Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

High school was another site of unpredictable reading taboos, which I tried at first to circumvent by concealing my own book inside some useless shell of a civics textbook. When the teacher snatched my book—which was released only after some minor penance performed after class—I realized that I had to become fully self-entertaining. Let them jabber on about the tedious and unnecessary business of checks and balances or the various branches of state and local government. Why did the adults in my life demand so much attention anyway? “Are you listening, Barbara?” was one of their favorite inquiries, followed up cleverly by, “Then what did I say?” Sometimes their eyes bulged out so far when they asked these questions that I wondered whether the attention they needed wasn’t medical. Or maybe they lacked inner resources and had no way of being sure they existed unless someone like me was around to confirm that they did, moment by moment, with appropriate eye contact and nods. And maybe they were right.

  I had wrestled with solipsism, which of course the fantasy was a dramatization of, for years in my journal. At times it seemed perfectly clear that nothing existed outside of myself: “Oh, the dreadful bitter sense of power to know that this paper, my classmates, the moon, cease to exist when I turn away from them,” I wrote soon after our move to L.A. “And as far as I’m concerned, they do.” More commonly, though, I oscillated around a kind of benevolent agnosticism. There was no rock-solid evidence for the existence of other autonomous, conscious human minds; the people around me could be projections or hallucinations, not to mention the sci-fi possibility of ingeniously designed automatons placed on earth by long-gone extraterrestrials. Nevertheless, in 1959 I announced with some fanfare that

  I have come to the decision, long considered, that I must assume as an axiom that other people are like myself. Meaning that they are conscious, have ideas, thoughts, hopes, fears, loves, secrets, etc. etc. Like me. That sounds absurd but I think very few people believe it. In fact the number of people who do believe it is so small (I think, from evidence) that it is an important concept. Now I know I cannot prove this or ever know for sure, but it seems to me that it is essential in any dealings with other people to assume it [the consciousness of others]. Not really knowing, I can imagine that (1) other people are sensory images only, (2) other people are conscious too, or (3) other people are conscious and know far more than I do. The third is what I think I should feel (I don’t know why).

  Note the ambivalence of this declaration, from “I must assume” to “I don’t know why.” I had not decided that other people fully existed, I had decided to believe that they did, because without this belief, what basis was there for morality or, as I tended to call it at the time, “kindness”? Although if you pressed me on the importance of kindness, I would have had to admit it was not much more than an aesthetic preference, with perhaps an element of self-protection: Experience showed that if there was going to be meanness and screaming and hitting among people, I was likely to be one of the ones who got hit.

  But at the same time I had absorbed enough Nietzsche to be contemptuous of kindness and the feeling of weakness he saw it arising from. In fact, in some of my harsher bursts of aggressive rationality, I was contemptuous of Nietzsche himself. He looked down on his fellow humans, much as my father did, but neither of them seemed to question the idea that other people existed. As for me, I even doubted the reality of the physical world and the dead or silent objects that filled it. Reality? At any moment it could drain out of the visual field and the soundtrack that went with it, leaving me in that strangeness that lies beyond language. So how could I “believe” in people? And if I were to start down that path, then why not go all the way and believe that the entire show—human and otherwise—represented another conscious entity, a super-being, a God? The ambivalent rejection of solipsism quoted above ended with the statement that this exercise in belief “can only go so far, there is a limit. I will not believe in God because really, intrinsically, I can’t prove that anything outside myself exists.”

  So you can see the attraction of the fantasy, as well as of the solipsism that it grew out of: I didn’t need other people, and even if they did exist and think and love and dream, they didn’t seem to need anything from me, at least not anything straightforward and comprehensible that I might have been prepared to give. If I felt a tiny spark of mutual attraction to a boy, which was beginning to happen from time to time, and then after a day or two he ignored me altogether—so what? He was gone as far as I was concerned and probably had never really been there in the first place. I kept myself clean—sometimes even indulging in a luxurious splash of Jean Naté after a shower—and I still had the concept of “nice clothes.” But the question that seemed to torment so many teenagers, at least in magazines and movies—the question of “what other people think of me”—was way too abstract to pursue. First I would have to imagine their independent subjective minds, meaning that in a sense I would have to become them. Then I would have to plant a little objectified Barbara-image within those minds, which would be no small trick. Then I would have to figure out what I, as an independent subjective mind, could do to alter that little image…and so on, mirrors reflecting mirrors.

  Maybe I should have kept a few other people alive in the fantasy—a few friends and certainly my little sister—but being able to pick and choose would make me somehow complicit in the general disappearance. So I killed them all, at least in my mind, and I did so without bloodshed or fuss, leaving the classrooms empty, the houses still, the world awaiting exploration.

  At the time this did not seem like a great loss, because I had no reason to think that humans were, on average, better company than so-called inanimate objects. I have known people who are duller than trees, as well as individual trees that surpass most people in complexity and character. There are cloud formations that are more riveting than the shifting expressions on an ambivalent lover’s face. And if you want a companion whose range goes from gaiety to brooding menace, consider the surface of the sea. As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms. Not so long ago, for example, before the recent recognition of animal consciousness, scientists were convinced that only humans possessed feelings and minds, and that any attribution of these qualities to animals could be blamed on “projection.” But what is mind anyway, how is it distributed throughout the universe, and in what forms of camouflage? Better to start all over again with the basics, I thought—sky, sun, ocean, walls—which were already more than I could handle.

  But as the fantasy played out over months, its real lesson was of how deeply dependent I was on my kind. At first I got along fine, spending my days foraging and my nights reading by flashlight. You can live a long time on the leavings of the dead—fossil fuels, which were once the stuff of living things, for example—without ever bothering to think of what it was that died or how long the supply of cadavers will last. As time went on, though, I had to face hard questions like: How long can you count on a battery, or canned goods, or matches? My few quaint areas of practical competence—cooking, cleaning, sewing—had no immediate applications, since I ate from cans and took any clothing I might need from homes or stores. Vacuum cleaners of course no longer ran, nor was there spare water for scrubbing. Now what I needed to know were the mysteries of human technology: How do you change a tire, fix a car, repair a broken gate, make a fire that will last through the night? Maybe all these things had been taught in school while I was secretly reading novels. Or maybe they had been taught only to boys.

  If I hadn’t killed my mother along with everyone else, finally shut her up once and for all, this would have been her opportunity to say, “See? You always thought you were above it all, and look how useless you’ve turned out to be.” She would have been right. For all that my parents impressed on me the dignity of labor and the wonders of practical ingenuity, I had never fully noticed the huge human mobilization
that was required to keep me alive day after day, never pictured the farmworkers, the meatpacking plants, the truck drivers restocking the stores, the store workers restocking the shelves. If you’re going to be a solipsist, at least a principled one, you better know a thing or two about subsistence farming and how to put together a simple circuit.

  The real blind spot in my actual, pre-apocalyptic life, where water flowed reliably from taps and the refrigerator always held fresh food, was my failure to acknowledge or account in any way for what kept my mind alive. Forget “emotional support,” which as far as I know had not yet been invented. What I needed was a steady supply of novels, philosophy, science updates, random shreds of information—and I needed it the way any warm-blooded mammal needs food. And if I was the only indisputably conscious being in the universe, where the hell did I think that all that philosophy and science and fiction was coming from? There is only one reference in the journal to an author as a human being with a life apart from his writings, and that was a mention, drawn from the introduction to one of his books, of Dostoevsky’s being condemned to death, dragged in front of the firing squad, and then, inexplicably, allowed to live. This greatly impressed me. But did it lead me to acknowledge Dostoevsky’s independent existence as a person, a person with more imagination and depth than myself? And Nietzsche, who for all the bits and pieces I’d read of his, for all the times I’d silently argued with him—did I have any idea who or, to be perfectly rigorous about it, what he was?

  I cannot easily account for this blind spot today or begin to reconstruct the intricate mental devices with which I tried to fill it. Nietzsche and all my other sources could be nothing more than projections of my own mind or, to put it more impersonally, dust devils that arose within the storm of neuronal firing that was my conscious life. This is what the solipsist is left with: some vast undifferentiated substance containing both the “I” and the “everything else.” Maybe there had once been some sort of rupture between the “I” and the rest of it that my quest for “truth” was simply the desire to heal. The characters in novels, for example: After the initial strangeness wore off, it was their familiarity that overwhelmed me. I was Myshkin, Raskolnikov, Decoud, and probably always had been. Nietzsche at first “really shocked me”:

  No dialectics, pseudo-mathematical reasoning, or absurd terms. The tone of his writing is fanatic enthusiasm. I am borne along on his buoyant sentences with some hesitancy and fear, as though I were being misled.

  But then I let myself traipse along with him, accepting him as part of my sensory equipment and how the world had to be seen. So maybe there really was nothing “outside” of me and everything I learned was just the confirmation of a preexisting template that had always been there within me or, more accurately, within some universal me-substance.

  I wasn’t just reading fiction and philosophy at the time, but science, where even I could see that major changes were under way, or actually had been for about thirty years, although rumors or the new “uncertainty” and “indeterminacy” were just catching up with me. First came the news, I don’t know exactly where from, that atoms were mostly empty space, meaning that if you kept pressing the table in front of you, eventually the subatomic particles would line up so that your hand would be able to pass right through it. In a sci-fi story, a prisoner, after many bruising attempts, broke out of his cell this way. I can’t say I anticipated the insubstantiality of matter as revealed by quantum physics or could even have told you with any confidence what a “quantum” was. But if the “real,” material world was a collection of objectively verifiable particles, then I had, in my dissociative episodes, already witnessed its demise firsthand.

  I tried at one point to discuss the “new physics” with my father. I should admit now what I could not admit at the time, that the very existence of my father, as well as the rest of my family, constituted an undeniable refutation of my solipsism. I might not have cared all that much about what other people thought of me or even have been able to imagine such thoughts, but I had, at least up to this point, always striven for his approval. This meant I had to be smart and sarcastic, focused on science, and above all a winner at whatever I undertook, whether it was a chess game or an informal contest to see who could make the best angel food cake. When at the end of high school I told him I turned out to be first in my class of more than six hundred students, tied for that honor with a boy, his response was, “So why the hell didn’t you beat him?” At which I laughed because this is exactly what I’d known he would say, and all was right with the world. To the extent that I had any notion of a future life and career, it was all shaped by my father: I would be celibate of course, because anything else would be a grave disappointment to him. I would live alone, a veritable nun of science, poring over theoretical treatises until late at night and rising early to plan the day’s experiments.

  It was a Saturday morning and he was going over some papers at the dining room table, which was also the only communal workspace and the surface where my mother laid out her patterns and sewed, when I slipped into the chair across from him and raised an urgent question about electrons. There must have been some contextual small talk or at least some wily preliminaries on my part. Maybe he asked me how school was going, science in particular, and that provided enough of an opening for me to bring up the odd fact that I had been fretting about for several weeks now: that an electron could be in two places at once. What could that mean? How was one to picture such a thing?

  At first this looked like something he could handle. With his right nostril widening toward an incipient sneer, he launched into one of his perorations on woolgathering. That wasn’t his exact word, nor did he say “dreamy,” but the idea was that science is not about imagining things or trying to picture them in your head. Science is about making measurements, which is a way of collecting numbers that can in turn be fed into equations. Words play very little part in this exercise. Sometimes the results don’t make much sense when you try to put them into words, but that doesn’t matter because what you’re aiming for is predictions, better mousetraps, and so on. Or as the macho physicists would be saying in a decade or so: Shut up and calculate.

  Of course he was right. If I couldn’t picture an electron, how was I supposed to picture an electron’s location? I didn’t take this entirely as a putdown, because at some level he was just telling me what he thought I needed to know, should I ever attempt to make my way as an actual scientist: Don’t blather about unseen and unseeable things; be a good apprentice; do what you’re told. But I couldn’t resist the obvious next sally, on the matter of measurements: Can we really trust them? I offered the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or whatever remedial version of it I had absorbed, which no matter how crudely expressed should still have been recognizable to any reader of Scientific American. The act of observing changes the thing that is being observed. And what could it mean to measure, say, the location of something that’s in two places at once?

  Here his face hardened ever so slightly, causing the whole scene to shift from suburban father-daughter conversation to something so stark it could have been lifted from an ancient Greek drama—say, Oedipus Rex, only with me in the title role. I know I was not his actual son, only a botched reincarnation in which his magnificent genius mind had been misplaced in a female body, where it was dragged down and eroded by the hormonal tides. I was supposed to be smart, like him, but never as smart as him. I was supposed to ask questions, but only answerable ones that gave him a chance to demonstrate his superior logic and education. The table between us grew wider; all background sounds ceased.

  What did I think was going on in laboratories? he demanded impatiently. A bunch of people playing hide-and-seek with things that might or might not be there? Of course an electron or anything else is in one place or another, otherwise what are we talking about here? And he didn’t mean just him and me talking right there, but the whole business of human communication, collective endeavors, the whole scientific enterpris
e. If people are going to say any damn thing that pops into their heads, if objects are going to be both here and there, what is the point of talking at all?

  Up to this point I hadn’t been a smartass, if only because I lacked the intellectual wherewithal for that. What, after all, had I read besides the British physicist Arthur Eddington and a few pop science paperbacks? But I was offended by the implication that quantum mechanics was some soft-minded adolescent reverie of mine, so I reached for the most powerful weapon at hand—Linus Pauling. I knew he was one of my father’s scientific heroes; we may even have had one of his books in the house. But Pauling was a quantum chemist, I pointed out mercilessly, and from what I could tell, he had done a great deal to advance this shifty new view of electrons. The covalent bonds between carbon atoms, for example: These could not be explained by a physics of hard little particles that dutifully locate themselves in one place or another.

  I won, I guess—if it’s possible to win a contest in which the father you love or some idealized version of him is destroyed. He turned away from me and stared out of the room toward the living room window, his face blank and his shoulders slumped. This wasn’t a dismissal, it was just how he got when he pulled into himself—legs crossed, arms crossed over the topmost leg, eyes as blue and empty as the morning sky.

  My mother was right: I loved my father far more than I loved her, and I didn’t find out the full extent of it until that blighted day, more than thirty years later, when my siblings and I sprinkled his ashes in some murky Missouri lake near where my brother lived at the time. When the urn was passed to me, as the oldest, to begin the sprinkling, I was ambushed by a sudden rage. The lake was not wide enough or blue enough for him, the Ozarks surrounding it too worn-down and paltry. We should have done this in Montana, where there were crystalline lakes that would have welcomed his gritty residue and mountains sharp enough to direct his soul straight up to the galaxies that had so fascinated him before the Alzheimer’s took over. We might as well have been pouring him into a sewer, and this is why I cried—angry at the lake, angry at my dry-eyed brother and sister for imagining that this would be a fitting send-off, and, since I knew he had never given them much reason to love him, angry at myself for crying in front of them.