What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  It is increasingly clear that there is no baseline simplicity to which our own essential nature can be reduced. Mysterious intelligence is mysteriously pervasive. Bad science has for a long time assumed a not so great chain of Being, an apparent rising complexity that is in fact only a compounding of simplicities, explainable top to bottom in terms of a fundamental primitivity. In fact we are an extraordinary instance of a pervasive complexity. Science has not proposed any way of accounting for this fact, not having been aware of it as a fact until quite recently. A theistic vision of the world is freer to see the world whole, as it is in itself, so to speak. “The world is full of the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,” in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Within this great given, that Being is an astonishment, any aspect of Being can be approached with an expectation of discovering wondrous things. The slime that comes up from the depths of the sea in fishermen’s nets is a ruined universe of bioluminescence. Microorganisms live in clouds, air moves in rivers, butterflies navigate the earth’s magnetic field. The matter cosmologists call “dark,” which makes up most of the mass of the universe, seems to be nonatomic. Wonders never cease.

  Over against this we have a constricted empiricism, the building upward from the seemingly known or presumptively knowable, its expectations based on limited technology and on the old idea that science is a process of deromanticization, demystification. To speak as the theists did of lavishness, elegance, artfulness is to introduce language capable of acknowledging that there is more to the world than its intricate economies of survival. Locke, a theist, saw Being as a great, boisterous ocean that will always remain essentially unknown to us. The more we learn, the truer this seems to be. To apply too broadly a paradigm drawn from narrow experience is an error that entails cascading errors. Classical religion brings assumptions of vastness and relation, and beauty, and wonder and humility before its subject, all very useful in giving reality its due. I do not wish to imply that secular scientists do not often bring these gifts to their work, or arrive at them in the course of their work. It is in the study of humankind that these things are consistently absent. It is as if we can only be granted a place in the universe if we are made vastly less extraordinary than we clearly are. This is the kind of persisting bias and error that intellectual integrity would forbid. The old theists looked at extraordinary humankind, the quintessence of dust, to consider the nature of the universe. This makes perfect sense. We do, after all, demonstrate in our being what is potential in matter and time.

  If we approach the mind with my cosmological constant still factored in, we can say the mind is morally competent—Adamically speaking, that is—in its design, allowing for all deviations from the ideal or the norm. I am not the first to note that modern thinking about the mind has often proceeded from the study of pathologies, real or not. It seems clear enough to me why Victorian women might have been prone to hysteria. I look back at the comparatively mild limits and prejudices I escaped by grace of the civil rights movement as if I had found myself two steps clear of a falling rock. In the American South, the intense depression observed in slaves sold away from their families was diagnosed as an illness to which their race was oddly prone. In such cases, assumptions about the nature and life experience of certain human beings obscured the obvious, and science built on the sand of engrained error. I suspect this may be why the study of human consciousness is so markedly different from science in general. It very typically confirms or defends theories about social roles. The fact that it does not view the human person with particular respect as consciousness or, to use an old phrase, as moral agent has a long history of grave and shameful consequences. The great anomaly here is that the science of the human brain, if science is indeed the right word, does not take account of what the brain actually does. I have been invited from time to time to lend my brain to science, that is, to pass it through an fMRI while using it creatively. Even if I had not seen an article about how this machinery had been taking hair from the heads of experimental subjects due to faulty calibration, the thought that I could attempt anything remotely similar in such circumstances to what I do when I am writing fiction is simply bizarre. This is surely a grand instance of the application of faulty methods to a faulty question. The science of the mind, as it is practiced now and has been practiced for generations, has no place for human inwardness, the reflective settling into oneself that somehow finds and yields structure and meaning, not all at once but as a kind of unwilled constellating of thoughts and things to which some part of one’s attention may have drifted any number of times. It is in the nature of the mind to distill, to do its strange work over time. No snapshot, no series of images, could capture its life.

  Walt Whitman wrote a beautiful little poem about a spider, and about the workings of consciousness:

  A noiseless patient spider,

  I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

  Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

  It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

  Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

  And you O my soul where you stand,

  Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

  Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

  Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

  Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

  This could be a description of the making of coherency from experience, as the mind does autonomically. It could describe the making of a poem, or the process of reaching beyond the isolation of subjectivity by means of these gossamer threads of inquiry and speculation to arrive at a kind of insight we might call scientific. None of these readings would exclude the others. That the spider serves so well as a metaphor for the soul’s musings places both of these silent creatures in the same “vacant vast surrounding,” places the soul in the world experientially, without condescension to the world and without rarefaction of the soul. I note the importance here of the complex psychology intrinsic to the self theistically understood. The speaker of the poem watches himself watching, understands that there is purpose in his attentiveness, that it is itself a gossamer thread finding a hold in the delicate strategy of exploration he sees in the spider. He beholds himself in his essential humanity, as solitary, as one given to musing and to discovering analogy and elegance where his attention rests.

  Science tells us we have no souls. And science gives us no name and no way of accounting for the phenomenon of self-awareness that makes our thoughts, doubts, dreams, memories, and antipathies so interesting to us, and our frustrations with our faults and failures so acute. Granting that “the soul” as an idea might be culturally particular enough that it gives self-awareness a character not intrinsic to it. The classic soul is more ourselves than we are, a loving and well-loved companion, loyal to us uniquely, entrusted to us, to whom we entrust ourselves. We feel its yearnings, its musings, as a truer and more primary experience of ourselves than our ordinary consciousness can offer us. Traditionally souls are spoken of as saved or lost, being the immortal part of humankind, even though they are also thought of as unoffending, indeed as offended against when we misuse our worldly agency. Freud’s superego bears a superficial resemblance to the soul, the great difference being that the superego is the internalization of strictures and demands that are not one’s own or friendly to one’s well-being, and that intervene in the formation of a primary self. The old song says, “It is well with my soul.” No song says, “It is well with my superego.” That would describe a state of utter capitulation to a harsh authority enforced by a submerged but dreadful guilt.

  It is interesting to consider what we have received in exchange for the theistic worldview of our ancestors. Psychological complexity is acknowledged in modern theories of the mind—in Freud’s tripartite psyche, in notions of an unevolved reptilian b
rain coiled at the base of consciousness, in bicameralism, and recently in the brain as a sort of calculator making continuous and presumably accurate estimates of the organism’s relative advantage, “cost-benefit analysis” in the terms of economics, the discipline whose prestige seems to have overwhelmed what remained of humanist impulses in this field. Complexity enters this schema because some undescribed mechanism intervenes to conceal our selfishness from ourselves, to allow us to believe that our generosity actually is generosity and so on. Why, if self-interest is the unique and universal motive, any shame or blame would attach to it is one question. Another is, what would this system of concealment look like as biology or neurology, and would its complexity, its physiological cost, be repaid by concealments that hardly seem necessary in the first place, given the selfishness thesis? In any case, all this complexity takes place in isolation within the standard human skull, which is not a very pleasant place to be. I suppose this is both a source and a consequence of modernist malaise.

  “My soul by grace of God has fared / Adventuring where marvels be.” These are lines from the poem “Pearl,” written in the fourteenth century. The voice of the poem describes a dream vision of a girl child who has died. The speaker sees her as a lovely young woman by a river, in a paradise he cannot yet enter. The poem speaks beautifully and tellingly of such loss, acknowledging a depth of grief that is, finally, embraced in the consolations of a cosmic order that is as tender and profound as such sorrows would require. We might call this wish fulfillment, the projection of human hopes on an empty heaven. Or we might call it a vision of Being that is large and rich enough to accommodate the experience of human love and grief. How else to do justice to them? “Pearl” movingly evokes a young child’s translucent loveliness, and pearls adorn the sleeve of the cosmic Christ. The garden where the child is buried is a faint but real promise of the paradise where her soul flourishes. The beauty we see in this world is a sign and portent of an ultimate beauty, and we are rightly enthralled by it. Beauty has no place in modern theories of the mind, nor do the pleasures of memory, thought, or perception, or the aesthetic pleasures. Endorphins are not adequate to filling this void. They only mean that pleasure happens, as I hope we all know, even without the word.

  My argument is essentially that the universe of theism is large enough not only to admit of the great range of human emotion and imagination, pathos and grandeur, but to enhance these things, to value them even when they are never noticed or valued or, for that matter, expressed in the whole of a mortal life. Unless it is to distinguish itself very sharply from theistic tradition, I have no idea why the various psychologies are alike in disallowing the more ingratiating human traits. Religion is represented as a repressive system from which modern thought is a liberation. Yet all these psychologies are bleakly determinist, and so poor in their view of the possible that it is impossible to guess what their version of a free act would look like. The notion that all behavior is essentially self-interested might liberate selfishness, but that would be no more than a slight deviation from a pattern of behavior that is inevitable in any case. If decency is merely feigned, the enabler of selfishness, it might be no deviation at all. I grant the problems associated with the doctrine of predestination, and I find it a vastly deeper problem to be asked to subscribe to the idea that meaninglessness is irresistibly implanted in human nature, that the superego will wrestle the id to a draw, that the reptile will not hiss and draw embarrassing attention to itself, that the hand in the collection plate will appear to be putting something in and not taking something out. A better modernist anthropology might change my sense of all this, but as it is I think it is entirely appropriate to evaluate what there is on offer.

  In case there are doubts, this really is a lecture on the subject of intellectual integrity, a thing many of us have felt to be sorely lacking these days. Why is it so difficult to find the language to approach this subject? Well, these psychologies I mention imply or say outright that there is no mind. Then how do we speak of intellectualism? These psychologies imply or say outright that there is no self. Then how do we speak of integrity? The notion has caught on very widely that there are no facts, only interpretations. Truth itself is dissolving as a concept in an acid bath of idle cynicism. So to what standard are the ethically inclined to hold themselves? Who knows to what extent the “thought” of a period is what we take it to be. But modern thought especially has been made a curriculum and a catechism. There are no grounds for doubting its influence. Again in the matter of intellect or ethicalism, it is conspicuously lacking in terms to address these things or to value them.

  For a very long time it has been assumed that intellectual integrity in the modern period demanded the rejection of religion. As corollary there is the assumption that we must adopt the worldview of the modern period. This subtle coercion, to embrace certain ideas on other grounds than their merits, might explain their survival despite their being, from a human point of view, desiccated things, deeply unsatisfactory. And this while brilliant science continuously sets before us a vaster, more cryptic and spectacular cosmos, the brilliant human mind being mirror and alembic of all this grandeur, as it has always been. The modern science of the mind is to science in general as a blighted twin is to a living body—mimicked life and thwarted development. I propose that this is true because it epitomizes “the modern” as a concept. It is first of all a worldview. The methods of the science that sponsors it presuppose its validity—the soul will never reveal itself to an fMRI, and poetry, prayers, painting, and architecture are inadmissible as evidence. These theories of the mind change, to the extent they do, as cultural styles change, not in the way of hypotheses that are winnowed and refined in the ordinary course of inquiry. (I use the word mind because their attentions to the brain yield, by their lights, insights of global validity into human nature, the kind of inwardness implied in a deceptive valuation of one’s own motives, and so on. To say they learn this from scrutiny of the brain would be false. The idea goes back at least to Freud.)

  Most of you probably know that Einstein’s great mistake, the constant he added into his theory to make the equations work as he wanted, and which he regretted ever afterward, has turned out to be no mistake at all but an anticipation of the effect of dark energy as antigravity. I skirt specifics because I don’t understand them. But there is a point to my analogy. If a theoretical account of the order of things does not describe what reason or intuition propose to the understanding, then the factor that would correct for its deficiencies should be looked to, pondered. The modern world, insofar as it is proposed to humankind as its habitation, is too small, too dull, too meager for us. After all, we are very remarkable. We alone among the creatures have learned a bit of the grammar of the universe. Einstein was known to mention God from time to time, which need not imply theism in any traditional form, only the sense of a universe more intrinsically orderly, capacious, and finally unknowable than theory and formula could capture. For him the Lord seems to have been another cosmological constant, an undemonstrated given necessary to allowing the reality he wished to describe its full character. We have in ourselves grounds for supposing that Being is vaster, more luminous, more consequential than we have allowed ourselves to imagine for many generations. No idea is authenticated by the fact that it hurts our feelings. Intellectual rigor is not inevitably reductionist. Intellectual integrity cannot oblige us to deny what is manifestly true.

  Old Souls, New World

  The Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality, Harvard Divinity School: April 27, 2017

  The long-prevalent belief that what is proposed as truth or reason can only be credited in the degree that it is consistent with the strata of physical reality by any means available to our experience is mistaken. It is mistaken in its conception of the nature of the physical and, therefore, in the nature of everything else. It has insisted that what it offers as the sole model of reality is exhaustively pertinent to every meaningful question about reality, dismissi
ng as not meaningful every question to which it is not pertinent. But for some time now science has been fetching back strange reports about the radical apparent discontinuity between volatile reality at the subatomic level and the stolid lawfulness of reality at the scale of our experience, for example. The fathomless anomalies of the infinitesimal present as any ordinary day, any transient thought. We know now that physical being as we experience it is wildly untypical in cosmic terms. Reality as we know it now does not yield or legitimize a narrow or prejudicial vocabulary. Science has given us grounds for a liberating humility. We need not continue to encumber our thinking with strictures it has long since put aside.