Then Beggars Would Ride
If wishes were horses, if pigs had wings. The world is one way, our desires are another. Hence the joy of fantasy, daydreaming, fairy tales – magic. The book I want is upstairs – how I wish it were here in my hand. The food is in the refrigerator, uncooked – how I wish it were cooked, on plates, on the table. The dishes are dirty, I wish they were clean. X, Y and Z are dead, how I wish they were alive. A and B are ill, I wish they were well. The world is full of suffering, I wish it were not. The suffering is useless, I wish it were useful. Bad things happen, I wish they didn’t.
We want to believe the universe encodes our idea of meaning. But it doesn’t. We have to content ourselves with self-created meaning – projected meaning. Invented, assumed, dreamed up. Applied, pasted on, added, painted, stage-set meaning. Upper floor meaning – pretend, make believe. Applicable only to us. Contingent, subjective, made.
And made by us. Not by a deity, not by chemical processes, but by us. Shabby shambling little primates on a smallish insignificant planet. One animal species among the millions that live and have lived on this planet – how could its notions of meaning be inscribed in the cosmos? But we so want to think they are – so we pretend that religion somehow underwrites our claims.
We don’t want our meaning to have been made, and especially not by us. We know we’re not good enough. So we assert that it’s been done by someone much grander – and yet like us – only more so. Like us only perfect – the way we would be if we were perfect. Which seems like a contradiction in terms – if we were perfect we wouldn’t be like us. Being imperfect is the very essence of being like us. It’s hard to know what we would be like, really – as soon as you start to think about it it makes no sense. What would perfect arms be like, for example. Longer? Shorter? Extendable? Retractable? Equipped with blades? Infinitely long?
That’s the great thing about religion. It doesn’t need to bother with such things (unless it’s Aquinas, but it’s common or garden religion I’m talking about here, the religion of the newspapers and The New Republic and the pundits), it just asserts, and ignores contradictions and impossibilities. That’s the whole point. It’s a mechanism for making wishes into horses. A wish-to-horse conversion device.
I agree that a sense of proportion and humility is a good idea and that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. But I do think you’d admit, no?, that in the world as we see it, there are no beings more complex than humans. We may not be very small or very big but we are the most extraordinarily complex, the most evolved, entitiy that we know about.
Teilhard de Chardin of course spoke of this phenomenon and urged us to take our complexity, and our continued human evolution very seriously.
So when I hear people denigrate us as living on an insignificant planet etc etc etc…well then I always remember that we humans started as soup….pretty incredible. eh? soup become conscious of itself and that Grace Slick wa on to something when she referred to us as the ‘crown of creation.’
Great post! I loved the “wish-to-horse conversion device”, i could use one of them myself – well, one that really worked, that is ;)
“We have to content ourselves with self-created meaning”
It’s interesting that. Very true, of course. But what I find most interesting about it is the implications it raises about morality (my favourite field of philosophy).
Too many people assume it implies nihilism, or at least some form of relativistic subjectivism. Unpleasant stuff. So they reason backwards, and say “nihilism is unacceptable, so there must be intrinsic value in the universe independent of humans, so there must be a God”.
Needless to say, it’s not the best approach. Rather, we must accept the fact that WE are the creators of Value, and work from there. It’s altogether possible to have a meaningful morality built on those premises (despite common assumptions to the contrary).
A particularly good example (IMO) is the little-known Desire Utilitarianism. (Not to be mistaken with other utilitarian theories, there are many significant differences – fortunately!)
For those who are interested, I recently compiled a brief overview of the theory:
Our notions of meaning will be inscribed on the cosmos when we gain the power to inscribe them there. Which I am hoping for, at least for me. Aside from the question of what meaning is [someone ought to tackle that one one of these days], a wish-to-horse conversion device will one day I think be in operation…made by us, or some of us anyhow, not by some god or goddess who is obviously too stupid to give a rip about us. I wished I had my own little trebuchet…now I do, because I built it. Extrapolate. I haven’t gained all my goals yet, but I’m working on it.
As for our own imperfection…well I think that one can be licked too, eventually. As long as real minds don’t give in to that contingent that sees us as errant slaves of a god or insignificant excretions of nature. We may have started out lowly, but we don’t have to stay that way. What pulls us upward, what tells us we are not lowly? I’m an agnostic, so I guess it is either 1] our future selves, or 2] it just looks like a good idea that we might as well try…
Anybody wanna take on a definition of meaning? I mean, those po-mo types are always yapping about it. No fair looking at the dictionary first!
Today, I’ve posted my response, and now I’m late to work. Acck!
http://blogs.salon.com/0002889/2004/02/11.html#a152
Let me try that this way:
http://blogs.salon.com/0002889/2004/02/11.html#a152
Oh, nevermind, cut and paste. I’ve gotta go.
love, –M
Whoa! Don’t go jumping to conclusions about the New Republic. Easterbrook and Wieseltier may be fairly religious, but a number of other TNR writers seem indifferent. Plus Wendy Kaminer has occasionally written for TNR, most famously here:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/kaminer.htm
David, yes, I definitely would agree. I’m in fact endlessly fascinated by the fact that this shambling primate is what it is. In fact I wrote about that in the rest of the early-morning scribble that turned into the post – but didn’t include it, saved it for later.
RC, thanks. Yes, reasoning backward; that’s just it. However tempting it may be it just…doesn’t…work. Marijo doesn’t agree with me, but there it is.
Chris, I know, I know. We have a link to that wonderful Kaminer article. And TNR did well to publish it, since as Kaminer points out the NY Times wouldn’t let her say that kind of thing (which I find pretty shocking). And they publish many atheist-secularist friends and contributors of ours, such as Simon Blackburn. But they ran that dreadful Franklin Foer article as a cover story only recently, the one rebuking Dean for not being religious. That’s the kind of thing that makes me what people call a militant or strident atheist – when people demand that other people believe things (and publicly avow things) that there is no reason to think are true. I think that’s an attack on reason and independent thought, and I’m agin it.
Well, it is one-sided, Marijo, you’re right about that. My confirmation bias.
But I don’t really agree that it’s bad manners, simply because so many religious people (at least now, at least in the US) have no hesitation about conflating atheism with at least indifference to morality – or ‘values’ as they are generally called. And then there is the whole way ‘faith’ is taken to be a virtue, which I think has very dangerous implications for people’s ability to think clearly. And in a democracy, everybody really does need to be able to think clearly! That’s not a luxury.
So I do think atheists need to speak up when it becomes the default position that religion has it right and secularism has it wrong.
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Clang! That’s the sound of the nail being struck on the head. I think you’ve perfectly expressed the problems with perfection, especially as the concept may apply to a deity. Theists get themselves into a muddle very quickly whenever they assert that God is perfect, but also somehow like us puny humans.
I developed an amusing thought experiment about this issue a little while ago. I tried to imagine how a perfect God would compete in a human sports event, such as a 100-yard dash. Now of course, the way you win a 100-yard dash is simply by running faster than the other competitors. So, imagine God wearing his track uniform – which presumably fits him perfectly. He’s all geared up for the race, and he means to win. And being perfect, he WILL win. But what could it mean to run a “perfect” race? It can’t mean simply running faster than the other racers, because as long as it takes Him any time at all to run, it’s theoretically possible for someone else to run faster. Thus, the only way He can run a “perfect” race is if he instantly crosses the finish line – that is, if it literally takes Him no time at all to finish the race. But if He does that, than He actually hasn’t run a real race at all, since the movements of running (pumping your knees and so forth) require at least some time.
So how is it possible for God to be perfect, in this example? He either collapses to imperfection because he takes some time to run the race, or because he hasn’t actually RAN the race – which also means he hasn’t done what He was supposed to do and so could not have done it perfectly. So there you go. The whole concept of perfection really, is shot through with conceptual problems of this sort. And I suspect that most theists simply haven’t put any thought into the question of what it could mean for God to be perfect, and also like humans. But like other religious dogmas (Trinity, original sin, etc.), the concept of theistic perfection is usually just solemnly declared a sacred mystery. Ah, mystery -the great solution to all serious intellectual problems.
Phil
Well I actually liked the Foer article because it described a problem with the Dean campaign. Life isn’t fair and we have to deal with the fact that the U.S. is currently a country where presidential candidates have to pander to some religious sentiment. It’s simply realpolitik. Blaming Foer is shooting the messenger. Foer explicitly writes “One day, a truly secular candidate might be able to run for president without suffering at the polls. But that day won’t be soon. This is, for better or worse, an openly religious country that prefers its politicians to be openly religious, too–a trend that has only become more pronounced in recent national elections.” So Foer is nowhere endorsing religion, but merely describing the nature of American politics.
By the way, it irks me when Dawkins, et al. remark that we’re little people on a little, insignificant planet. First, let’s look at the word “little.” Assume that our planet occupied 1/10th of the entire universe. Assume our lifespans were a billion times longer than they currently are. Now would that reduce the weight of the human condition by one iota? Would it immediately make us more important? I think not.
Now look at the word “insignificant.” It follows the word “little” like a synonym, yet look more carefully and you realize that significance is not equal to size. We might be the most intelligent species in the entire universe, or at least one of the most intelligent, so we could be very significant. We’ve already send space probes to the farthest planets of our solar system, which seems pretty bloody impressive considering human civilization has only been around since about 5000 B.C.
Thanks, Phil. I love the race idea. (I wonder if God has a photograph of his phenomenal calf muscle. I know someone who has a photo of his own calf, so that he can admire his superhuman strength. I bet God’s would make his look pretty dusty.)
Chris,
Well, I turn to that Foer article, of which I happen to have a hard copy, to see if I’ve misremembered it – and I find it full of places where I’ve marked sly rhetoric. For instance the use of the word ‘faith’ instead of religion. Or saying that Kitty Dukakis ‘admitted’ the Ds were not very religious. Or use of the word ‘spiritual’ throughout. That’s exactly the kind of thing that can be so insidious, I think – it just assumes that religion is good, that belief in religion is the default position.