Nietzsche and Borges and Murphy: Fiction and the Empty Universe

Neil deGrasse Tyson declares the number of possible persons by the number of possible combinations of DNA. This would make twins and clones the same person. In fact the number of possible persons is infinite. 

Borges added to Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return a Library in which all texts return infinitely, but with variation. But if the library is infinite, all texts also return infinitely without variation. All commas are forever where they belong. And if the universe is structured like the library, then not just all texts but all lives return eternally with and without variation. Every mistake you ever make you make eternally. But you also avoid it eternally. Everyone you ever could have married, you marry. Every life you could have lived, you live. Every mistake you could make, you make. Every mistake you could avoid, you avoid. Everything that can happen happens, happens forever in infinite repetition. And this helps us understand the great emptiness of the universe, an argument against the existence of God. Most of the universe is empty. Most of the library is nonsense. Pockets of meaning are infinite and infinitely rare at the same time, at every time, at all times and in all times. That’s the structure of the library. But it also means that the books we write which are fictions here are realities elsewhere, providing they are possible anywhere. Is there a universe in which flying carpets are real? If there is, there are flying carpets there and Persians who fly on them. If not, not. But Silas Lapham exists with his paint in a universe somewhere. And somewhere he doesn’t gamble on the stock market and somewhere he does.

Rushdie's God

 I am a particular fan of Salman Rushdie. Of his published words, the few I have not (yet) read are like the water that's left in your cupped hands when all the rest has passed through. Not much. I have taught an entire graduate seminar on his works--though that was long ago, before most of the ones we now have were written. I've gone to India to present a paper on his sense of history, which was soon after published in a book that came out of the conference. I did this in the days when I wasn't quite sure it was safe to travel to India to talk about Rushdie. (Turns out I had nothing to worry about.) If nothing else of Rushdie lasts, it's hard to imagine the Midnight's Children will not be read as long as there are people who read novels. 

That's not to say that I think Rushdie is universally brilliant and not even sometimes rated higher, I won't say "than he deserves" but, as I would rate him. He's a novelist. He's not a philosopher. And he's not theologian either. I'm neither of those things myself, so there's my grain of salt.

I, like Rushdie, like to talk about God. I don't like to talk about God the way Rushdie does. Rushdie is not just a devotee of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but is (or in one case was) also a personal friend of theirs. It's the tradition of no less a mind than Bertrand Russell. And like them, he isn't just an atheist--I have no problem with atheists--but contemptuous not just of religion (I understand even when I don't share that response to religion), but also faith in general, to theism in general. As such, he equates believe in God with magical thinking, with believing in fairy tales and Santa Claus. Something only children and small minded adults can take seriously. 

On the question of whether God exists, I will not take any stand. On the question of whether this characterization of belief makes sense, I will. 

In Languages of Truth Rushdie offers a standard atheists "history" of religion (he cannot distinguish between belief in God and adherence to religion). Ignorant, pre-scientific people, needing to understand and control what they could not understand or control, felt the wind and invented an invisible blower of the wind to whom they could appeal when the wanted the wind to stop and who, if he did not stop the wind, hated or blamed them, in any case required some response from them if they still wanted the wind to stop. (I'm not quoting because the idea is so simple and so standard that it doesn't even matter if I embellish or understate; it comes to the same thing.)

God did not create us in his image, he tells us, we created God in our image. 

Rushdie may be right about all of that. That's not the question. He also may be wrong. Offering no evidence between "common sense," which is an extraordinarily slippery sort of evidence, no one reading Rushdie has in fact any reason to accept his version of history, his story, or, to put it in the terms it best deserves, his myth. There's an essential difference between a plausible explanation and an established fact. Rushdie wants to put his eggs in the basket of science, but then he offers a hypothesis as a conclusion. He has told the story many times of how he lost his faith as child--around the age of 14 if I remember correctly. A lot of children do. I don't see any evidence that his thinking on the question has advanced since then. Almost no one's ever does. (C. S. Lewis is an exception to that trend, not that I don't have problems with the version of faith advocated there as well. But whatever one might say about Lewis, his faith is well thought out, not the shrug-off of Rushdie.) I don't think anyone needs to take too seriously the undeveloped atheism or the theism of a fourteen-year old.  

The point that I wish to make is this: Rushdie replaces a faith in myth with a myth in which he expects us to place our faith. A myth of origins. A simple reversal of the old idea about God's image. How does Rushdie know we created God in our image? Here he does not delve. It's too obvious to need to delve. 

The problem with saying that faith is unreasonable, fairy-taley, jibber jabber, is the number of reasonable people who maintain that it isn't, not just amateur theologians like C.S. Lewis, but actual philosophers like Rene Girard and Paul Ricoeur. And the problem with the idea that we created God in our image is that the claim is always based on the unverifiable notion that God if God existed would never create the universe in which we live. It's unjust. It's too tolerant of evil. Our reason tells us that it is unreasonable for an omniscient, all loving God to make such a shit show universe. 

That may be true. There is reason to assert that it is. But we have nothing like a reason to believe that it is. If we do, we do so on faith. That an infinite God would use human reason, with not just its lack of knowledge but its lack of apparatus, its thoroughly qualified finiteness, to make what we have to call from our perspective "decisions" about how to make a universe is not just an act of hubris but an act of willful blindness. It's plainly silly. Think of a toddler telling you how to fix your car or your government or global warming and multiply that difference infinitely and you have the difference between what religion calls the mind of God and what Rushdie calls the mind of God. 

There's no getting around this. It will sound like a cheap response to the Rushdie, Hitchens, Dawkins crowd. But it is in fact the more reasonable response. It is the line of thought that unlike theirs takes into account reason and science. It sets myth aside to confront the facts as we know them. 

A Word on Thomas Hardy

 

It seems the first thing one must say today is in response to Hardian pessimism: to the aversion I have to reading novels that beat up on their protagonists. Hardy pulls out fingernails and pushes needles slowly into eyes with what feels like self-loathing, sadistic, pleasure. 

These stories go beyond tragedy, which always has a cause, which always tells us that “it had to be” even when we respond, “it should not have to have been that way.” Hardy wants us to know, “it didn’t have to be that way.” In his works it may be an evil individual, and it may be the arbitrary rules of the social unit (that put so much pressure on who may have sex with whom in its most obvious example of the “it didn’t have to be that way” variety) or pure chance. When the gods condemn us, we just have to submit. When society punishes us for mere natural actions that give us happiness or pleasure at no one’s essential cost, we can change those rules. But when well meaning people doing good are ground down for their virtue, the most natural reaction is disgust followed by despair. That which cannot be altered or resisted or blamed offers no meaningful response. Hardy’s universe is one no one wants to live in. There’s no fixing it. There’s no reconciling oneself to it.

Hardy’s response is “but that’s the universe you do live in. I’m just showing it to you. I’m taking the veil off the bullshit presented to you as food by all previous literature (with the possible exception of King Lear). I’m not telling you what to do with this knowledge, because there’s nothing you can do with it. Accept it if you choose to live in truth; deny it if you choose to live in delusion.”

But is this the universe we actually live in? Of course there IS a force behind the arbitrary destruction of all of Hardy’s admirable heroes. Hardy himself. The manipulating author who keeps good at bay while he opens all the apertures to destruction. That doesn’t however reveal anything about the accuracy of the portrayal. Hardy is Tess’s Apollo. But Tess might have died as she did without any Apollo. People die by chance on their way to doing good every day.

What strikes me as in indication of something deeply false about Hardy’s novels is the reaction of readers. Some of us turn away in disgust. Some of us in satisfaction of a kind. Some cry at the tortured goodness. But no one, I imagine, puts them down out of boredom, at least no one who wouldn’t put down any novel out of boredom. (That’s to say, if anyone is bored by Hardy it’s not because of his plots or his characters but because they don’t have the wherewithal to read.) But boredom is the only proper response to a Hardy novel if Hardy’s representation is accurate. The very idea that something wrong has happened, that some deep injustice has been perpetrated, that there’s something wrong with this indifferent universe may be the effect of centuries of bad storytelling, indoctrination into the myth of meaning. But it may also be from the deeper sense that there is something wrong, something broken in this universe. If Hardy’s right, he shouldn’t have sold any novels. When you hold the mirror up to the reader who sees himself for the first time, there may be an initial shock. But once “that’s who I am” settles in, the shock, whatever intermediary stages of denial and sadness must be made through, comes eventually to resignation and indifference. And we have still not got to indifference.

 

Is

 

Even if I tell you, tell you plainly,

        in the simplest words,

You will not get it.

 

Even if you tell it back to me in new words you picked from the fruit-heavy branches of your word tree so that I understand my own meaning as though you were giving it new to me

You will not have it.

 

But it will sit with you when you lie trembling in your sweat-soaked bed.

It will hold your hand and lay a compress on your fevered head.

And when the fever breaks, many many years from now,

When my voice and name have been composted past shadow,

You will repeat these words again (or others like them) like a prayer, slowly, to yourself

as you strain your thighs to the mattress edge

and shift your weight

and stand up shaking on the cold hard floor.

Then you'll have it; you’ll have got it, you will know.