“In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
Franz Kafka, “Aphorism 52.” Is this because the world will win, or because the world is right, especially about you?
mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
My Photo Blog
Flickr / Videos
Facebook / Twitter
Email
/
Archive
Posts tagged franz kafka.
BMKK, whose posts I love, shared Leoš Janáček’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, IV. Adagio, alone with a mysterious epigraph of sorts:
“—The sky is a roof, with windows in it for rain to fall through. People live up there, you see. And if you climb up high enough you can visit them.”—WG
Nearly as much as did Kafka’s, Janáček’s reputation benefited from the intervention of Max Brod, whose relationships with the great Czech figures demonstrates that people who do not understand art can nevertheless love it -consolation for me!- and even help it. Many of Janáček’s difficulties derived from his rejection by Czech musical culture, particularly the Communist devotee of Smetana Zdeněk Nejedlý (never sufficiently punished for his pettiness, viciousness, or conflation of the aesthetic, political, and personal, in my view).
Janáček and his wife Zdenka.
Janáček’s marriage was not a successful one: he fell in love with other women and refused even moderate discretion, provoking his wife to a suicide attempt and an eventual loveless cohabitation as he pursued his affairs and his work.
His music is fascinating and relentlessly inventive; he seems to have been compulsively original, restlessly exploratory, and as such he anticipates many better-known composers of later years. Two of his great popularizers aside from Brod -Sir Charles Mackerras and Milan Kundera, in whose Testaments Betrayed I first read of Janáček- speak of his work as though it approached the prophetic, particularly his interest in psychological realism in operatic melody. Mackerras has said that he was “the first minimalist composer.”
An unrequited object of affection, Kamila Stösslová.
Kundera concludes his brief biographical sketch of Janáček by describing his happier late years, when he was finally afforded international success and no longer required to accept meddlesome and moronic changes to his work. He also finds himself (again) in love with a young woman, Kamila Stösslová. On a trip with her, Kundera says, the 74-year-old plays light-heartedly with her son, catches a cold which develops into pneumonia, and dies in the midst of happiness. I cannot say how much of the anecdote is invented, but it expresses the arc of his life well even if it is apocryphal.
"A Message from the Emperor," Franz Kafka
The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message in his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald speak it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those witnessing his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.
“Kierkegaard is a star, although he shines over territory that is almost inaccessible to me.”
Franz Kafka, to Oskar Baum. Kafka doesn’t mean that Kierkegaard illuminates a Christian world which is alien to his Judiasm; he elsewhere wrote that Kierkegaard “is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.”
Indeed, Kafka’s Judiasm had as its greatest effect his preoccupation with gnosis and textual indeterminacy, with an endless exegetical pursuit of truth long since vanished from the word and the world. To a lesser extent, it provided an atmosphere and some iconography for his mind, and no German-speaking Jewish man living in Prague in the early 20th century could escape the relentless othering that so dislocated and alienated him.
But reductive analyses fail clumsily with Kafka, who was a modernist writer more than a Jew or a neurotic or a Czech or a European or a mystic. It is in his modernism, which we largely share -post merely being a prefix- that we find what put the Kierkegaardian territory “almost” beyond reach:
For Kierkegaard the absurd -the suprarational- remained an alternative to the world of reductive, superficial reason; for Kafka, the absurd -the irrational- had become the world of superficial contemporaneity. What was transcendence for Kierkegaard was, in distorted form, a reality for Kafka: the senseless world of anti-rational, post-human social derangement.
The territory of religious commitment as a turning-against-the-world was almost inaccessible to Kafka, who saw the world turning against itself; Kierkegaard drew inspiration from Abraham’s irrational willingness to murder his son, while Kafka saw that soon, functionaries would commit atrocities by the millions without asking for a rationale.
This is why Kierkegaard is timeless -Wittgenstein said: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” Kafka, on the other hand, wasn’t a saint but a prophet: he saw as early as anyone what modernism meant: reason run amok and no solace beyond reason, no leap permitted.
(Note: the awesome Greg Brown and I have been arguing over whether fiction or non-fiction is superior, is more real, in Meaghano’s comments; I think Kafka’s prescience is a good example of why the novel will always illuminate more than the essay: we must imagine before we describe).
"A Little Fable," by Franz Kafka
“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I at last saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
“When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. But I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.”
The ape Franz Kafka describes making “A Report to an Academy.”
From this frenzy nothing is being kept; from these cascading thoughts nothing will be recorded, nothing archived, nothing photographed, nothing broadcast. It is not a question of choice but of forms of forgetting:
One might forget by permitting blankness to spread like a chemical through canvas, bleaching the fibers of their paint and leaving a vacant whiteness that is only a vacuum of what you experienced but is itself a sort of fullness, a density of nullity.
Or one might forget by detailing it all in small strokes, page after page, in tiny glyphs, margins overflowing with notes and annotations, diagrams and drawings: this forgetting will happen as a corrosion from within, the years eating away at the fat under the skin, as slowly what was stuffed becomes thin: a skeleton left where once one had flesh. Over time, what was left out subsumes what was put in.
Or one might forget with falsity: the memory shifting like a bored teen, long-limbed and contriving each posture, projecting from his spine affectations one knows well but from which one will never be free. Now you recall being in love; but now it seems you hated him from the start; or now you think, she was right for me; but now you think: no one was ever right for me. Your memory is your marketer: what lie must it use to sell you the newest products of the personality?
Or one might forget by turning again to the present, where all that one remembers continues to happen again and again, as though memory is like imagination: a modest metaphorical apparatus for variations on the themes we already know.
Whatever we do, we will not record these moments no matter how fiercely we seek to inscribe them, frantically etching them in our flesh like officer of Kafka’s penal colony, coordinating Designer and Harrow to cut deep into the body the judgments and lessons we yearn to experience serenely and purely before our bodies are cast off and present, past, and future cease utterly.
“Each aesthetic judgment is a personal wager; but a wager that does not close off into its own subjectivity; that faces up to other judgments, seeks to be acknowledged, aspires to objectivity.”
Milan Kundera, The Curtain. Almost all discussions about the aesthetic values must address this problem: are judgments about art subjective or not? It is common enough in our time to consider everything subjective, but this is not so: indeed, it is the supposition of objective aesthetic values that permits art to have historical continuity in the first place, despite being the work of many thousands or millions of individuals:
…in the absence of [presupposed objective] aesthetic value, the history of art is just an enormous storehouse of works whose chronologic sequence carries no meaning.
This is clearly not the case, as anyone who knows the full catalog of a band or the arc of a painter’s career will attest; it is even truer when one looks at movements and counter-movements. The history of the arts is comparable to a conversation with consequential threads, and like a conversation this history presupposes certain values; what the content of those values is, whether they are to be celebrated or violated, traced or transgressed, is another matter.
But what is striking about Kundera’s passage, to me, is that he refrains from acting as a philosopher: he does not argue that aesthetic judgments are subjective or objective, but rather than they are in a zone between those categories: each one is a personal wager which aspires to objectivity.
Although most debates about art and aesthetics quickly become debates about the implicit morality, politics, or personality-associations of the debaters, those that don’t still may come to dead ends: someone will say, “Well, it is only your opinion,” or someone else will say, “It’s all just taste.”
And it at once is and isn’t. We may all have our happenstance proclivities, but these are irrelevant except to us. What makes an aesthetic judgment defensible is the degree to which its aspirational objectivity is supported by context, by historical observation, by comparison and contrasting, by references to the internal coherence, logic, structure, and intention of the art in question (I apologize to anyone who strictly supports the notion that there is an ‘intentional fallacy’).
Such qualities buttress an aesthetic judgment, but while it may asymptotically approach objectivity it will never achieve it, not even in the cases of the greatest artists: when Nabakov hates Dostoevsky and Musil finds Kafka dull, you know that understood objectivity is a myth (and those were all roughly contemporary European men!).
Witold Gombrowicz said that any artist is an anti-scientist, and Kundera’s unscientific assertion that aesthetic judgments are personal but not merely subjective, individual gambles communing with the objective, is an excellent example of why I prefer this mode of thought.
Love & Dogs
My first requested over-long essay; here it is, TWIB. It surely reads too much into the subject, but I defend myself with Kafka’s assertion: “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.”
As a child, I didn’t use to know if I loved anyone. I wondered whether it was possible that I had simply assigned to the extremity of fondness I felt a name which it didn’t deserve; I have always been neurotic about such things (we perhaps expect too much of love).
It is a human concern, whether some devotion or adoration rises to the level of love; so too are concerns about love’s details, dimensions, and duration. They are human because they are linguistic and self-reflective; they involve the conscious mind, a spatiotemporal metaphor-machine which came into existence perhaps ten or twenty thousand years ago, not more.
It is at that approximate time that dogs and humans became intertwined, our domestication of them morphologically splintering them from their lupine forbears and their devotion to us perhaps helping to engender the moral decency Herbert Spencer referred to when he wrote that the “behavior of men to the lower animals and their behavior to each other bear a constant relationship.” (He was not alone in thinking that our relations with animals are a barometer of our morality).
The relationship between dog and human is peerless. Malcolm Gladwell noted some expressions of the inter-species connection from researchers who have found that absolutely alone among animals, dogs instinctively believe that humans will help them accomplish tasks. They are hyper-attentive to us, more than we are to ourselves; they register minute differences in posture, breathing, pupil dilation, and tone. They are more trusting of us, more drawn to us, than primates are, even Chimpanzees.
Recent scholarship suggests that this is the result of evolutionary development. After so many millennia of shared existence, dogs now come into the world looking for us; they seek us out and, finding us, have no wish to part. Their integration into human life has structured the formation of their mental world: they are now an animal which exists for another as well as for itself.
But does it abuse the language to say that they love us or that we love them? And if it does not, how do we relate this love to other forms of love?
One easy hierarchy of affections is proposed by Roger Scruton, whom I quoted some months ago; discussing pets, he writes that
“…[We] pour out on them the pent-up store of fellow-feeling, without fear of reproach. At the same time, we are acutely aware of their moral incompetence. Their affection, if it can be won at all, is easily won, and based on nothing… It implies no moral approval and leaves the character of its object unassessed and unendorsed.”
Though this is exaggerated (as there are some men even dogs dislike), it gives us a division: the “easily won…based on nothing” affection of an animal and the affection of humans, which carries with it “moral approval,” assessment, and endorsement. Although I found this idea striking when I first read it, something about it now seems presumptive, even absurd: Scruton’s vision of human love is precisely what is least appealing about it!
Milan Kundera once observed that if his wife said she loved him because he was handsome, intelligent, or charming, it meant very little: everyone loves those qualities, and they are only part of one’s character! But when she said that she loved him despite his ugliness, stupidity, or boorishness, it meant a great deal. Love based on attributes is contingent and common; love in the face of foibles is precious.
What Scruton suggests is superior is debatably so: it is a process of assessment; assessment is judgment. It is therefore a process in which one ignorant human, with pitifully partial knowledge of the deeds, experiences, thoughts, and feelings of another, judges him morally and either endorses him or rejects him, and that judgment will be based on shared, common, social norms: it will be replicable.
We recognize that such love is of dubious value. None of us will long survive the moral interrogation of a judge! In our depths and our darkness, humans are complexly ambiguous. Thus real love is understood to be a commitment -an act, a pact, a planned, willed, decisive choice- rather than the result of feeling or “moral approval.” Indeed, it is for this reason that we have other avenues for the moral approval we cannot give each other, most notably religion. Most religions in some way address the innate human sense of moral corruption, whether by contextualizing it as natural or something to be overcome or by asserting that it is forgiven by an act of a godly love.
This is felt to be a very profound sort of love: it is willfully blind to social judgments, to legal infractions, to filthiness and failure. It loves the soul, so to speak, and the soul is not one’s doings, one’s speech, or even one’s self; it is not the personality, the psyche, or the subconscious; it is the inimitable, unique essence of an individual beneath even his or her heart.
Of course, such a love does not recognize the parts of us we care most about: the sense of humor, the quickness with a kind word, the charity, the wounded self. Indeed, if we are all equally gifted this superhuman (or subhuman) love, what is it worth? We want to be loved both deeply and for who we are, even as that latter element is a changing and illusory quantity. We want to be loved both for the soul and for the self.
But we do not derogate this high form of love because it ignores the self. It is “extraordinary…so close…yet so remote,” as Thomas Mann said of dogs; it is a blind commitment to all humans, but we treasure it.
It may be objected that unlike the purported love of a god or a deeply affectionate relative, the blindness of a dog’s devotion is worth little because it reflects a calculus of natural selection, an evolutionary imperative. The same could be said of a mother’s love for her child, which has neither selfhood nor character and is no less loved for it. We tend to slight that which we perceive as “naturally-ordained” or automatic, as opposed to “consciously-willed.” But we are evolved creatures too, and those are impossible distinctions to clearly make.
My dogs are devoted to me and I am devoted to them, not in a way that leads me to cook for them but in a way that leads me to consider them of the utmost moral value. Indeed: for every story of a dog dying for its master there is a story of a master unwilling to part with his or her dog. A professor told me of one of his graduate students whose labrador had disappeared into the currents of the Mississippi at a treacherous point; the student dove in after the dog, and both drowned. Some people I share this with find it sad, and others ludicrous.
Perhaps devotion and love aren’t the same, but given that love as a feeling is less important than love as a willed decision, we might justly regard devotion as love’s deepest manifestation. And since we are all partly acting out our biological imperatives, we might argue that the presence of “intentionality” and “comprehension” in our affections is overemphasized.
These, too, are wasteful, idle, human questions. What is beyond them is the curious and felicitous relationship we have with this other species, which Maeterlinck described:
“We are alone, absolutely alone, on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.”
However we describe this alliance, we are as fortunate to have it as the dog is, perhaps more so: in it we can see a paradigmatic instance of non-judgmental devotion, which I maintain is not less significant for being unconscious. It is not surprising that even atheists must refer to Eden to describe dogs and their effect on us: there is something very sublime in canine affection, whatever its origin.
Bathroom Politics: War and Defeat
Robot-Heart posed a hypothetical bathroom question, which reminded me of the intricate and fraught politics of sharing such spaces. I suppose it’s normal enough to feel at least ambivalent about communal zones where we use partially sexual and partially unhygienic personal equipment to eliminate wastes from our otherwise angelic bodies. Such small rooms are fast filled with some of our deepest concerns: reminders of death, filth, sex, privacy, vulnerability, social order.
They are therefore rather hilarious.
I happen to be quite comfortable with biology and thus totally unafraid of using bathrooms: public, private, clean, dirty. I tend to think of myself actually as rather heroic, as a guerilla bathroom soldier. Where others will hold it in, I can sit down and read. Where others are distracted by noise and crowds, I can take care of business. I have used bar bathrooms where you would be afraid to stand at the threshold. Bathrooms are one of the only spheres of human experience in which I feel tough: not neurotic, not weak.
Pee-Shy (“paruresis,” if it makes you feel better)
But all things are relative. To take an example, for years I have felt something almost all men know: the personal pride of standing at a urinal next to someone who is pee-shy. If you’ve ever been pee-shy, you know that other, freely-urinating men in the bathroom are judging you in all sorts of ways (that’s part of the problem); there are complicated implications to pee-shyness, most of which have to do with the pee-shy person worrying that others think they’re weird or scared or perhaps sexually distracted.
If you are not pee-shy, you perhaps enjoy some small measure of satisfaction while peripherally aware that, next to you, someone is anxiously struggling with a mounting series of urinary concerns as they worry about what you think. Being in a bathroom makes one a bit like a primate, and I’ve often been content with my status in the order.
Battle and Defeat
Some years ago, however, at our corporate HQ, I experienced a terrific reversal. After a long meeting in which I consumed too much coffee in the hopes of remaining sharp enough to impress an executive, I raced to the men’s room only to find said executive in it already, washing his hands. He and I had butted heads in the past and I was afraid of him, hostile to him, and eager to win him over nevertheless (corporate life!).
Since he was washing his hands, I went to a urinal rather than a stall (choosing a stall to urinate is a sign of weakness, I gather, although I think that’s ridiculous). But he was just washing his hands first, as though his member was too sacred to handle without preparation. Making his way to the urinal next to me, he smilingly initiated conversation: where did I go to college, what was my major, etc.
Within seconds, I knew it was happening: the damned flow seized up, despite my nearly-burst bladder. And worse: I knew that he knew, and he was loving it, almost as revenge: it was in his smile and tone. He prolonged the conversation long after he’d stopped going, and thus I was stranded: he knew I hadn’t peed, knew I must have had to (why else was I there?), knew I wasn’t, and knew I’d eventually have to quit the field.
Which I did, in humiliation. But I’ve never since lorded my bathroom bravery over others, as I know their anguish now. He’s long since left the company, but, to quote Kafka, it is “as though the shame of it must outlive him.”
“I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.”
Franz Kafka, quoted by Animosa. It’s important to be careful what you allow into your mind; I can read a damn appliances catalog and notice incipient stirrings of possessive desire.
Men
The Lenny Bruce quote below comes from Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, in which it is offered as part of a discussion of the romantically dissolute lifestyle of Peter Altenburg.
Considered by geniuses such as Robert Musil, Alfred Polgar, and Egon Friedell to be one of the great minds of fin de siecle Vienna, he was described by Franz Kafka as being able to discover “the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffee houses.” He was witty, as well:
“There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that’s already three things, and there are a lot more.”
His brilliance was accompanied by a complete inability to lead a stable, successful life, and he subsisted entirely on the charity of the literati and the kindness of his friends. He was also rakishly promiscuous, which leads James to write a bit about the relationship between sexual longing and romantic love:
“The saying goes that men play at love to get sex while women play at sex to get love. The second half of the antithesis is the more likely to be found interesting, because the first sounds closer to the truth… A lot of men will do a lot to get laid. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they play at love. It seems far more likely that love plays with them… [T]here can be no serious doubt, except from those who do not feel it, that the initial attraction of a man towards a woman is felt with the comprehensive force of a revelation. The sentimental view is not the romantic one, but the supposedly realistic one that love follows lust and grows through knowledge.”
James goes on to discuss Albert Camus:
“Men who fall in love easily should do the world the favor of not taking their passions personally. Above all they should do that favor to womankind. Albert Camus, in the week before he was killed, wrote to five different women and addressed each of them as the great love of his life. He probably meant it every time, but had long ago learned the dire consequences for those he adored of making them pay the emotional price for his laughably transferable fixation.”
The chapter is not simply diagnostic, but indeed contains some measure of advice for men subject to the monumental and revelatory flood of infatuation. James suggests that while knowledge of women and the world is useless because of the epiphanetic nature of these feelings’ onset, self-knowledge is helpful, if only to disabuse men of their silly belief in the lucidity of their thoughts.
This image struck me because it immediately reminded me of this:
We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone, we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to hell. For me, you were, along with much else, also like a window through which I could see the streets. I could not do that by myself, for tall though I am, I do not yet reach to the windowsill.
- Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak
I ordinarily take the sort of banal, dull photos one sees tacked to cubicle walls: flat and uninteresting and overly concerned with content, barely conscious of composition, lighting, or any other aesthetic consideration.
So I’m happy this photo of Green Mountain, which is now the background of this site, was interesting to someone, especially someone who takes photos like these.
Here is the original photo, before being altered for web site use.
“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
Franz Kafka (via bluechameleon).
Exact Truths and Beautiful Lies
“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 they 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 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.]
