The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. In such an environment the humanities do seem to have little place. They are poor preparation for economic servitude. This spirit is not the consequence but the cause of our present state of affairs.I think that with this passage, Marilynne Robinson totally captures the spirit of the age: it seems to be a given that the legions of baristas with their humanities degrees are the epitome of waste; that they ought to have spent their education dollars on technical college or found themselves a viable trade. My facebook feed is equally divided between the people who uncritically quote the quasi-metaphysical Deepak Chopra and David Avocado Wolfe on the one hand and those who throw out the cold cynicism of Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais as “proof” against those who still believe in “fairytales about invisible sky gods”. People of faith are thought to be either fundamentalists who attempt to impose their beliefs on others or weak-minded dolts who say their prayers at night out of infantilism or nostalgia. In a world where God cannot be found on either radar or spectrogram – where absence of proof is assumed to be proof of absence – who has the courage to defend belief on purely intellectual terms? Marilynne Robinson does. And yet, as she made and defended her arguments in the seventeen essays in The Givenness of Things, quoting Erasmus and Calvin and Bonhoeffer, I so often couldn't quite follow along with her; and all because I have no proper rooting in the humanities – Bonhoeff-who?
I had an easier time of it when Robinson was talking science – as she often does, returning again and again to the unreality of quantum physics, gravity that's weaker than it ought to be, the unknowable nature of time; all topics which have long fascinated me – and I found myself in easy agreement with an argument like this one:
Neuroscientists seem predisposed to the conclusion that there is no “self”. This would account for the indifference to the modifying effects of individual history and experience, and to the quirks of the organism that arise from heredity, environment, interactions within the soma as a whole, and so on. What can the word “self” mean to those who wish to deny its reality? It can only signify an illusion we all participate in, as individuals, societies, and civilizations. So it must also be an important function of the brain, the brain aware of itself as it is modified by the infinite particulars of circumstance, that is, as it is not like others. But that would mean the self is not an illusion at all but a product of the mind at other work than the neuroscientists are inclined to acknowledge.And if it's that easy to argue for the existence of “self”, is it really that large a leap to argue for the existence of other concepts (the soul or God) that we as humans can feel the reality of but cannot “prove” with current technology? (Perhaps I should note that I'm not personally religious – as I tend to think of religions as the imperfect constructions of imperfect humans – but that doesn't make me an atheist.)
I also connected to the bits about Shakespeare (on whom Robinson wrote her doctorate decades ago) and appreciated her argument in favour of seeing the Bard as a theologist; writing for a culture (including the so-called Groundlings) that understood the history of Western thought better than we do today. But again, my ignorance of the humanities/the classics didn't allow me to completely understand seeing the endings of the history plays as metaphors for grace; that Shakespeare told the story of Antony and Cleopatra, for example, in a way that would make his audience understand that the lovers had to die in order to see the rise of Augustus Caesar, which would then set the scene for the coming of Christ. I would never have made that connection and I am jealously resistant to the idea that the unwashed masses in Shakespeare's day would have known more than I do; and that's rather the point of this book.
As I was reading, I put multiple book darts in every essay, knowing I would want to come back and talk about all of them, but now that the book is done, I just want to restate what I found to be the main idea: In public conversations today (of which I find my facebook feed to be representative), it seems a given that people of faith are not too bright, but consider this: I've read that the cavemen who painted deer and bison on the walls at Lascaux, France some seventeen millenia ago had brains just like ours; we like to imagine them as dumb knuckle-draggers, but as their art proves, they were fully human. But if a modern rationalist were to speak to a cave-painter, demanding scientific proofs for the source of his artistic impetus, our caveman wouldn't have the language to defend his inspiration – and yet I'm sure he'd know that his being was more than a common piece of meat whose animating force was more than a random effect of evolution. In the past few millenia– even closer to modern day and even more analogous to our own brains – deep thinkers were able to meditate on and discover elegant proofs for the existence of the soul, of God(s). This history of thought – the humanities – has long been taught by intelligent people to intelligent people, and there was in Western culture a common language of belief. Yet in the past few hundred years, we have prioritised science (as though “science” and “faith” are mutually exclusive), and within the past generation, we have become utterly contemptuous of the humanities. Therefore, the modern person of faith has lost the language to defend his beliefs; he may as well be a caveman; he is certainly compared to one often enough.
In reading Marilynne Robinson's previous works – and especially Gilead and Lila – I often mentally checked out when characters would explain Calvinist ideas to one another; now I understand what the author was trying to achieve by this. Givenness is a rather dense work to get through – and most especially if, like me, you don't have the proper educational background with which to approach it – but I found it rewarding just the same; it was fascinating to read what has been the lifelong fascinations of an author I admire. And as I just recently read her first novel Housekeeping (which is commonly considered a work demonstrating the Transparent Eyeball metaphor of Emerson and Whitman) this passage felt especially meaningful to me right now:
I feel that I have been impoverished in the degree that I have allowed myself to be persuaded of the inevitability of a definition of the real that is so arbitrarily exclusive, leaving much of what I intuited and even what I knew in the limbo of the unarticulated and the unacknowledged. I wish I had experienced my earthly life more deeply. It is my fault that I didn’t. I could have been a better scholar of Walt Whitman.If Robinson wishes she had experienced her “earthly life more deeply”, imagine how impoverished I feel right now. Yet, richer for having read this book.
