What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  The list is long, and we are implicated in it all, in ways both obvious and subtle.

  I offer this very dark view of the world not only in order to pose the inevitable question—What is to be done?—but also to respond to this question in terms that are now more or less precluded by the practical urgency of these problems. The response I propose is that we preserve as we can the heritage we have received and that we enlarge and enrich it for the sake of coming generations. For a long time I assumed that this was simply a thing civilizations did, a practical definition of the word civilization. Now I see that wealthy countries are stepping away from ancient commitments, to humanist education, first of all. Humanists are the curators, in their own persons, of art, language, music, and thought. The argument everywhere now is that the purpose of education should be the training of workers for the future economy. So the variety of learning offered should be curtailed and the richness of any student’s education should be depleted, to produce globally a Benthamite uniformity of aspiration and competence, and a subservience to uses not of his or her choosing. Max Weber’s iron cage is slamming shut.

  Why this should be happening now, where it need not happen, in countries that could be called, by global standards, plenty rich enough; why it is considered prudent to alienate, starve, even amputate institutions that are riches in themselves and creators of wealth of every kind, I do not know. But the impulse is at work all over the West, inducing us to sell our birthright in exchange for a reward far less certain and sustaining than that famous pot of lentils.

  In the West it was theology and its consequences that built these great institutions, and the ebbing away of theology that has made them seem to many to be anomalies, anachronisms, and burdens, as well. They were addressed to the many mysteries of human life on earth and to the knowledge of God. Their mission would seem to have been the very height of impracticality, if it were not so intrinsic a part of the emergence of the modern world.

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  Theology and religion are not synonyms. Either can exist without the other, and either is diminished in the absence of the other. I can speak only of Christianity, of course. It would be a great presumption on my part to seem to generalize, farther, at least, than to say that the highest intellectual and aesthetic achievements of every culture I know of seem to be associated with and addressed to their highest disciplines of religion, to their theology. The intentions that have created these institutions have made them stewards of defining cultural values, of conceptions of truth and definitions, by example, of beauty.

  At this point I should clarify my terms. By religion I mean the individual and communal embrace of the particulars of a faith, or loyalty or affinity to it that might not involve thoroughgoing belief in every article of its creed, that might be or seem to be almost exclusively aesthetic, ethical, or social, but is in any case important to one’s self-definition. Religion has a public character that can distract even the pious from its origins in the human intuition that reality is rooted in a profounder matrix of Being than sense and experience make known to us in the ordinary course of things. By theology I mean the attempt to realize in some degree the vastness and the atmospheres of this matrix of Being. Theology is the great architecture of thought and wonder that makes religious experience a house of many mansions, open to the soul’s explorations, indeed, made to invite and to accommodate them.

  One thing theology must do now is to reconsider and reject the kind of thinking that tends to devalue humankind, which is an influential tendency in modern culture, one that, not coincidentally, runs parallel to the decline of religion. This devaluing of the species in effect puts aside everything interesting about us as irrelevant to the question of our true nature. Objectively speaking, this is a remarkable project, itself a datum to be factored into a consideration of the many ways we are strange. A new theology should be open to recognizing our anomalous character, not least for the light it sheds on the precious and amazing lawfulness of the world, ourselves excepted.

  There is a sentence from a translation of an Old English dream poem called “Pearl” that is especially pleasing to me. It says, “My soul by grace of God has fared / Adventuring where marvels be.” The speaker of the poem is describing a dream encounter with a lost infant daughter as a young woman in paradise. For me the phrase has a more general application, to life on earth. The sheer plenitude of things a mortal encounters is a marvel in itself. There is not only religion, never able to escape doubt, its shadow. There is also feigned religion as well, and religion that has slipped into utter derangement. There is not only lofty and glorious theology but theology as grinding labor, engrossed in its own difficulty. Nothing human beings do or make is ever simply itself.

  No other species than ours could be called earnest. This is our response to special difficulties that attend our singular nature. We are unique in the effort we spend on the problems of defining our purposes and then accomplishing them, as the materials we put into them—facts, thought, words—slip and change while we work. No other species could be called ambitious, determined to reshape the world beyond the modest sufficiency that satisfies the niche-finding and nest-building generality of creatures. Error could be thought of as an extravagance parsimonious nature denies to migratory butterflies but lavishes on us unstintingly. Out of this indeterminacy, this great latitude, and within it, we construct our minds and our civilizations. These are all things to be marveled at, certainly.

  There is a persistent tendency in modern thought to deny the anomalous character of the human presence in the world. No other creature could aspire to contriving a scheme that would reconcile itself fully to a present understanding of nature, especially one clever enough to be continuously changing its understanding of nature. We are never more unique than in our long struggle to deny our exceptionalism. Though it seems very unscientific to ignore logical contradictions—for example, these attempts to reason away the capacity to reason—this effort is commonly called science and is deferred to as science by much of society, including stewards of its religious culture. By my lights this is altogether a phenomenon of that freedom to err that I have mentioned, a gravitationless space where ideas propagate and elaborate themselves free of the disciplines of reason properly so called. A major thrust of this school in recent years has been an argument against altruism, the capacity for generosity, for intentionally conferring benefit on another at cost to oneself. According to this theory, family enjoy what appears as generosity among its members because one instinctively protects those who share one’s genetic makeup in the degree of their consanguinity. In other words, the benefit is to oneself because it insures one’s genetic immortality—in some degree, for a while, since endogamy is genetically unwise and exogamy overwhelms any particular genetic heritage in fairly short order. Of course endogamy is practiced in some cultures and must have been the norm in a great many in premodern settings where physical and social mobility were sharply limited. If the theory of genetic “selfishness” has merit, then these pools of self-similarity ought to yield communities brimming with generosity and mutual devotion. This seems not to have been the case, however. The old tendency of the crowned heads of Europe to marry their cousins provides a formidable counterexample.

  I will note here that the emotions whose reality is supposedly reasoned away by this school of thought are precisely those humankind are traditionally said to share with God. Christianity is, after all, the narrative of a cosmic altruism. “God is love” is an equation of meaningless terms if this interpretation of the emotions is granted.

  Certainly the age of marvels has not passed and will not so long as humankind roams the earth. This school of thought that would disallow the testimony of our emotional experience as evidence of the nature of our motives uses brilliant machines to make the point that in response to certain stimuli certain regions of the brain light up, indicating increased activity. Among things in life that surprise, this would surely rank low. Nevertheless it is offered as evide
nce to support the assertion that our emotions are not what we take them to be, that our feelings are a sort of ruse, a strategy to conceal our true, selfish motives. Questions arise. What is this mysterious self that must be kept in the dark about its own baser impulses? How can it be fastidious about its ethical life when the impulses it conceals from itself are both natural and universal? This self looks to me like a rather robust survival of what was once called a soul, here offered as a fix for a theory that would otherwise be rejected out of hand. If its scruples are potent enough to shape the nervous system, how can they not be potent enough to shape behavior itself? All this is just an inelegant contrivance meant to excise humankind’s moral qualities insofar as they cannot be reconciled to evolutionary theory. In another laboratory, perhaps associated with a mental hospital, the same brilliant machines scrutinize the brains of those who lack generosity and empathy, whom we call psychopaths, and who are taken to be organically injured or disabled, in any case abnormal, in that their behavior is unconstrained by these emotions the evolutionists consider to be actual enablers of self-interest. Is it more remarkable that we are all by nature psychopaths? Or that these theorists do not read each other’s journals?

  I mention all this simply to make the point that much influential thought is fundamentally incoherent, and no less influential for this fact. How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another. There are circumstances, we all know, in which ordinary people can become virtual psychopaths. If our feelings are meaningless and our actions are in essence all of one kind, our passage through this vale of tears can’t mean much. To the extent that anyone takes this kind of thinking seriously, humanism will be unsustainable as an idea. It is entirely possible that the desire to put down the burden of moral responsibility is the source of these theories, and that they are a product of cultural demand rather than a subversion of cultural values. Surely, flimsy as they are, no one would subscribe to them who was not predisposed to share their conclusions. People speak of disillusionment. But discrediting the moral worth of people in general while discounting the capacity for empathy in oneself minimizes the meaning of crime and liberates the criminal, as in the case of the psychopath. It opens the way to profounder disillusionment. Finally, mercilessness has always come easily to human societies. The penumbra of indeterminacy, of potential choice, that always hovers can, as they say, quite suddenly decohere as brutality and resentment. To rationalize crude motives is one of the stranger projects of our period, in light of their continuing history of staggering cost.

  A theology for our time would reintegrate Being. 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. Scientific method is brilliantly successful at doing what it is meant to do, observing and describing the physical universe. The uses made of it reflect moral choices that cannot be derived from it. Inoculation has saved many lives. When the practice was new it was criticized on scientific grounds for burdening the race with lives that would better have been lost, eugenically speaking. What a human life is, how its value is to be reckoned, is a religious or philosophic question. Descartes for his purposes confirmed the truth content of his perceptions by assuring himself that God would not lie. A great deal is assumed here—notably that God sustains an active and honorable relation with human consciousness. This being the case, science is made possible by the intrinsic value of the individual in the divine scheme. Descartes need not establish this value by translating a theological statement into the terms of his method. To do so would be to undermine its foundation.

  Scientific method does not, at any given moment, provide an all-sufficient test for the reality of everything. It knows what it has the means to know. Dark matter, overwhelmingly the greater part of the mass of the universe, was inferred and discerned as part of a recent series of insights into the nature of the universe. It seems to be radically different from the kind of matter to which we are accustomed. It will remain “dark,” incomprehensible, until science decides what kinds of questions will be fruitful, what kinds of observations will be possible. Science is incremental—a few decades ago dark matter would have been impossible to conceive of. Science exploits accident and relishes surprise—the discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, which was entirely unanticipated, opened the way to this radically new conception of the cosmos. Impressive as all this is, its greater meaning is that we can’t know what we don’t know, what we may never think to ask. It is an abuse of science to assume that the methods and terms of its understanding are ever sufficient or final. The understandings of human nature that have been proposed to us as scientific diminish us, even as science itself is amazed by our complexity, even as science itself is a demonstration of our brilliance. I notice that when archaeologists discover some anatomically prehuman creature, possibly a collateral ancestor though probably not, their descriptions generally begin with a sentence containing the phrase “surprisingly sophisticated.” The rock-and-bone evidence of sophistication that remains after so many millennia indicates, usually, that they ornamented themselves, made tools, buried their dead, and cared for their aged and disabled. Why is the sophistication always a surprise? Presumably because a model of prehuman nature persists, unmodified by these discoveries. Again, I suppose the evolutionary model of human emergence discourages the thought that these creatures should share important traits with us, given the inadequacies of their prefrontal cortex. What can we do with the evidence of altruism, surely the right word for tending the frail in absolutely primitive conditions? Would anyone suggest that they also were deceived as to the true, selfish nature of their motives? We may have misunderstood many things because our own tale of origins cannot be reconciled with the fossil record. And this might be true because human evolution as we have imagined it has been one side in the antique battle between Darwinists and fundamentalists.

  I have absolutely nothing to propose that would make sense of the fossil record, which seems to be more complicated by the day. But I do find it beautiful that whatever these creatures were, ornament pleased them, and they could be gentle and provident. A marvelous light falls over the beginning of things and over us also, inclined as we are to pick up a shapely stone or a pretty shell. None of this is at all incompatible with a profound sacredness of Being. Early Darwinism was virtually identical with racial theory, the races to be ranked, so it was thought, as stages in human development. Therefore the sophistication of these nonhumans continues to surprise. They are burdened by our prejudices. Surely it is much more scientific to relax the hold of old error and take it as true that the world is as wonderful in its mystery as any theology could hope to express, and that science, rather than impoverishing it of mystery, lavishes new marvels on us day by day.

  Granting its power, it is not clear to me that this or any method should be made to function as a metaphysics. We cannot say that the stars were arrayed to instruct us in the glory of God, to dispose our minds to wonder, to make us feel our finitude within an order of Being for which millennia are more transient than a breath. This, for all we know, is the accidental consequence of the accidental emergence of the constellations, the fortuitous interaction of our unfathomable brains and senses with dazzling reality. In the beginning, it was a very remarkable atom that blossomed into a cosmos and is blossoming now in every thought anyone will think tomorrow, in the accelerating rush of space toward what no one knows. We must step back and acknowledge that any accounts of the initial moments that make the event seem straightforward and comprehensible are deeply wrong. Nothing else could be true, considering what it has yielded.

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  A new theology must begin from and always bear in mind the fact that there is something irreducibly thrilling about the universe, whatever account is made of it. I mention that primal particle, the mother of all accident, or so we ar
e to assume, because it does integrate all Being, both potentially and in effect, now and through all futurity. Thought, language, emotion, culture, as surely as matter and energy, must derive from the initial moment that is now understood to have eventuated in the universe as we know it. What other origin could be proposed for them? If they evolved in some sense, they did so as they were prompted by the reality that contained them, one we can understand now as highly special. The complexity of ancient languages and of what we know of ancient thought discourages confidence that we are at the kind of straightforward advantage to them that evolution can be taken to imply. It would be theistic to say that the capacity for abstract thought, for example, was introduced into humankind by some external agent. This is not my style of theism, but others might find it an appropriate patch on a perceived unlikeness between the workings of the mind and what we call the material world. Let us say instead that this capacity must have arisen out of the transformations potential in that first particle and realized over time, consistently with these potentialities. Then, if this is the case, there is a profound, intrinsic relationship among all forms of Being. Within this universe there is no other or beyond, though there may be any number of modes of Being intrinsic to it that we are not aware of. (I have seen speculations that we feel the influence of other universes, and who can say finally that we do not?) Proceeding on conventional assumptions, we can, as a thought experiment, run time backward until all phenomena are folded again into that first particle.