It is no accident that Marxism and social Darwinism arose together, two tellers of one tale. It is not surprising that they have disgraced themselves in similar ways. Their survival more than one hundred and fifty years on is probably owed to the symmetry of their supposed opposition. Based on a single paradigm, they reinforce each other as legitimate modes of thought. So it is with our contemporary Left and Right. Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness.
What Are We Doing Here? is a collection of “mostly lectures...given in churches, seminaries, and universities over the past few years”; reflecting not only Marilynne Robinson's usual preoccupation with Calvinist thought, but extending her ideas to the current American political climate. Because these lectures were given so close together, but at different venues, they often circle and repeat the exact same points over and over again; making this, as a reading experience, slightly more tedious than necessary. These essays are challenging (I can't imagine sitting in an auditorium and listening to Robinson speak without the benefit of going back and rereading the passages I didn't understand the first time through), and they're sometimes dry, but I never found them boring; there's definitely value in collecting the current preoccupations of such a deep thinker in one place like this.
When Stephen Hawking died recently, the social media that I follow included posts by religious folk who said such things as, “I am deeply saddened that he died not knowing God the Creator of all things”, and responses from those “rational thinkers” who then replied with, “You can believe in an invisible sky fairy all you like but, if he does exist, screw him for inventing ALS.” (I would like to note, with utter neutrality, that in A Brief History of Time, back in the 1980s, Dr. Hawking stated his goal to describe the universe in such a way that no creator God was necessary; I don't believe he accomplished this, but either way, he's either currently in possession of the ultimate truths or simply extinguished – what we believe about it is no longer relevant.) It's where Robinson responds to this particular public discourse – wherein religious belief is seen as primitive and unintelligent and scientism is seen as definitive and rational – that I was most interested.
Our ways of understanding the world now, our systems and ideologies, have an authority for us that leads us to think of them as exhaustive accounts of reality rather than, at best, as instruments of understanding suited to particular uses.As a professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Robinson has watched as the humanities have lost their presumed validity as an area of study. Centuries of rising humanism has pushed our gods to the edge of relevance, but we now find ourselves in a post-humanist world – where it is fashionable to call humans the least of Earth's animals and regret our effects, and even our presence, on the planet (beliefs that I see on my own social media every day) – and if we no longer see value in humans, we certainly don't see value in studying the humanities at a post-secondary level. Our meanness of spirit (the transformation from “Citizens” to merely “Taxpayers”) resents funding public institutions of higher learning, insisting if we do that the young should only be studying “trades”; not recognising that it is through the humanities – art, music, literature – that humans have been expressing what is divine in themselves all along. Over several of these lectures, and especially with regards to the discovery of dark matter, Robinson makes the point that science is continually making observations that contradict what we previously thought was “settled truth”; why do we believe that science is truth in itself instead of simply one method for observing the world? Science dismisses the felt experience – mind and conscience – as mere side effects of evolution, and in several places, Robinson wonders why we don't challenge the “cynicism as ultimate truth” of Richard Dawkins, et al:
Who can show me a shred of empirical evidence for the existence of anything resembling a selfish gene? The prejudice that allows these theories to claim the authority of reason and science is, among many other things, a slander on reason and science.And in a later lecture she ties it all up thusly:
Science before the twentieth century supported the assumption that reason was, as the physicists say, flat, that like the laws of nature its rules were the same everywhere and in all circumstances, and that whatever they could not countenance was an error, a primitive survival, a mystification. Then along came quantum physics, relativity, a theory of cosmic origins, and science ever since has been constantly at work at a new poetry, trying to capture something of the startling elegance, novel to our eyes, that eventuates everything that is. Crucially assisted by dark matter, of course, which seems to hold the heavens together and about which little else can at present be said. Only grant that a great, creating holiness is at the center of it all, and one must arrive at something like the extraordinary language in which the ancients invested their perceptions. For the ancients, the great, creative holiness was the intuition, the conception, that forced their language so far beyond the limits of the commonplace. Science departed from its origins in religion not so very long ago. If these two great thought systems are not now once again reaching a place of convergence, the fault lies with religion, which, in a fit of defensive panic, has abandoned its profoundest insights and has never reclaimed them.Surely, where science and religion converge must be a lovely and satisfying place to live. And while this was the most interesting thread for me personally, it wasn't the only one in this collection. Robinson makes much of Americans' lack of knowledge of their own history and origins – and especially with respect to the (apparently unfairly maligned) Puritans; the freedom-fighting abolitionist knowledge-seekers who founded both Harvard and Yale deserve to be remembered for more than the pejorative “Puritanical” (more than once Robinson asks, non-rhetorically, if there weren't witch trials in the South at the same time). Robinson traces and retraces the religious writings of Jonathan Edwards and quotes from The Actes and Monuments of the Martyrs by John Foxe; with several references to the Golden Rule, Robinson seems to be making the point that if we were to recognise the divine in both ourselves and in our neighbours, there would be no poverty or income disparity – the death of God was the death of faith, hope, and charity, which led us directly to where we find ourselves today, yelling at each other over the internet.
There are two personal pieces in this collection that don't seem to fit with the scholarly tone of the others, but they are both fascinating reads. A Proof, a Test, an Instruction is on the personal relationship that Robinson developed with President Obama:
Having spoken with the president, having had some direct experience of his humor, his intelligence and courtesy, and his goodness, I consider it probable that those who have opposed him so intractably did so because they knew how remarkable a leader he could be. They were threatened by the possibility of a great president, one who could lead the country in a direction they did not favor and give prestige to a vision they did not share.And the final essay, Slander, was on Robinson's aging mother and how watching Fox News made her fearful; tormented by anxieties and regrets:
I, her daughter, a self-professed liberal, was one of those who had ruined America. I would go to hell for it, too, a fact she considered both regrettable and just.Where this kind of Left-Right chasm can open within a family, it seems obvious that there is something wrong with public discourse today. Robinson's writings have given me much to think about in this regard.
There is a Catholic priest, Fr Raymond J. de Souza, who serves as a columnist for the newspaper I read, and he was one of the commentators who wrote about Stephen Hawking upon his death. I didn't realise that Hawking had served on the Vatican's Academy of Sciences for over forty years, and that he was happy to celebrate the Catholic priest, Monsignor Georges Lemaitre, who had conceived of the Big Bang Theory; from my perspective, there's nothing fundamentally contradictory between some level of religious belief and what scientific observation has discovered about the universe. Even so, de Souza ended his column with:
Professor Hawking expanded the limits of what physics tells us. It is an elementary part of the philosophy of science that there are limits to what physics can tell us. Hawking insisted, by assertion and not evidence, that there were no such limits, that there was no metaphysics, just physics. Which means that Hawking’s world — despite the fact that saw farther than almost everyone else — was, in the end, rather small.So, naturally, in our combative climate of internet discourse, the primary response in the comment section revolved around, "Hilarious that pedophile priests from the corrupt Catholic church think they have anything to say about science and scientists."
So turns the world.
