of weapons were destroyed. (However, a few sporting rifles were retained when the spirit of universal brotherhood produced its first casualty - a Swedish engineer in Bengal who attempted to embrace a tiger. Warnings were issued that an awareness of God's existence had yet to extend to the lower members of the animal kingdom, where for the time being the struggle for life remained as pitiless as ever.)

To begin with, such isolated episodes were barely noticed in the general euphoria. Thousands of spectators sat around the great telescopes at Jodrell Bank and Arecibo, not to mention a number of commercial TV aerials and any other structures that vaguely resembled radio antennae, waiting patiently for a direct message from the Almighty. Gradually people drifted back to work - or, more exactly, those returned who considered their work morally gainful. Manufacturing industry was able to keep going, but the agencies responsible for selling its products to the public found themselves in a dilemma. The elements of guile and exaggeration at the basis of all merchandizing, whether on the level of nationwide advertising campaigns or door-to-door salesmanship, were no longer tolerable under the new dispensation, but no alternative machinery of distribution was available.

The inevitable slackening of commerce and industry seemed unimportant during these first weeks. The majority of people in Europe and the United States were still celebrating a new estate of man, the beginnings of the first true millennium. The whole basis of private life had changed, and with it attitudes towards sex, morality and all human relationships. Newspapers and television had been transformed - the previous diet of crime reports and political gossip, westerns and soap-operas had given way to serious articles and programmes elaborating the background to the discovery of the deity.

This growing interest in the precise nature of the godhead led to a closer examination of its presumed moral nature. Despite the generalizations of scientists and clergy, it was soon clear that the dimensions of the supreme being were large enough to embrace any interpretation one cared to invent. Although the deity's overall moral purpose could be assumed from the harmony, purity and formal symmetry that the mathematical analyses revealed - qualities more pronounced in response to cohesive and creative actions than to random or destructive ones - these characteristics seemed little more specific in relation to man and his day-to-day behaviour than the principles underlying music. Without doubt a supreme intelligence existed whose being permeated the entire fabric of the universe, flowing in a myriad ripples through their minds and bodies like an infinite moral ether, but this deity seemed far less ready with explicit demands and directives than it had been in its previous incarnations.

Fortunately, their god was clearly neither a jealous nor a vengeful one. No thunderbolt fell from the sky. The first fears of a judgment day, of darkening landscapes covered with gibbets, safely receded. The nightmares of Bosch and Breughel failed to materialize. And for once humanity needed no goads to make it regulate its conduct. Marital infidelities, promiscuity and divorce had almost vanished. Curiously, there was also a drop in the number of marriages, perhaps because of a common feeling that some sort of a millennial kingdom was at hand.

This widespread notion revealed itself in many ways. Great numbers of industrial workers in Europe and North America had lost all interest in their jobs, and sat about on their doorsteps with their neighbours, gazing at the sky and listening to the radio bulletins. At the summer's end farmers harvested their crops but seemed much less enthusiastic about preparing for the coming season. The flow of pronouncements, and the first disputed interpretations, from the committees of divines and scientists still investigating the phenomenon of the deity suggested that it might be unwise to plan too carefully on an indefinite future.

Within two months of the confirmation of the worldwide rumour of God's existence came the first indications of government concern over the consequences. Industry and agriculture were already affected, though far less than commerce, politics and advertising. Everywhere the results of this new sense of morality, of the virtues of truth and charity, were becoming clear. A legion of overseers, time-keepers and inspectors found themselves no longer needed. Longestablished advertising agencies became bankrupt. Accepting the public demand for total honesty, and fearful of that supreme client up in the sky, the majority of television commercials now ended with an exhortation not to buy their products.

As for the world of politics, its whole raison d'etre - its appeals to self-assertion, intrigue and nepotism - had been destroyed. A dozen parliaments, from the US Congress to the Russian Chamber of Deputies and the British House of Commons, found themselves deprived of the very machinery of their existence.

The United Faith Assembly was faced with equal problems. Although people still attended their places of worship in larger numbers than ever before, they were doing so at times other than those of the formal services, communing directly with the Almighty rather than playing the part of a subordinate laity in a ritual mediated to them through a priesthood.

The former Christian members of the United Faith Assembly, who remembered the Reformation and Martin Luther's revolt against a clergy claiming privileged access to the supreme being, were of course perturbed by these developments. They were reluctant to accept the mathematical description of the deity offered by the world's scientists, but had nothing to offer in its place and for the time being were on the defensive. The physicists, conversely, were only too quick to remind the clergy that their long-hallowed symbols - cross, trinity and mandala were based more on fancy than on the scientific reality which they themselves had made available. The long-standing fear of all churches, that the revelation of God might come from knowledge rather than faith, had at last been justified.

The continued change in the character of life on both sides of the Atlantic began to disturb prominent members of government and industry. Conditions in the United States and Northern Europe were beginning to resemble those in India and the Far East, where legions of amiable beggars wandered the streets without a thought for the morrow. The Kingdom of God might be at hand, but that hand was empty.

During October little happened on the surface of events, but at the end of the month a second meeting of the United Faith Assembly was held in Jerusalem. Here a prominent archbishop publicly challenged the scientific view of the deity as a being of vast neutral intelligence. Without doubt, the archbishop affirmed, this was to take a naive and over-simplified view based on what were admitted to be crude methods of detection. Was the deity entirely passive or, like the sea, did it reveal itself in many forms and moods? Remarking that he was not ashamed to refer to the Manichean Heresy, the archbishop stressed the dualism of good and evil that had always existed in the past, in man as in nature, and which would continue to exist in the future. This was not to suggest that evil was a fundamental part of man's nature, or that he was incapable of redemption, but this passive contemplation of an invisible God should not be allowed to blind them to the inevitable antagonisms within themselves, or indeed to their own failings. The great achievements of mankind, its commerce, art and industry, had been based on this sound understanding of the dual nature of mankind and its motives. The present decline of civilized life was a symptom of the refusal to see themselves as they were, a warning of the dangers of identifying themselves too closely with the Almighty. The capacity for sin was a prerequisite of redemption.

Soon afterwards, as if cued in by the archbishop, a series of spectacular crimes took place around the world. In the Middle West of the United States a number of bank robberies were carried out which rivalled those of the 1930s. In London there was an armed assault on the crown jewels in the Tower. A host of minor larcenies followed. Not all these crimes were committed for reasons of gain. In Paris the Mona Lisa was slashed by a maniac running amok in the Louvre, while in Cologne the high altar of the Cathedral was desecrated by vandals apparently protesting against the very existence of the deity.

The attitude of the United Faith Assembly to these crimes was unexpected. It greeted them with patient tolerance, as if relieved to see these familiar examples of human frailty. After the arrest of a noted wife-poisoner in Alsace a local priest pronounced that the man's guilt was in fact a testimony to his innocence, a sign of his capacity for eventual redemption.

This tortuous paradox was to receive a great deal of publicity. A number of less scrupulous politicians began to foment similar notions. One Congressional candidate, in a badly hit area of California where military aircraft had been manufactured, suggested that the notion of an all-pervading deity was an affront to the free choice and diversity of human activity. The sense of a closed world reduced man's powers of initiative and self-reliance, the qualities on which the freeenterprise democracies had built their greatness.

This statement was soon followed by the speech of a distinguished metaphysician attending a congress in Zurich. He referred to the plurality of the universe, to its infinite phenomenology. To embrace all possibilities the deity would have to contain the possibility of its own non-being. In other words, it belonged to that class of open-ended structures whose form, extent and identity were impossible to define. The term 'deity' was, in any useful sense, meaningless.

The scientists at Jodrell Bank and Arecibo who had first identified the Almighty were asked to reconsider their original findings. The televised hearings in Washington, at which the tired-eyed astro-physicists were harassed and cross-examined by teams of lawyers and divines, recalled a latter-day Inquisition. At Jodrell Bank and Arecibo troops were called in to protect the telescopes from crowds of over-hasty converts.

The fierce debates which followed were watched with great attention by the public. By now, in early December, the Christmas season was getting under way, but without any of its usual enthusiasm. For one thing, few stores and shops had anything for sale. In addition, there was little money to spare. The rationing of some basic commodities had been introduced. In many ways life was becoming intolerable. Hotels and restaurants were without service. Cars were forever breaking down.

Everywhere, as the debate continued, people turned to the United Faith Assembly. Mysteriously, however, almost all churches were closed, mosques and synagogues, shrines and temples remained sealed to the unsettled crowds. Members of congregations were now selected as strictly as those of the most exclusive clubs, and applicants were admitted only if they agreed to accept the church's guidance on all spiritual matters, its absolute authority in all religious affairs. A rumour began that an announcement of worldwide importance would shortly be made, but that this time it would be given only to the faithful.

The mounting atmosphere of unease and uncertainty was distracted for a few days by the news of several natural disasters. A landslip in northern Peru immolated a thousand villagers. In Yugoslavia an earthquake shattered a provincial capital. Icebergs sank a supertanker in the Atlantic. The question asked tentatively by a New York newspaper, DOES GOD EXIST? Faith Assembly casts doubt on Deity was relegated to a back page.

Three weeks before Christmas, war broke out between Israel and Egypt. The Chinese invaded Nepal, reclaiming territory which they had only recently ceded while under the spell of what they termed a 'neo-colonialist' machination. A week later revolution in Italy, backed by the church and military, ousted the previous liberal regime. Industrial output began to revive in the United States and Europe. Russian missile-firing submarines were detected on manoeuvres in the North Atlantic. On Christmas Eve the world's seismographs recorded a gigantic explosion in the area of the Gobi Desert, and Peking Radio announced the successful testing of a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb. Christmas decorations had at last appeared in the streets, the familiar figures of Santa Claus and his reindeer hung over a thousand department-stores. Carol festivals were held before open congregations in a hundred cathedrals.

In all this festivity few people heeded the publication of what was described by a spokesman of the United Faith Assembly as one of the most far-reaching and revolutionary religious statements ever made, the Christmas encyclical entitled God is Dead...