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that religion provides the glue that binds people together into projects that sometimes ameliorate the human condition. So they hope to provide a substitute for this sort of fellowship in secular institutions. Those of us who embrace scientism may share the social “aims” of secular humanism, though we recognize that there is nothing objectively right about these “aims.” Let’s employ the illusory vocabulary of designs, goals, ends, and purposes for the moment. A careful scientific study of how religion accomplishes its crowd control and its social engineering may enable us to create secular institutions with similar good effects (at least until overtaken in arms races). It’s just as likely to enable us to create institutions with consequences for humanity as harmful as those that organized religion has produced over the last several thousand years. But no one needs to buy into secular humanism to do this social engineering either. What is more, if scientism is right about most people’s love of stories, it’s not likely that Richard Dawkins will be able to sell people on the beauty of science as something we can build on as a substitute for religion. There is no really compelling story in the beauty of science and no convincing story in secular humanism either.

Most of us who have embraced atheism don’t need secular humanism to be nice or to go on living. Since it won’t work as a substitute among those who think they need religion for both, no one needs it at all.

TAKE TWO PROZAC AND CALL ME

IN THE MORNING

So, what should we scientistic folks do when overcome by Weltschmertz (world-weariness)? Take two of whatever neuropharmacology prescribes. If you don’t feel better in the morning . . . or three weeks from now, switch to another one. Three weeks is often how long it takes serotonin reuptake suppression drugs like Prozac, Wellbutrin, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, or Luvox to kick in. And if one doesn’t work, another one probably will.

Once neuroscience has provided neurology—the medical specialty—with enough understanding of how the brain works, the docs will be able to deal with psychological problems almost as effectively as they now deal with problems of the other organs (“almost” because the brain is more complicated than the other organs). Psychological problems will always be with us. The Darwinian nature of everything biological assures us of that. As Darwin discovered, blind variation is the unvarying rule in nature. As a result, there will always be a wide range of brain hardwirings that combine with a wide range of environmental vicissitudes to produce a wide range of capacities and incapacities. No matter how much we try to homogenize upbringing, education, and health—mental and physical—there will always be people at the extremes. Some will be hopelessly depressed, maladjusted, and suicidal. Others will sail through life with not so much as a cloud in the sky. Each of us is located somewhere along the bell-curved distribution of psychological traits, dispositions, and abilities that nature and nurture conspire to create. Most of us will be reasonably well-adjusted, tolerably happy people, within two standard deviations from the mean between depression and euphoria.

What should you do if you feel the tragic sense of life, if you really feel you need to find the meaning of your life in order to keep living, and if you feel nothing will meet that need? Scientism tells you to treat introspection as a symptom. If it is the symptom of something serious enough to lead to bodily harm, pharmacology is the answer. If it is bearable, it may lead to some creative achievement, like Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or William Styron’s Darkness Visible, two really enjoyable books about being miserable. Besides killing yourself or otherwise ruining your life, the really serious mistake is taking depression seriously as something of value by itself. Alas, people do talk and act that way. They often refuse to take their meds because, they say, it deprives their inner lives, their thoughts about the human predicament, of seriousness