mills

My Last Long Post, I Swear, and I'm Sorry (Art, Love, and Religion Take a Lot of Space)

“Writers need certain stock answers for certain stock questions. When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, “It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.”  -Julian Barnes

In The Republic, Plato condemns art as being manipulative, deceitful, and unreal; he notes that the successful work functionally misleads people into believing things that aren’t true, experiencing emotions need not feel, and reacting to things not of the actual world.

College students love to argue against these prohibitions, because to them there is nothing more abhorrent than the idea of censorship; MTV has taught them that the free expression of absolutely everything is the most important principle imaginable. That Plato writes at the end of Book IX that he is speaking metaphorically in The Republic, that he is discussing not a city but a metaphor for man’s mind, is ignored.

“…the city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe that there is such an one anywhere on earth? In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.” -Plato

So, Plato says: we must banish the unreal and let only reason rule, in our minds if not our cities. For Plato, this meant art, the fundamentally false, selective, and individually-directed effort to misrepresent the world, for whatever ends, good or evil.

As someone who, like Richard Dawkins, finds life mostly worth living due to “music, poetry, love, sex, (and science),” I find this prohibition absurd; I don’t believe that fidelity to reality is the sole criterion for something’s value. It is certainly the case that fidelity to reality is the most important attribute for, say, a theory of physics or chemistry; it is certainly not the case that the “unreal” quality of Kafka’s novel The Trial reduces its value.

Indeed, lovers of art are familiar with this fact: what reality presents as most salient is not necessarily important to art. Kafka seizes on some existential anxiety rooted in the claustrophobic, systematized, bureaucratic era, and to do so most effectively he discards some of the aspects of reality that are either irrelevant or indeed a hindrance to exploring and communicating human, existential truths. In fact, he lies about some aspects of reality; for example, I’ve been told by some serious scientists that Gregor Samsa could no more wake up a beetle than Jonah could survive the whale’s stomach.

Art’s purpose, after all, is not to recapitulate reality but to get at some existential (small ‘e’) truth about life, love, death, creation, fear, hope, whatever; if you know someone who criticizes modern art for not being realistic, you likely feel exasperation. Perhaps you want to scream, “If I want a hyperrealistic explanation of how light travels and perspective appears to the human eye, I’ll get some physics and biology professors to explain it!  When I’m looking at Guernica, it’s because I am interested in what humans feel, in their sub-rational guts, when fascists are bombing them into oblivion.”  Art is better at horror than science is. It is also better at love.

It is better because it is human-oriented; it speaks to and comes from inside the human mind, indifferent to the facts and functions of reality. 

Richard Dawkins is married; I wonder if at any point in his relationship, he’s ever interrupted a declaration of love by noting, “Well, dear, if not you then someone else; the science is clear; I’m mostly in this gig for reproduction, although my conscious mind dresses it up; let’s not lie about being inimitably connected, perfect for one another, and so on.” Love, after all, is just chemistry and genetics when you strip away the poetry. (Or do you think otherwise?)

Our history has seen the gradual if bumpy rise of individualism: from the animal herd, from the slave society, from the mass of uneducated units bossed by their priest and king, to looser groups in which the individual has greater rights and freedoms… At the same time, as we throw off the rules of priest and king, as science helps us understand the truer terms and conditions on which we live, as our individualism expresses itself in grosser and more selfish ways, we also discover that this individuality, or illusion of individuality, is less than we imagined. As Dawkins memorably puts it, we are “survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” -Julian Barnes

We are ‘survival machines,’ and yet that isn’t how it feels; one feels a strong urge to believe in love, to believe in hope, to believe in one’s self, in the value of art and creation and peace not in the narrow sense that they ‘enable the survival of my genes’ but in a deeper way; moreover, when communicating, one struggles to impart this meaning to others. When I love, I don’t feel that I am just acting out civilized ornament over animal determination; and I don’t want to.

I am comfortable with “beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.” What truths: that for the person experiencing pain, it is not chemical; for the person in love, the organs and tissues and hormones involved aren’t what matter; that for the person feeling the expansive sense of joy we all taste in our luckiest, most cherished moments, it’s inconsequential whether he believes an accurate cosmological model or not.

Indeed, you have so little time to live. Is the most important thing that you know truth or that you are happy (and not happy like a teenager with tickets to a concert, but deeply happy in the knowledge that your life has conformed to a model you endorse and believe in)? Do you think on your deathbed you will think, “Man, I was so right about the origin of the universe!” Or will you think of the ways in which you’ve been what you think a person should be? Done what a person should do?

Now, for an atheist, all these questions have satisfactory answers: knowing truth makes me happy, and the sort of person I think I should be isn’t described by a pastor, etc. I am not arguing that belief is ‘better’ than unbelief, but rather that the factual accuracy of a belief system is not the only criterion for judging it and that the scorn some of us smugly atheistic people feel for the religious has more to do with oppositional pride than with any failure of religion.

At their best, an atheist might concede, religions tell hard, exact, existential truths enclosed in beautiful, shapely lies. Do I believe that Jesus rose from the dead?  I don’t.  Do I think that there is a possibly heroic transcendence involved in loving those who harm you, in letting go of your attachment to the world, in living and dying for your principles?  I do. Do I believe in the loaves and fishes? No. Do I believe that material possessions are less important than we are inclined to think? Yes.

I also believe that the subtle philosophical points involved in this subject are too much for many of the people on this planet, but they shouldn’t be excluded from the warmth provided by meaning, art, and ethics; and it is for them that some of those beautiful shapely lies exist.

Dawkins calls such a view patronizing, and it is; I am sorry for that, but I live in the real world. I know people who bear their burdens because they believe a deity walks with them; and their burdens are too great for me to think it witty or fun to mock their belief, either the hard truths about love, sacrifice, patience, fidelity, and death, or the beautiful lies about snakes and arks.

Not only that, but I don’t think their lies inferior to my lies, the ones I tell myself about love and meaning, about my value as an ‘individual,’ and so on; nor do I even consider the artful stories of a religion inferior to the brilliant theories and facts of science, as they address different audiences with different needs. This is why it is so pitiful to see the religious attempt to engage in science to prove their faith; it’s like Picasso trying to tell us we can actually store our wines in the Guernica basement, that it’s real.

“We all know people (is it significant that the ones I can think of are mostly women?) to whom we can sincerely say: “If only everybody were like you, the world’s troubles would melt away.” The milk of human kindness is only a metaphor but, naïve as it sounds, I contemplate some of my friends and I feel like trying to bottle whatever it is that makes them so kind, so selfless, so apparently un-Darwinian.” -Richard Dawkins

I hope Dawkins knows that religion is that: the effort to bottle whatever makes some - Buddha, Jesus- so un-Darwinian.  Religions are often horribly disfigured by corruption, by historical meddling, by politics (the worst influence of all), and so on, but at their core is this effort: to capture, codify, and present in the maximally entrancing, captivating, and persuasive form ‘the milk of human kindness.’

My disagreement with Dawkins, I suppose, comes down to one thing: are beautiful lies needed?  I know this much: I need them in art, and I need them in love, and I need them in life; why shouldn’t humans need them in ethics, in morality, and in hope?

[Note: that I believe in the value of religion doesn’t mean I think anyone should believe; after all, I don’t. An argument for utility is not an argument for truth.]