Letter to Clyde

One of the reasons I don’t want to discuss my own metaphysical positions in class is that I don’t want to seem to be using my classes as an opportunity to try to push my views onto my students. Nor do I like other people hijacking class time to proselytize, either politically or religiously. It can be a pretty fine line, given that literature almost always has moral concerns, and sometimes we rightly reject authors’ writing not for reasons of craftsmanship alone, but because their theme or tone or whatever doesn’t meet our moral standards. We have to be able to talk about things like that. But there is a difference between expressing a personal moral response to a text, and just hogging the seminar conversation to advance one’s own agenda. Because I hold this principle as a sacred academic value, I want to follow my own code myself too.

But since you ask, Clyde, I am willing to spend a small amount of non-class time; here you go:

I don’t believe in supernatural entities. The idea that some conscious being, much bigger, better, more powerful, smarter than humans, but in some other ways something like humans, at least to the extent of being some kind of discrete individual that can observe situations and has preferences and can make decisions and take actions—that some such being either created the universe and/or presides over it and/or provides it with moral significance that goes beyond the wellbeing of ordinary biological sentient beings such as humans and animals… this idea seems quite implausible to me. Maybe not disprovable, in some kind of mathematical-logic sense, but not at all a reasonable belief to hold given the rest of our state of understanding of physics, biology, astronomy, psychology, and so forth.

I have spent many years thinking and reading about the subject; I consider it pretty unlikely that somebody will come up with some new argument in favor of God’s existence which I’ve never encountered before. I am not very much interested in entering into debate on the subject, but I guess if somebody—a believer—was just trying to understand: How is it possible that such a sensitive, kind individual, someone devoted to honest inquiry into the truth, could have an atheistic outlook? I guess I could try to give some quick sketch of how it feels to think like me.

The shortest route by which to give some notion of my basic worldview is this: I believe consciousness is, demonstrably, a biological phenomenon. Individual consciousness arose as part of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to animal bodies: unlike plants, a creature that can move around voluntarily can by its own actions either increase or decrease risks to its staying alive and healthy; so it has to have a sense of itself as an individual, and a desire to protect its individual bodily integrity against all kinds of harms. Our consciousness and our bodily existence are inextricably tied together. Therefore there is no such thing as non-embodied consciousness, and thus there can be no spirits, ghosts, demons, angels, devils, gods, souls, immortality after death, etc. Consciousness only actually makes sense as an attribute of a living animal, not as an attribute of something existing on a cosmic scale or beyond physicality altogether. Stars and planets and galaxies and infinite space and pure abstractions and so forth don’t need to be, and can’t be, conscious, any more than a rock or a flower is.

These are beliefs I have--I would even call them empirical beliefs, as opposed to the faith-based kind--but they are not a moral code or a spiritual practice. They don’t really tell you much about me, Clyde. I doubt your desire for “context” has been satisfied.

Although I think atheism is a perfectly accurate label to describe my metaphysical stance, these days I’m not all that eager to present myself to the world as an atheist, since the prejudice against atheism is so deep in this country. And it’s not even just because I fear being discriminated against, it’s that I don’t want to affront people who (wrongly in my view) interpret any expression of atheism as necessarily equivalent to hostility directed against them. I went to graduate school with a Catholic man and we were walking through a parking lot one time and I saw one of those Darwin fish-with-legs on a car, and it gave me a little lift, like I assume it gives a Christian a lift to see the regular old Jesus fish. So I said, “Look, it’s a Darwin fish!” And Bill muttered darkly and shook his head. He thought the car-owner was mean, mocking Christians like that. I said, “Bill, why does it have to be mockery? Can’t the person just be saying, You have your beliefs, I have some too, mine have just as good a right to be shared and celebrated?” Bill said no. There is no possible blameless intention a Darwin-fish displayer can have. It made me sad, because I had sometimes toyed with the idea of getting such a fish and displaying it in just such a spirit as I described. But now that I realize it will inevitably be seen by many as an anti-fish, never mind, I guess.

In the last few years, when Christians knock on my door or something, I’ve been experimenting with labeling myself a buddhist instead of an atheist, since this tends to strike people more gently. They may have no idea what buddhism is, but they take it for granted that it’s some kind of system more or less analogous to their own. It isn’t, really, but so what? They don’t get a nasty shock and we shake hands and it’s friendly and over quickly.

I have a great fondness for Jewish culture—the literature, the intellectual contributions—and a soft spot for Israel. In terms of cultural identity, though, my heritage is Christianity more than it’s anything else. There are plenty of secular Jews, but you don’t often run across people who think of themselves as secular Christians. Too bad! I feel that I have more in common with Christians who have values and temperaments similar to mine than I do with people who may share more of my empirical/scientific beliefs but are sneery egomaniacs rather than compassionate humanists. People can be right about some things and wrong about others. Beliefs can be held lightly and generously, or stubbornly and spitefully, regardless of their propositional content (contra Sam Harris). Or beliefs can be—they mostly are!—halfway held, shifting and inconsistent things. I believe delusion is part of the human condition; I catch myself in delusions of one kind or other on a daily basis. So I try to be forgiving about other people’s, with a few exceptions. For instance, if people really, really believe in a hell of literal eternal torment, and they’re down with that, they think that’s a fine way to organize a universe and a just God sees to it that everybody gets exactly what they deserve in the end—infinite suffering for some? Perfect! Well, I think that’s one fucked up idea, excuse my French. I really don’t see how people can get that idea sitting comfortable in their heads alongside their other ones about God and goodness.

Was that what you wanted to know, Clyde?

mennonite in a little black dress

I saw Rhoda Janzen’s mennonite in a little black dress at the library and I picked it up because I’m always willing to take a look at a memoir of growing up in a religious subculture. Even if it’s not exactly my cup of tea, it may be useful to recommend to my students, who often want to write about their own religious subculture but generally need to build their skills in communicating to a heterogeneous audience that includes folks with very different backgrounds and premises, up to and including non-Christians. Even atheists! So I checked it out for possible amusement/pedagogical value, despite the two strikes against it: one, it came out in 2009, so this is not a book review I can peddle anywhere, and, two, it was blurbed by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, as laugh-out-loud funny.

http://www.rhodajanzen.com/

Not that I think Eat, Pray, Love is terrible or anything. But there was a certain glibness to it, a willingness to divert attention away from truly wrenching emotions into light comedy without fully acknowledging and exploring the pain. And not that I have anything against comedy, or think it incompatible with profundity. But there is a difference between the mood and impact you can build with a protracted, cumulative life narrative, and what you can get with a bunch of episodes from a situation comedy. In the latter, there’s always a distance between us and the characters; we never fully enter into their experience. Their catastrophes tend to be played for laughs like those of a cartoon character flattened by an anvil or exploded by dynamite. I do understand, and partly admire, the self-deprecatory impulse that leads Gilbert and Janzen to cast themselves as feminine Wile E. Coyotes or Elmer Fudds: they fear, and rightly so, the self-aggrandizement of the high-tragic memoir. But really, there is room on the tragicomic spectrum for writing that allows, right alongside the laughs, sincere respect for human suffering (including one’s own, including that which is brought on by one’s own errors).

I almost quit reading mennonite in a little black dress a few chapters in, when I could see that no narrative arc was under construction. Nothing about it compelled—or rewarded— my sustained attention. But it was easy pleasant reading to dip in and out of and I left it on the kitchen table to while away odd minutes. And then, at a certain point, I had accumulated enough biographical tidbits about Janzen to know that I liked and respected her. I had encountered enough tidbits about Mennonite culture to feel I was learning something. And I had run across a few real gems of expository or meditative prose, e.g.: Feo Belcari (a 15^th century poet/dramatist so obscure here and now that his only Wikipedia entry is in Italian) is introduced in humorous, accessible terms, along with the information that there are a few people, including the author, who actually care deeply about his work. A significant theological inquiry into the relations between god and man is introduced gently in the context of a family board game and pursued many chapters later in an old woman’s reminiscences about her missionary family in China. There’s a screamingly funny (at least to a teacher) joke about undergraduate writing slipped into an account of a kind friend’s holding Janzen’s hand to get her through the heartbreak over her husband’s betrayal. There are some amusing first dates with snappy dialogue. And finally—oh, but almost too late for readers to care—we see an object of great significance from Janzen’s childhood, the symbol of her attraction to worldly sophistication, the spur to her ultimate intellectual growth and exploration outside her homogeneous community. Rhoda! Why did you wait so long to tell me about the blue silk hosiery envelope?

Janzen is a well-published poet. That bent no doubt has something to do with why her book reads more like a collection of humor columns than it does like a book-length narrative. It feels more like a series of good first dates than it does like a long-term relationship. Still, I’m going to give mennonite in a little black dress four out of a possible five stars. That’s about half a star higher than I gave Eat, Pray, Love, but maybe I’ve just undergone some spiritual growth since then.

I sure like Rhoda Janzen. And, students, the book has plenty of valuable craft lessons to teach, despite my complaints (the missing narrative arc, of course, and, well, some of the characterization is a tad bit flat as well). If you can fill up your portfolios with scenes and settings this well drawn, with sparkly humorous highlights and pockets of hinted-at depth, you’re getting an A, all right.