The Fraud of Theology

In an interview with The Washington Post, one of Donald Trump’s advisors on theological matters, Robert Jeffress, supported Trump’s apocalyptic August bluster against North Korea, by citing Romans 13. At the beginning of that chapter of the epistle, Paul recommends that Christians obey their secular rulers, because “the authorities that exist have been established by God” (13:1). But in a NY Times article, Steven Paulikas, an Episcopal priest, contends that Jeffress tore that scriptural passage out of context and perverted Christian theology in Jeffress’s fetishizing “message of violence over the clarion call to love of Romans 13:8,” which speaks of love of others as the fulfillment of Jewish law. That latter idea of the Golden Rule seems to derive from Rabbi Hillel who lived a century before Jesus is supposed to have lived.

Paulikas’ point about context is that “Paul is telling Christians to obey the Roman authorities in temporal matters such as taxation, not justifying the authority of one ruler over another,” such as Trump over Kim Jong-un. But Paulikas seems to be forgetting Rom.13:4, which says the secular authorities “are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” Just because a ruler’s power derives from God doesn’t mean the ruler can’t misuse his power. For example, Jews considered Moses to be an instrument of God’s wrath against the Pharaoh. Instead of being commanded to obey the Egyptians, the Jewish slaves (who never historically existed) rebelled against Egypt to build their own society in Israel, according to Exodus. So if Christians can construe Kim Jong-un as a “wrongdoer,” they’re free to interpret Rom.13 as meaning that Trump might be “an agent of wrath” who will “bring punishment” upon North Korea.

Moreover, while Paulikas calls it a “clarion call,” meaning that the call for love of others trumps the advice to obey secular authorities, the context actually indicates that this allusion to the Golden Rule is just a digression and an extended figure of speech. It’s just a fancy way for Paul to make his point that his readers should “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law” (13:8, my emphasis). The rest (13:9-10) pursues the tangent about love as the fulfillment of Jewish law, a digression invited by that turn of phrase about the only “debt” that should be left standing (the obligation to love others). It’s like saying, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. And fish don’t need land transportation, because they live underwater. Did you know that fish come in a variety of sizes and colours? And fish taste differently too, especially if you choose to add a sauce. The best way to catch fish is with the special lures I sell at the local shop, which I’m pleased to announce is open six days a week.” The intended main point, of course, is that women don’t need men, the rest being a tangent that follows only from the rhetorical way of expressing that point. Likewise, the main point in the middle of Romans 13 is that Christians should pay all their secular debts, not that love is all-important.

Mind you, if secular authorities as well as their subjects can misbehave, as Jeffress would have to be assuming, there’s no longer an imperative to obey any particular secular ruler, since perhaps President Trump is as bad (as sociopathic, psychotic, and otherwise loathsome, etc.) as the North Korean leader, in which case Jeffress’s case falls to pieces, after all. Alas, this criticism is mooted by the rest of the context which Paulikas doesn’t address, in Rom.13:11-14, which begins, “And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.” So the overriding reason for Christians to obey their secular masters, to pay their taxes and avoid debts, besides the interest in avoiding secular punishment, is that the whole natural world was about to end in any case, so presumably there would be no time to make like Moses and rebel against society to establish a new earthly one. And of course, once this bit of context is entered into the hermeneutic ledger, both Jeffress’s and Paulikas’s arguments come to nothing, since obviously the Kingdom of Heaven didn’t arrive in the lifetime of those early Christians. The Jewish Temple fell in 70 CE, but the apocalyptic significance of that event was only subjective, since it mattered much more to Jews than to the Romans, for example. The secular world as a whole endured for two millennia and persists to this day despite Paul’s assurances that the contrary scenario would unfold. So this entire theological discussion of Trump and North Korea falls apart because Rom.13 itself implodes. 

Theology, Fiction, and Reason

In any case, Paulikas’s discussion raises a deeper, more interesting question, when he lays out an assumption that’s crucial to his article. According to Paulikas, “There is such a thing as incorrect theological and moral thinking, and the best way to neutralize it is with an intellectually and morally superior argument on the same terrain. Only good theology can debunk bad theology.” 

Is it true that theological statements, as such, can be correct or incorrect, and that the best way to conduct theology is by offering an intellectually superior argument? If so, theology would be a lot like Western philosophy. In fact, theology would be indistinguishable from a branch of philosophy called the philosophy of religion, because argumentation is philosophy’s specialty. And if we’re meant to yolk theology with the burden of engaging in hyper-rationality, as in the testing of hypotheses with excruciating attention to empirical detail, theology would instead fall under scientific cosmology and other sciences. In that case, theology would be dismissed in Laplace’s manner, since scientists have no need for the God hypothesis. Moreover, theology’s assumption of supernatural metaphysics would be barred by science’s methodological naturalism.

The reason Paulikas seems confident in asserting that theological statements should be rationally evaluated is that he confuses the literary, textual sort of analysis in which he engages in his criticism of Jeffress’s support of Trump, with what Paulikas presumes is a separate discipline called theology. The giveaway is Paulikas’s appeal to “the context” of Romans 13, and indeed Protestants in general, who are those Christians who seemingly idolize the Bible, can be counted on to argue explicitly about the scriptural context of this or that verse, in virtually every one of their writings. Their “arguments” are actually textual analyses and belong in the field of literary studies. This is to say that Protestant “theologians” should be regarded instead as literary critics whose operating assumption is that the Bible is a work of fiction, in which case the question isn’t whether a biblical statement is factually correct, but whether an analysis of the text is coherent. Likewise, the Christian religion that built up around this work of fiction would be comparable to a zealous fan base, such as the cult of Star Wars. Fans of Star Wars aren’t interested in whether the contents of the movies or books are factually “correct” in terms of having anything to do with events transpiring in a real, faraway galaxy; instead, they argue vociferously over questions that arise only within the fictional universe. Given that Han Solo said such and such in the fictional narrative, is it plausible that he would have fired his gun first in the Mos Eisley cantina? Similarly, you could argue about the correctness or incorrectness of biblical interpretations on literary grounds, as Paulikas seems to have done in his appeal to context in his dispute with Jeffress, and as I did in my above criticism of both of their interpretations of Paul’s epistle.  

To understand theology as being the literary criticism of a great work of fiction, namely of the myths told in texts held to be scriptural or ultimately authoritative by an ardent fan base is to view religion as Yuval Harari does in Sapiens. He writes, “Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination” (30). He thus contends that the ancients regarded their religions much as we regard the brands of our favourite corporate suppliers of goods. Effectively, the gods were idols, that is, entertaining characters that signified collective differences in brand loyalty, and the myths were treasured fictions that defined and maintained group identity and kept the peace in large societies that otherwise would have collapsed for the reason discovered by the philosopher Sartre: hell is other people. Ancient religions were one with their corresponding secular empire, and the theocratic synthesis operated in some ways like a modern corporate monopoly. Compare the Aztec or Babylonian religions, for example, to Apple or to Google. In either case, you have a massive secular power the deeds of which are justified by a set of stories—in the modern case, bogus economic models, advertisements, propaganda, intertextual allusions in other cultural works such as movies or television shows—that imply social conventions essential for maintaining group cohesion by fostering enthusiasm for the brand and thus a corresponding way of life for the fans.  

Religious people today will be loath to think of their scripture as being comparable to the oeuvre of J.K. Rowling or to the blockbusters of George Lucas, and that’s because the Scientific Revolution has established a division between purely literal, natural, physical, factual truth, on the one hand, and subjective impositions of meaning and value on the other. The ancients may have had a semblance of some such distinction between, say, mere mundane, practical questions and matters of ultimate significance. But they had no globe-spanning enterprise that cemented the dichotomy and thus thoroughly disenchanted what we now think of as the whole universe of natural time and space. Instead, the more or less animistic ways of thinking in the ancient world took the natural world to be infused with spirits, including immanent deities or other such powerful agents, and thus with purpose, meaning, and moral value. So if you told an Aztec farmer that Quetzalcoatl is only a fictional character, he wouldn’t have taken it as an insult, because for him what we call the world of cold, indifferent natural facts is instead itself halfway fictional. There was no ironclad fact-value distinction, so only if you belittled Quetzalcoatl in something like the way a Star Trek fan might slight the greatness of Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back would the farmer set upon you with pitchfork in hand. To question Quetzalcoatl’s existence would have been as nonsensical as making a point of saying that Darth Vader doesn’t really exist. You would have been subjected to medical treatment on the assumption that you’d have to be insane to bother being an atheist, just as you’d have to be churlish to interrupt the showing of a Harry Potter movie to announce that there’s really no such thing as magic wands; you’d be booted from the theater, not because your statement is “incorrect,” but because you’d have spoiled the entertainment.

Again, the fictional status of the gods would have been taken for granted, but only because fictions were elevated as the best available theories that both explained how the world worked and kept civilizations running. Now that after the rise of science the value of fictions has instead been demoted to being a private matter of opinion, to equate the Bible or the Koran with a Harry Potter novel is to take for granted that the scriptures might be factually correct on some point or other only by accident, given the authors’ need for verisimilitude to enable the reader to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. Moreover, to kill in the name of a religion would necessarily be as insane as waging war to convert Star Trek heathens to the cult of Star Wars. Violence caused by confusion between entertainment and reality does still happen, as in the case of football hooliganism in Europe and elsewhere. But the pressure on religious individuals like Jeffress and Paulikas to insist on the objective, absolute correctness of their theological statements, as opposed to conceding their mere aesthetic status, is overwhelming primarily because of science’s impact on modern epistemology and metaphysics.

Modern Theology as a Fraud

So if theology isn’t a kind of literary criticism, nor is it a branch of philosophy or of science, what else might it be? There is an even less flattering alternative, which is that modern theology operates as a massive con. Theological statements are shape-shifters, their meaning kept nebulous in the service of self-deception. Take Paul’s assurance that Christ would soon return to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and put aside how premodern Christians might have understood the truth of that prediction. Today, we know that Paul’s theology would fail drastically as philosophical argumentation or as scientific investigation. Moreover, Christians can’t afford to concede that Paul’s eschatology is entirely fictional—and not just because the religious entertainment would have to compete with the secular variety, such as with the Hollywood superhero movie, but because religious fictions, when viewed as such, can no longer function in the ancient fashion, as the glue that binds together a population. Again, this is because the world in general has been disenchanted, as Weber put it, so a fiction no longer has universal scope. The animistic dream of a living universe is dead, and all fictions are only so many futile diversions or protests against nature’s indifference, whispered in terror of the dark.

Paul’s theological statement is really just fiction and it was always just so, but Christians today can’t accept it as such. Instead, they maintain the statement is factually correct, as Paulikas presumes, but the Christian must evade not just the rock of an admission of theology’s mere literary status, but the hard place of the philosophical or scientific standard of inquiry. Thus, to avoid Paul’s prediction of the imminent end of the world being dismissed as obviously false on empirical grounds, the theologian will say the prediction is “rational,” “factual,” or “correct” even though it refers not to any ordinary temporal or otherwise natural matter. One of the epistle writers himself ventured that since a day is like a thousand years to God (2 Pet.3:8), when he implies that his first-century audience is living through “the last days” (3:3), that could mean Christ would nevertheless return millennia after all their deaths. This is semantic sleight-of-hand, though, since the epistles were addressed not to God but to human readers. From our vantage point, at least, the equivocation suggests, then, the advent of a duplicitous genre, the theological charade, which takes place in a halfway house between the literary analysis of fictions and the rational discovery of facts.

Again, knowing that theology has always been merely fictional, whereas the ancients wouldn’t have understood our distinction between fiction and fact, we might be inclined to credit the author of 1 Thess.4:14-15 and of Cor.15:50-52 with prodigious chutzpah because he had the nerve to maintain that even though Christ’s second coming hadn’t happened before some of his readers had gone and died, there was nothing to fear because they could still be resurrected even after their corpses have been turned to dust; after all, as those epistles say, the archangels themselves would descend and blast God’s trumpet to raise the dead even before the living are raptured, awarding all with “spiritual bodies” since nothing as corrupt as flesh could enter God’s kingdom in any event.

Certainly, a twenty-first century theologian who cites approvingly that ad hoc Pauline defense of the seemingly already-falsified predictions of the world’s end that was supposed to have occurred in the first or second century must be perpetrating a farce rather than interpreting or arguing in good faith. (The defense is ad hoc despite the superficial plausibility of saying that flesh couldn’t be expected to enter Heaven, because if matter can’t enter the kingdom of God, it’s not literally a kingdom either and we’re led to a mystical disavowal of any theological specificity. Likewise, “spiritual body” is oxymoronic: if God’s domain is ghostly, what makes the resurrected self a body distinct from anything else? How is the personal self retained without anything analogous to a brain? Of course the matter must be entirely mysterious, which means Paul’s apology to his readers—who had had their hopes up about the imminent end of the world, only to watch some of their fellows die before the saviour had returned—amounts to brazen hand-waving, whereas Paul might have admitted he’d been wrong and recommended that his readers shouldn’t waste their life on his nonsense.) The breezy New Testament prediction along with the apologetic epicycles and rigmarole are presently fictions that can’t be enjoyed with a suspension of disbelief unless they’re read as somehow factual despite all rational appearances to the contrary. So theology must now be akin to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme or to any other massive fraud in which certain insiders, such as cynical televangelists or church officials cook the books and pull the levers behind the curtain to preserve an illusion for the multitude of victims.

In short, those who are currently religious have the benefits of enjoying their myths as socially meaningful and as objectively correct, even though these folks take upon themselves none of the responsibilities of literary critics or of philosophers or scientists. No need to deal with the cognitive dissonance involved in suspending disbelief in a story that isn’t supposed to be merely fictional, as you go back and forth in your experience between the real world and what is secretly just an imaginary one. No need to base your cherished belief on logic and on empirical evidence, when statements about gods and miracles can be interpreted as being so hallowed as to deter open-ended scrutiny from those who are thusly misled. You can engage in literary analysis of the Bible as though it were just a work of fiction, citing contexts to support your interpretations of passages, and you can credit theological statements as being backed by fallacious arguments, ensuring the superficial facticity of some such statements even while retreating to faith, dogma, church authority, or private religious experience whenever the rational going gets tough, and even while simultaneously treating scripture as if it were just poetic fiction subject to infinite and unfalsifiable, personal interpretations. It’s a shell game, a fraud of sustaining the illusion that theology has a viable intermediate position between literary critique and rational investigation of the real world. For moderns living in disenchanted nature, the way to mythopoeic reverie is lost, just as the adult can no longer experience truly childish glee—not without a fraud like theology or the secular enterprise of creating technological substitutes for gods, miracles, and the spirit world. 

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The Art of Narrating Ourselves into Being

In the Western religious myths, God spoke the world into being. There is no god, of course, and nature is a horrifically undead phenomenon that defies complete explanation, let alone an anthropomorphic one that downplays the world’s fundamental impersonality. No, it’s not nature in general that has a literary origin, but only the human world since that world begins with us as persons. As human animals we evolved by natural selection and by other such mechanisms, but as autonomous, encultured selves, we are indeed spoken into being—not by any extraterrestrial intelligence, but by our thoughts which comprise an inner voice that weaves itself into a grand fiction featuring characters that embody our ideals, with whom we’re free to identify to begin to salvage some meaning and dignity from the otherwise absurd flow of events in the wilderness.

We are just Characters in our Life’s Story

A self is not an immaterial thing, a ghost, and to think that what distinguishes people from animals or objects is that we have some such spiritual body is to reify and to fall victim to a cognitive illusion. A self is really a way of organizing thoughts. In so far as we identify with our bodies, we’re biological entities like the other animals, but in so far as our nature is defined by our thinking, we become morally-significant persons. What, though, is a thought? A thought is a generalization which simplifies for some purpose, which is to say a thought is a map or a model which manages the chaotic flux of experience by representing those parts of the world that interest us. The main purpose of our representations of the outer world is to predict what will happen so we can control the environment rather than be helpless to the indifferent forces and cycles and accidents of nature. We predict by generalizing across instances, inducing patterns by transducing and neurally binding sensory inputs, slotting experiences into conceptual boxes for memory recall so we can implement our plans for future projections of our identity. This allows us to respond with greater intelligence and autonomy than could those animal species that rely on preprogrammed, as opposed to learned, responses.

We also model the innerworld, which is to say ourselves. Through introspection, however, we have no knowledge of our brain that organizes our experience. So although we now know of the brain’s importance to ourselves, we have difficulty personally identifying with that squishy mass. On the contrary, even the notion of the brain seems alien and revolting. Instead, in our daily life we who have a personal level of identity prefer to think of ourselves as the character that figures in the lifelong narrative we tell to ourselves. This narrative is the overall model that organizes our private data, which are the otherwise confusing signals produced by the body that we sense through introspection, proprioception, memory, and other interior channels. Roughly, our reflexes, feelings, emotions, judgments, notions, ideas, guesses, and so forth are organized by a personalizing story we tell.

The story is what the philosopher Marya Schachtman calls a form of diachronic unity, meaning that like a sonata or a song, a story is a holistic structure that provides meaning to the sequential parts of which it’s made. A fragment of a song is meaningless without the temporal structure, which is the plan for the song that stretches across time, including the introduction, the verses, chorus, bridge and the end. That structure is defined partly by the genre and indeed by the lyrics which likewise tell a story, giving the song a personality. In the same way, from the raw bits of experience we assemble a narrative that connects our memories with our hopes and intentions, to form a satisfying, meaningful whole. The whole of that story amounts to our personal (as opposed to our biological) identity. A self is something like an entire movie or play with defined characters who take the stage at different times depending on which part of the story is presently being “read” or called for, by the rest of the world. Thus, we may occupy different perspectives or personas, according not just to what’s happening in the outer world, but to how we make sense of the environment with our inner narrative. The narrative assigns roles to enable us to socialize, to retain our dignity under trying circumstances, or to perform other functions.

The story that defines us is still being written while we’re alive, and we identify with different characters in different contexts. The meaning of each character, though, is given by the entire script. The script is composed of the inner voice that continually speaks its interpretations and organizes experience to preserve what the existential anthropologist Ernest Becker would call our “self-esteem.” Becker showed how the self is formed psychologically and socially as a defense against the angst suffered by every child who learns that the world doesn’t serve his or her whims. We tap into cultural reservoirs of meaning, or “hero-systems,” to preserve the self-esteem that acts as a buffer against anxiety. Similarly, Yuval Harari points to the collective fictions that sustain civilization, allowing the members to avoid conflict by defining themselves nationalistically, according to myths that justify the social power distributions. Both of these aspects of our existential story are relevant, as we’ll see, but the more immediate source of selfhood is the narrative that occupies our thoughts.

The narrative that distinguishes our inner voice, which artists excel at expressing in concrete outward forms, emerges as we choose at each moment how to interpret a particular experience. The personal pattern forms after certain types of interpretations accrue, because they support our pride or esteem. There is, though, no homunculus which reads or writes the story. The script writes itself as a result of the conflict between our clever animality and the indifference of the outer world which threatens all such creatures with anxiety that can be alleviated only by suicide or by resort to the magic of art. We create ourselves for the same reason we create the outer artificial worlds, because awakened beings require a refuge from the horrific wilderness. Where we are presently in the story, that is, the bookmarked page, as it were, is determined by the limits of the character we occupy at a particular time that has more or less understanding of the total story in which that character plays its part. Ultimately, we’re equal to the characters whose thoughts and actions are defined and contextualized by a series of meta-thoughts, by a narrative that provides our whole life with existential meaning.

Fictional Selves and Literary Morality

The philosopher Galen Strawson points out, however, that not everyone explicitly narrates their life. Strawson quotes from famous individuals who confess their memory is too poor to figure in worthy inner narratives; instead, they experience themselves as a confused series of experiences. If they take to writing their biography, as in the case of Montaigne, they do so objectively, drawing no distinction between the inner and outer worlds and thus modeling themselves, at best, for the sake of greater prediction and control, having no aesthetic end in view. Moreover, he says, in line with Becker and Harari, some such narrations may be traps that render ourselves inauthentic, as we adopt conventions that are only socially convenient. Instead of demonstrating finesse in creating our personal, existentially-noble self by gradually telling our story via introspection and meta-reflection, we may resort to clichés such as stock characters so that we play out only the roles that society assigns us. All of which seems correct, but contrary to Strawson, this doesn’t falsify the foregoing account of the self; instead, the account has unsettling, but non-disqualifying implications.

One of those implications is that there are degrees of personhood. Some biological humans are more personal than others. A character can be more or less distinguished, more or less the result of inward reflections and visionary projections of meaning which are the marks of superior artistry. Crucially, introverts are more personal than extroverts. This is to say that each of us attains greater personhood to the extent that we engage in introspection and meta-reflection. To the extent we’re focused only on acting, not on thinking about ourselves, we lose our self. In that case, we should be identified only with our biological humanity and with the roles we play as defined by the stories that otherstell about us to organize us as objects of theirmodels. If we haven’t thought about the meaning of our life’s stages, about what sort of story we’re living out, we have no right to speak of us as being authentic, self-made (spontaneously and privately-generated) persons. The word “person,” then, is an honourific title ascribed to someone who performs well at certain cognitive tasks.

Second, if someone engages in no inner modeling at all, she’ll have no self-understanding. She’ll have failed to know herself, that being the task sufficing to create a worthy self in the first place. Suppose, for example, you have no interest in inner narration, but you do reflect on your experience in the same way that you organize your encounters with the outer world. In that case, you do model your thoughts and feelings, but you objectify yourself; that is, you treat yourself as just another object: you generalize over your inner contents for greater predictive power and instrumental control. You take a pragmatic, impersonal attitude toward yourself rather than distinguishing your character in moral or in aesthetic terms. Still, you’ll understand yourself at some level; indeed, you may have greater self-control than the enchanted inner narrator. But if you don’t interpret your thoughts and feelings at all, not even to objectify them, your stream of inner experience must be quite animal-like. You may suffer from autism or from some other antisocial personality disorder, which renders you more like a robot than a person.

There are, then, two sources of meta-reflection, the private and the public. Private reflection is the stuff of introversion, of segregating yourself from society to question conventions in deep, philosophical investigations of what’s really happening. By contrast, culture is the product of collective reflection, and we tend to defer to culture in our moments of extroversion, when we’re absorbed with some activity or when our self-esteem is sustained by diversions that require others’ participation. Thus, interpretations and character roles can be narrated privately or publicly, and the typical self (that is, the human way of organizing thoughts) is a mixture of idiosyncrasies and artistic leaps of imagination, on the one hand, and politically-useful frauds, on the other. The more introverted we are, the more liable we’re to engage in subversive meta-reflection, and so the more the meaning of our inner narrative will depend on the latter’s opposition to the prevailing culture. By contrast, the more extroverted we are, the more we immerse ourselves in the ruling myths that bind the masses, by providing excuses for the power inequalities which are almost always objectively grotesque. In the latter case, our defining story may be bereft of existential authenticity or nobility. Think of Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. If the extrovert only defers to cultural codes of conduct, without pondering them, being always lost in some business or other that leaves no time for meta-reflection or for the development of an inner voice that tells her life’s story to herself, she can hardly be called a person in the morally-significant sense. Her activities will be only implicitly meaningful, because the story that defines her will be told only in cultural forums such as churches, movie theaters, clubs, or political conventions. 

A third implication is that the morality that suits the nature of a self is wholly aesthetic. A self is just a work of art, produced mainly by cognitive mechanisms. We’re not born people, but must earn that title by thinking hard about what we are and what we should be in relation to the outer world as it really is and as we transform it. A self is the narrative structure that supplies the meaning of the characters we play at different stages of our journey. This meaning is ultimately the same found in any fiction.A story either excels in creative, artistic terms or it fails to delight or to inspire. Likewise, a person’s virtues or vices make sense only as efforts to live up to a literary ideal in the broadest sense. The relevant kind of story isn’t that which is written in book form, but it is linguistic, because words are likely key to conceptual binding and thus to the mind’s modeling functions. We become people, who are subjects that have dignity according to certain stories, only when we acquire a special way of organizing our thoughts as opposed to letting them flow with no autonomous control or understanding of them. We organize our mental contents by interpreting them in light of a cognitive map or model that takes the form of a narrative. All of these life-sustaining narratives are fictions, because they’re only simplifications rather than reproductions of what is modeled. Nevertheless, they’re fictions that have real impacts on the world, by preventing an epidemic of suicide and by driving us to achieve our guiding ideals.

A person is morally valuable, then, just in so far as she’s a literary object, a character whose greatness depends on the quality of the tale that captures the creative meaning of her life’s work and journey. You often hear an attempt to capture this tale in the eulogy offered by the relatives of a recently-deceased individual. The essence of a great life is the originality displayed in the struggle to overcome the existential absurdity which would otherwise entail suicide. But a great individual overcomes also the banality and instrumentality of the social myths that lend meaning to a life at the cost of turning the individual into a beta, into a follower who in carrying out her functions indirectly acts as a pawn in the scheme of a greater, more distinguished individual. Most so-called people are only barely personal beings, because their existential efforts are mediocre. They don’t struggle to exist as transcendent creatures, as human animals who acquire personality by accumulating the cognitive habit of interpreting their inner data according to a dawning vision of what a self should be; they don’t wrestle with the meaning of their life or with what sort of person they’ve become.

On the contrary, moral value has generally been construed as being non-aesthetic, on the assumption that the self exists without the need for much human effort. The self is presumed to be either a spirit created by God or a sort of rational agency that has natural rights. There’s been much talk, therefore, of moral laws as befitting the objectivity of personhood. On the foregoing account, though, an individual’s moral value is fittingly subjective, because we’re speaking of subjects that transcend the objective world, by resisting its absurdity with titanic acts of artistic will and vision. We think ourselves into higher being by writing the stories that animate us in our daily activities. The writing occurs in the narrations of our inner voice, which may or may not set the details of the story down as an autobiography, and in the publicly-available myths that serve political (civilizational) purposes as well as existential (artistic) ones.

The morality that survives the death of God, then, has more to do with beauty and ugliness than with any absolute commandment to love others or to obey some creed. Right and wrong are fittingly aesthetic, because these values apply to beings that are just works of art and that warrant, therefore, only literary assessments as far as morality is concerned. There are also pragmatic evaluations that should be made for social purposes, as in considerations of justice or medical health. But if we ask what we should be like, irrespective of mere utility or the social imperative to fit in for the sake of happiness, the answer is entirely up to our muse. The morally best self is just the one whose life makes for the greatest story. Period. All other moral questions likely reduce to pragmatic issues of self-objectification or to pseudoproblems stemming from obsolete religious narratives.

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Horror or Snark? The Millennial’s Dilemma

Millennials, the young adults born in a developed country between the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, are frequently scolded for acting like perpetual adolescents, for failing to face up to their adult responsibilities, for being overprotected by their parents who themselves—like everyone else—understand less and less how to prosper in the postindustrial world. There are various factors that could account for that generation’s failure. The high-speed internet and the ubiquity of smart phones, along with the loss of manufacturing jobs in developed countries after globalization have created so-called gig economies. The increasing reliance on industrial automation and the collapse of the American liberal class (as explained well by Chris Hedges and Thomas Frank) have disenfranchised most Americans, as the majority of the economic gains since the 1980s has gone to the richest one percent. The children of the internet age have thus been left to hustle for diminished economic opportunities: their jobs are often in the service sector, they’re typically short-term or unsteady and they don’t pay the bills, and so Millennials are often still financially dependent on their parents.

Moreover, as the art of selling products has become nearly a science for large corporations, allenthusiastic consumers have been infantilized to some extent, including Millennials. We watch television or play on our smart phones more than we read books and so our attention span has shortened, and instead of instilling in its younger users a universal perspective so that they think of themselves as part of a global collective, the internet has created echo chambers that foster self-absorption. Finally, dating apps and other dehumanizing areas of online culture have arguably made Millennials antisocial in that these young adults prefer to communicate on chat forums or on Facebook and Twitter or with emojis rather than to converse in person. To take an extreme example, Japan’s Millennials are often wholly uninterested in sex or dating, a problem known as “celibacy syndrome.”

Suppose there are these structural reasons why those who are currently in their twenties or thirties have gotten stuck in an adolescent phase of emotional and cognitive development. Suppose that technologies and economic forces have created a social environment that prevents the younger generation—one that’s still mentally flexible—from settling into a stable work or family life, into a routine that promotes virtues traditionally associated with mature adulthood. Are Millennials condemned, then, to be a deadweight generation, an albatross around the neck of humanity?

Consider that if Millennials are locked into an adolescent mentality, they’ll stand apart from society. They’ll be outsiders or even outcasts, just as modern teens have usually occupied a twilight period between childhood and mature adulthood, between phases driven mostly by play and work, respectively. Teens are no longer the center of attention as they were when they were adorable babies, but they lack the authority and responsibility of adults. Yet teens have the intellectual capacity to understand their forlornness, which makes them infamous for their angst. Teens often lash out in frustration or from boredom, revolting against the world that doesn’t live up to their ideals. They can afford to do this because they’re not yet part of the wider world: they’re social outsiders who are compelled to look at society objectively, albeit often with a lack of sufficient information, because they’re not yet committed to a daily grind outside the ivory tower. Teens have the spare time to philosophize, but are typically unable to apply their insights because they’re powerless and so they stage futile, mini rebellions. 

Perhaps Millennials are like teens in those respects—except that Millennials are better informed, so they should be able to comprehend the horrors of natural reality, that there is no god or immortal spirit or perfect justice or freedom or objective purpose of human life. In theory, young adults now are poised to be a generation of prophets. Their protracted immaturity should have the silver lining of alienating them from the diversions of traditional adulthood, and so their paradoxical adolescence could signify the dawn of Homo deorsum fluens, which is to say a species that’s self-conscious about being outcasts in nature. This would be a period in which our systems and technologies come almost to run themselves, leaving people in the lurch, with nothing to do but to contemplate the embarrassment of their overactive brains.

But owing to the appeal of certain defense mechanisms, Millennials are no prophets. These young adults are coddled by their overprotective parents and they often indulge in reactions of snarky detachment. Instead of confronting existential absurdity, which has historically been the lot of outsiders such as shamans and prophets, and instead of facing the horrific implications of modern science for the presumption that we’re an exceptional species, Millennials use juvenile humour to try to distance themselves from the real world. This cry for cynical and complacent comedy was met in the ‘90s by the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Louis CK, and Jon Stewart, when most Millennials were teenagers, and it’s indulged currently by that trio’s professional descendants, such as Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and Anthony Jeselnik. This postmodern comedic stance allows the disenchanted audience to feel superior to the world’s inhumanity even as the comedy undercuts the basis for any such privileged position. Thus, the mockery of President Trump is endless and perfectly deserved, but there hasn’t yet been much reckoning with what the preposterousness of Trump’s reign means for liberalism, democracy, and the American Dream.

In addition to parental coddling and ironic emotional detachment, Millennials are caught up in the distractions of geek culture such as the explosion of superhero movies and computer games, which provides the audience a cathartic experience of feeling heroic, while typically reinforcing the conventions of the neoliberal establishment. Grappling with nature’s impersonality requires a radical shift in perspective, a subversive level of objectivity that threatens to deprive the radical of the chance of being happy. The parents of Millennials aren’t the only ones who would want to protect their children from that fate; big businesses, too, would prefer to retain young people as lifelong consumers, instead of potentially losing them to a revolution of spiritual discovery—as nearly occurred in the US in the 1960s. Indeed, this is the same reason for the long-lasting opposition to marijuana’s legalization: unlike alcohol, this recreational drug is bad for business, because it invites the user to question everything, to think creatively, and to adopt a universal spiritual outlook that’s antithetical to the major religions (including the civic religion of neoliberalism), which are compromised by business or political concerns.  

Millennials, though, are at the forefront of this collective retreat from horrific reality, whereas they’re uniquely well-positioned to address it. They have little left to lose, aside from their cushy dependent lifestyle. If the now-nostalgic respect for being bread-winners and family men and women is lost to them, and they’re condemned to languish in a prolonged limbo even while they have the world’s collective knowledge at their fingertips, Millennials could yet save everyone from nihilism by inventing a spiritual outlook befitting the late modern zeitgeist. Millennials could start a new religion, one that isn’t obsolete and that inspires us to acts of tragic heroism. But this is evidently no easy task. Retreating to idle detachment, to ironic remarks and to a false sense of superiority and entitlement that are fueled by postindustrial consumer culture appears to be how Millennials are instead dealing with their outsider status.

Still, instead of mocking or chastising young adults for failing to grow up, we might reflect on what their failure means for our collective near future. Instead of pretending that they know better, older adults should realize that the hyper advancement of technology makes comparative children of us all, that the posthumans heralded by techno gurus might mentally resemble not gods so much as protohumans, which is to say children. Of course, every historical age has had its challenges and previous ones were sometimes heroically overcome. The young generation may or may not now have the courage and the creativity to envision an authentic late modern form of maturity, a realistic but honourable kind of adulthood. Regardless, the rest of us might be wise to appreciate the stakes and to help Millennials along.

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The Nature of Sympathy

Recently, at the end of a work day, I parked the company car at a public parking lot. When I exited the car I happened to notice, just in front of the left rear wheel, a curled-up baby mouse. I knelt down and saw that its eyes were closed and it was periodically shivering. I wondered whether I’d struck the mouse with the car, but there was no sign of blood. Perhaps the mouse was cowering before the giant vehicle, as I had only nearly crushed it. More likely the mouse had been abandoned by its mother, since there were no other mice I could see nearby. I wondered whether there was anything I could do to help. But I quickly realized I might do more harm than good, since as soon as I left with the baby, its mother might return to fetch it. Cynically, I reminded myself that the world is cruel, that untold millions of animals everywhere suffer unspeakably, that the mouse might carry some disease, that even if I did somehow rescue it, I’d thereby be depriving some other hungry creature of an easy meal. In any case, I didn’t have the time during the day and night to care for a baby mouse. Later, I checked the internet and there are indeed steps that could be taken to rescue an abandoned mouse, one of which is to drop it off at an animal shelter, which I didn’t think of at the time. In any case, I left the shivering baby to its devices, my rationalizations overcoming a pang of anguish I suffered on the mouse’s behalf. 

The next day, I returned to the car, expecting to see a tiny corpse in front of the wheel, but there was none. Had its mother returned? Had a raccoon gobbled it up during the night? I’d never know.

This raises several issues, but I want to focus on the nature of that spasm of pity that provided the backdrop for my musings on what to do as I stared at the helpless rodent. What exactly is sympathy? The least helpful answer is the rationalist’s, which is that sympathy is in recognition of the golden rule that we feel for others in need because we fear to contradict ourselves. Ethics in that case would be a matter of logic. We ought to help others, because we’re no better than they and we would want to be aided in return or if the situation were reversed. All of this may be so, except that it has nothing to do with logic. Instead, it’s based on the implicit social contract: if I scratch your back, you scratch mine; otherwise, society breaks down and we all lose out. But the free-rider, who takes that chance, violating social expectations such as by accepting a favour but failing to return the good deed, hasn’t acted irrationally by gambling, since the odds are indeed in his or her favour. Society likely won’t crumble as long as the majority dutifully respects the social contract while only a minority has the audacity to be selfish. Indeed, in so far as logic is at issue, unethical behaviour has the merit of being supported by that probabilistic inference. The free-rider (the con artist, sociopath, or criminal) who excels at pretending to care about others or who is protected from the victim’s reprisals, by wealth or social connections, can have the best of both worlds, including society’s protection from the elements and the benefits of enriching herself at everyone else’s expense. Life is short and so a pragmatic decision might well be in favour of selfishness, in which case the Golden Rule is for dupes who are merely lacking in self-confidence.

In any case, even the free-rider may sympathize with a stranger in need, which suggests an evolutionary origin of the emotional reaction at issue. Sympathy for the helpless likely began as an instinct that compelled adults to care for human infants, since the latter happen to be almost entirely defenseless (unlike the young in many other species). An infant’s only defense is to scream or cry when danger approaches and that noise is intolerable to adults, compelling them to aid the baby. This mechanism for protecting the species, by shielding the infants who carry the next generation of genes is then extended, as any sort of helplessness comes to remind us of an infant’s pitiful state. This would certainly include a shivering baby mouse, but it would include also an adult whose predicament renders her dependent on others.

Once again, all of this seems so, but a causal explanation of pity and sympathy is incomplete, since the long series of causes and effects shows only how it came to be that we universally suffer when confronted by a stranger’s plight. This answer doesn’t touch on the meaning of this fellow-feeling in the context of an up-and-running culture which didn’t exist when the instinct was first formed, hundreds of thousands of years ago. When we ask, “What is pity?” we needn’t mean only “What is pity for the genes?” and are free to ask what pity is for us who occupy our jaded, late-modern vantage point. We can see that the scientistic gambit of theoretically reducing an autonomous human adult to a robot controlled by genes is ironically undone by the science that’s thereby worshipped, since our autonomy is itself a genetic strategy for ensuring our global domination in the Anthropocene. This is apparent, for example, from the development of the cerebral cortex, which services language and abstract thinking; those traits, in turn, liberate culture from the narrow confines of the biological life cycle. Moreover, we can appreciate the lameness of the religious rationales for pity, since the likelihood of supernatural rewards for ethical conduct is now widely understood to be negligible. What is it, then, for a scientifically and philosophically-informed individual to feel disgusted with himself and with the world at large, when, for example, he almost accidentally crushes a baby mouse and then abandons it for a second time, to its fate?    

We can approach this question indirectly by considering a context in which sympathy is unwelcome: a courtroom juror’s deliberation. The juror’s role is only to consider the evidence and to follow the law. Sympathy for the defendant would count as emotional bias. You might think that this expectation for jurors conflicts with the need for them to be the defendant’s peers, and that a computer would be more ideally rational. However, what human jurors are supposed to contribute isn’t emotion, but commonsense reasoning which computers lack. Certainly, if a juror identifies with the defendant’s race, religion, age, or with some other irrelevant detail of her background, and lets that sympathy affect her judgment of the facts, the juror isn’t discharging her duty.

Suppose, though, a saint were called upon as a juror, and the saint’s sympathy for the suffering of all creatures prevents her from neutrally weighing the facts. Even when confronted with the evidence of the defendant’s alleged violent crime, the saintly juror can’t help but reflect on the hardships that led to the crime, such as the adversity the defendant failed to overcome in her upbringing, which formed her character that lashed out in the case of this particular violent act. The saint interprets the act not in isolation, but in a collective, even mystical context in which every event is tragic in a fallen, inhuman cosmos. The saint might have failed even to condemn Hitler, were Hitler to have been dragged before the judges at Nuremberg. If the saint wouldn’t be positioned to forgive Hitler, she would still regard his monstrous acts as sorrowful outcomes of a much larger catastrophe such as the continuity between the two world wars.

This suggests that respectable sympathy may be rooted in a holistic, rather Gnostic perspective on life, according to which all living things are united in the misfortunes of finitude.When one creature suffers, all ought to suffer along, assuming the others comprehend the larger processes at work in that suffering. If, on the contrary, we don’t sympathize, because we’re caught up in our egoism or even in our sociopathy, as in the case of individuals lacking any moral center or capacity for selflessness, we betray our myopia. We don’t see the event in its metaphysical or mythical context, but are blinded by our narrow-minded preoccupations. As I said, the Christian basis for sympathy is antiquated, but there may be a naturalistic sort of mysticism or pantheism that supports a viable, spontaneous (and sometimes debilitating) reaction of sympathetic suffering.

As with the saint’s irrepressible sorrow on behalf of everyone struggling beneath the veil of tears or in Plato’s cave of ignorance, the naturalist might sympathize with all sufferers, regardless of the circumstances. The sympathy might flow from the pessimistic outlook, which needn’t regard us as slaves, as in the case of scientistic reductionism, but which could juxtapose a hope for a progressive future with tragic knowledge of that future’s improbability, given our animal limitations. Whereas the implications of scientistic worship of science and of physicality are just nihilism and the baselessness of caring about anything, pantheism may entail sympathy much as comedic paradoxes provoke laughter. When we appreciate the humour in a situation, we laugh involuntarily, and when we perceive a situation’s tragedy, we might naturally feel sad for those caught up in it. The deeper the sense of humour, the more cause for laughter until the humourist might become mad from an overdose on the world’s absurdity. Likewise, the more profound the naturalist’s enlightenment, that is, the more uncompromising the sympathizer’s subversive awareness of our shortcomings in the existential scheme, the greater her inclination to suffer in response to what she would have to see as a world overflowing with senseless wrongdoing.

Let’s return to the cowering baby mouse. The immediate causes of its suffering are almost insignificant compared to the total, holistic cause, which is the mouse’s role in the universe as a whole. While we can’t fathom the entirety of that role, we can surmise that the mouse’s position is at least absurd in that there is no redemption for that hapless animal. Ultimately, the mouse shivers, abandoned by its mother and left to be eaten on dusty asphalt, because the mouse’s whole life is accidental and at odds with uncaring broader forces which inevitably win out against all organic anomalies. All animals are hungry, because the genes mindlessly and thus tirelessly replicate themselves in competition with other lineages (species), which necessitates animals’ war over resources. Thus, an unenlightened omnivorous animal couldn’t afford to gawk at the mouse and feel appalled by its helplessness, but could only exploit the situation and accept the free meal. The baby mouse shivers and dies because life only evolves, meaning it creeps onto a stage on which it doesn’t belong. An individual who is awakened to this existential context will suffer alongside tormented strangers, because the cosmic tragedy is a sorrowful affair and she sees that tragedy whenever our pretensions give way to the monstrousness of the underlying natural processes.

In my case, I suffered a pang of enlightened sympathy when I saw the shivering mouse, but my reaction wasn’t saintly because it wasn’t one-sided. My sorrow for the mouse was informed by disgust for the world that’s metaphysically responsible, but I had room also for mundane, pragmatic and selfish rationalizations. What, then, is sympathy? When we’re saddened by a stranger’s misery, we’re thinking not as animals but as transcendent, withdrawn observers of the misery. We attain something like Kohlberg’s universal perspective, at which point we can step outside our egoistic concerns, however briefly, and interpret the event in light of a myth that speaks to the paradox of natural tragedy and progress: we suffer with the baby mouse because the mouse had a chance for a better life, but the inhuman odds decided against that happier outcome. Moreover, when nature displays its godlessness and there is, then, no remorse or apology from the heavens, when the forlorn creature is left to a gruesome fate, the musings of an overly-philosophical passerby notwithstanding, we’re burdened by our understanding of the wider malady. We may cry for the mouse not because reason dictates any such reciprocity, but because sympathetic grief amounts to an existential battle cry, to a futile but noble gut reaction against the world that unveils itself in that particular affront.    

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Life as a Dream: The Secular Myth of Objective Truth

Art by Erik Johansson

Is life is but a dream, as the nineteenth century nursery rhyme assures us? Liberals, humanists, and naturalists insist that now more than ever, with the rise of fascism in Europe, Russia, and America; with the strange convergence of alt-right grievances with postmodern cynicism; and while demagogues, charlatans, and agnotologists in politics, advertising, and the corporate media are spreading doubt, spin, and propaganda, we should stand up for truth. However, this conflict between so-called rationalists or critical thinkers, on the one hand, and hillbillies and con artists, on the other, is a tempest in a teapot. Those who take the long view are invited to understand how truth died with God shortly after the Scientific Revolution, several centuries ago.

The concept of truth had already been suspect for millennia, when divine reality was thought to transcend human comprehension. What we took to be mundane, worldly truths, such as that the desert is hot during the day or that a normal human face has two eyes, a nose and a mouth, were mere illusions compared to mystical “truth,” the latter being ineffable and at best experienced as awe in moments of heightened awareness. Gods were only posited by our imagination, based on a lack of data (and on a noble lie developed by psychopathic power elites for the sake of pacifying the human herd of betas). Scientists collected the data, thanks to advances in technology, mathematics, and epistemology, and the gods were accordingly replaced with atoms and physical forces. Natural reality is measurable whereas the gods weren’t, but atoms and forces are likewise beyond our understanding in that they’re wildly counterintuitive.

The only thing we can fully understand is ourselves. Everything else must be simplified in the telling of them with concepts and models which idealize and which rest on falsifying metaphors that would humanize the inhuman. The proper subjects of knowledge are us and our societies; reason evolved to enable us to understand only minds and cultures with which we’re intimately familiar since we identify with them. The stories we tell about ourselves aren’t simplifications, since we’re identical with the subjects of those narratives, not with our brains as such. When we seek to understand the wider world, however, we either project human categories onto nature, as occurs in theistic religions and in folk conceptions, or else we effectively exchange the pursuit of truth with that of power.

In the epistemic context, anthropomorphism is philosophically unforgivable, however socially useful might be the gratuitous shrinking of outer reality so that it seems to fit within the human scale. Socrates sacrificed his life for the principle that truth matters more than our comfort. Instead of flattering ourselves with delusions that hold society together at the cost of confining us to an animal mode of life, we should search for a higher calling according to our position in the ultimate, metaphysical scheme. Unfortunately, Plato’s teleological picture of nature is a rehashing of the folk prejudices, losing the human interest of the transparent personifications in popular religion, in exchange for pseudoscientific respectability afforded by the philosophical discourse. Instead of angelic or monstrous spirits flitting about and deciding how events unfold, there are supposedly levels of being, including Forms and their material copies. In any case, scientific naturalism renders such interim philosophical tales obsolete. What isn’t well-appreciated, though, is that the very notion of truth is also outdated. 

Power and Truth, Measurement and Agreement

On the contrary, says the scientific realist as opposed to the pragmatist, science has proved a million truths, as can be seen from the power of the myriad applications of scientific theories. Functioning and indeed astonishing technologies stand all around us and that success would be impossible were there no systematic difference between scientific models and religious dogmas, for example. Indeed, there must be some such difference, but a scientific vindication of the commonsense concept of truth isn’t it.  

To be sure, we can try to make sense of the success of technoscience by positing happy semantic relations between natural facts and the symbols that scientists use to explain them. But that old-fashioned way of understanding where we are is awkward in light of the content of the scientific picture. Science shows us events occurring within or because of alien dimensions that we can measure and predict despite the stubborn fact that no one in the least understands those events. We can detect changes in the subatomic world, for example, and can take advantage of those forewarnings by devising models that work, in that their parts correlate with the facts, within the parameters that interest us. We can then exploit those correlations with machines that apply the lessons that are implicit in the models. But a scientific statement can be useful without being true. More precisely, the statement’s utility can be as mysterious as the inhuman reality of nature that scientists discovered to the detriment of all exoteric dogmas. We can say the theory is useful because it’s true, whereas a religious myth is false, but in light of the anti-human content of that very naturalistic theory, calling the theory merely true is itself dogmatic. Talk of truth now, after science has shown us the monstrous scale of the universe and the inhuman logic of quantum reality, is akin to chanting a mantra to ward off some fear.

But haven’t I just presupposed a truth, namely that the universe is very large rather than small? No, because the intuitive concept of size is meaningless for astronomical purposes. What does it mean to say that our universe is enormous if the whole of it may fit into what would seem to outsiders like a miniscule seed or near-singularity subsisting within a black hole embedded in a parent universe, as the physicists John Wheeler, Lee Smolin, and Nikodem Poplawski have theorized? Again, the concept of physical size makes sense in the context of measuring things that pop up in the field of ordinary human interaction. Thus, thousands of years ago, hunters would have called a bear large rather than small, to signal the urgency of the threat, and a baby is called small rather than large, in which case "large" connotes danger and “small” connotes helplessness and preciousness. Statements that employed such concepts were never merely true or false. Instead, the concepts comprise the mental HUD (heads up display) we developed (during what Yuval Harari calls the cognitive revolution, about 70,000 years ago) to interface with the environment after the perception of the latter has already been put together and pre-interpreted by the brain. And that evolutionary, biological story of how experience arises shouldn’t be thought of as true. Instead, that story is powerful, meaning that it achieves certain purposes. Likewise, religious narratives achieved alternative purposes. It’s just that we Western Faustians, as Oswald Spengler called us, care more about individual power than social harmony.

Take another example of scientific “truth”: global warming. Scientists agree that our planet is warming as a matter of fact, due largely to relatively recent human activities. We can model the mechanisms involved and can use the models to predict what will happen next if we respond this way or that to the threat. But is it truethat the earth is warming? To say that this is true is to say that our concepts are adequate to the facts such that there’s a correspondence or agreement between the former and the latter. And that is a hangover piece of anthropocentrism. Far from there being an agreement between the neuronal firings in our head or a sequence of linguistic symbols, on the one hand, and the facts we’re supposed to be speaking about, on the other, our attempts to understand reality are laughably outmatched by nature’s alienness.

Again, what does it mean to say that the earth is warming, when the interval that interests us is trivial compared to the sun’s lifespan? Yes, the planet’s climate has changed from year to year over the last several decades (mere decades!), and the trend is toward greater warmth, but talking about warmth in relation to the sun is as absurd as saying that it would be a little chilly on Pluto. The concept of warmth is suited to the mundane discourse in which we compare fractional differences in comfort depending on whether we’re wearing a jacket made of polyester or one of leather. Talk of global warming isn’t adequate to the task, as is suggested by the film Sunshine, which depicts the sun as a majestic god that enraptures an unlucky astronaut before roasting his every atom. No, what we would need is a concept that grasps at an intuitive level the unimaginable timespans and temperature fluctuations involved in the sun’s relation to this planet. In the distant past, the Earth was much hotter, which allowed animals to grow to monstrous size. (And that evolutionary statement about the dinosaurs is also a gross simplification and thus isn’t well thought of as merely true, because our concept of life is laughably inadequate due to our ignorance of life’s relation to the universe as a whole.) Likewise, one day in the distant future the sun will engulf our planet in flames. But there’s no word that encompasses the wild variations in the sun’s overall relationship to Earth. So our focus on the years that concern us is as arbitrary as a mayfly’s noticing just the changes in its puny environment that affect its 24-hour life cycle.

It bears repeating that measuring isn’t the same as understanding. A measurement can be more or less accurate, but accuracylikewise isn’t the same as truth. If you’re aiming for the middle of a dart board and you hit that target, your throw measures up to the standard and achieves your goal, but that doesn’t mean the throw agrees with the middle of the board. The numerical values on a thermometer are as anthropocentric as the linear divisions on a dart board. The decimal system suits us because we have ten fingers and toes and we attribute superstitious importance to ten as a complete figure; for the same reason, we mourn a baby’s loss if it’s born with only nine digits. Moreover, arithmetic presupposes that members of a type are interchangeable or that the differences between them are negligible—which they may be, for our purposes. When the Nazis assigned numbers to Jewish prisoners in their concentration camps, Allied soldiers were horrified by the inhumanity, but when we hold out a thermometer to measure the temperature and the reading says 30 degrees Celsius for the second day in a row, no one’s offended by this neglect of the untold variations in the factors that determine those temperatures. If you pick three apples from a tree, and then three more from another tree, you ignore the differences between the trees, the apples, and the other parts of the orchard, because your concept apple already simplifies so that many different things can count as the same for your purposes, and all that matters at the moment is that you have two groups of three things. The groups are reduced to being the same in that abstract respect. But that abstraction isn’t natural, just as there’s no such thing as a perfectly round circle or straight line in nature. No two apples are exactly alike and no two environments or temporal slices of an environment are remotely the same despite their having the same temperature according to a device we set up out of self-interest.

If a mayfly could judge its environment, assigning categories and drawing distinctions, and its judgments enhanced its fitness or achieved its mayfly goals, we would say that its judgments are, at best, true for the mayfly. The mayfly’s model of the facts would be so primitive and shockingly ignorant, from our comparatively godlike perspective, that we could only condescend to that aquatic insect and regard its worldview as having mere subjective truth. But ideal subjectivity isn’t the same as semantic, objective truth. The latter kind of truth is the agreement between a set of symbols and a real state of affairs. For Kierkegaard, subjective truth is inner authenticity, meaning the choice of how to live that remains “true” to your inner being. This integrity or faithfulness to your private thoughts and feelings is obviously not the same as the relation of semantic correspondence. You can express your authentic self even in a hostile or indifferent world, in which case the feeling that some statement is true for you, in that it coheres with your inner identity, needn’t agree with anything outside yourself. On the contrary, subjective truth can be tragic in that there may be a palpable disharmony between the self and the facts, as the real world extinguishes the self and consigns it to oblivion.  

Natural and Artificial Languages: Tools for Different Purposes

You might be thinking that even if ordinary concepts from natural language don’t agree with reality, since they’re too self-serving, scientists use more precise, artificial languages, including arcane mathematical concepts that may indeed encompass nature’s strangeness. But an artificial language like physics or chemistry has as little to do with a natural one like English or Cantonese, as subjective truth has to do with the objective kind, with the alleged agreement between certain statements and facts. Natural language is a tool for facilitating social relationships and thus its concepts ooze with anthropocentric metaphors and projections. The point is to enable us to read each other’s minds or to manipulate each other so we might dominate a social hierarchy. By contrast, artificial language is a device for providing us with power over nature.

When we speak of size or of warmth, we’re expressing ourselves so that the standard ought to be Kierkegaard’s ideal of subjective authenticity. Instead, most of us are self-deluded and so we concoct various mesmerizing fictions, including Plato’s tale of universal teleology or the semantic conceit of truth as agreement between us and the world. We take the expression of our comfort, when we say we feel warm in this jacket, for a statement that has as its objective meaning that it somehow latches onto reality, that it captures or mirrors a fact. This notion of semantic truth made sense in our ancient animistic period when we personified the whole world, believing that living spirits were at the root of everything so that we could imagine our self-expressions did indeed reflect wider reality. But after science revealed nature’s monstrous complexity and its strange lifelessness, or its undeadness, our self-expressions are merely grotesque if we presuppose that they satisfy anything outside themselves, that at their best our statements harmonize with anything in nature we didn’t create.    

An artificial language, such as the math used in a physicist’s equations is a set of tools for measuring and predicting, not for understanding. There is no hope a person will understand anything in nature unless she becomes as alienated from all she holds dear as is the universe alien to her intuitions. To understand something is to grasp its meaning. Nature has no meaning. Meaning is a product typically of human foolishness, so we understand only ourselves and our cultures. The rest is fit only for power differentials and for edifying existential reactions such as angst, horror, and awe. A scientist’s technical, abstract concepts, then, are at best only foreshadows of the machines that will harness the part of natural reality which informed the scientist’s model. The technical concepts are part of the blueprint for the technology with which we try to gain a foothold in the inhuman outer world. We have indeed overpowered much of our planet, at least when our Faustian efforts are compared to those of other species, most of which we’ve decimated or enslaved. But the conceptual instruments we use to develop the weapons in our struggle against natural processes don’t agree with anything. Instead, these concepts are techniques for preparing for our conquest of the modeled part of nature. The equations and definitions and laws divide and conquer their subject matter, just as a scientist will lay an animal on the dissection table and measure its innards to perfect the model of that species. That model doesn’t allow us to understand the creatures we torture, enslave, or consume; the point instead is for us to dominate them as though we were gods. A diagram of the layout of an animal’s internal organs doesn’t agree with the biological reality. On the contrary, the diagram is convenient because it inevitably simplifies, leaving out details that don’t interest us. The diagram is suitable only for certain purposes and those purposes usually presuppose the ideal of human dominance of the planet.

Like an accurate measurement, a natural law will correlate with the facts, but correlations are cheap and they don’t add up to truth. A thermometer is a device that registers changes in the environment and displays them in a useful fashion. Instead of meaningful agreement, there's causality, a mechanism connecting the tool to some natural process. Likewise, Newton’s law that force equals mass times acceleration is an arrangement of technical concepts that puts us in contact with a certain natural order. If there’s a semantic relation involved, it’s adequate only for our parochial purpose of dominating natural territory like crazed apes running amok, wearing lab coats. We will likely all be dominated by nature in the end, when our species is extinguished and all traces of our accomplishments will be undone as the galaxy evolves as a whole. Thus, to speak of the truth even of a natural law is unbecoming. The law enables us to measure the course of stars and planets, and to reach the moon by spaceship, but we don’t thereby understand anything, nor is our attempt to overpower nature wise.

Our best statements aren’t true in the sense that they agree with what they’re supposed to be about. The statements afford us some ultimately meager power which nevertheless naturally corrupts us, since we’re animals and that vanity may be the mechanism by which the wilderness counts us as being unfit to endure the variations it’s bound to pursue according to its alien agenda, as it were. Our technological success tempts us to overstep the bounds of ethics, to presume we can be realists whose discourse is objectively valid, that science agrees with reality, that there are realities named by our symbols so that we’ve put our finger on the world once and for all, or that we’re progressing towards that end. Again, this is an embarrassing lapse for alleged naturalists and humanists. The problem is that the Scientific Revolution began with the Renaissance during which early modern Europeans became engrossed in their potential for progress. The early humanists were highly optimistic about the powers of reason. But humanism needn’t amount to childlike glee in our secular abilities. Indeed, humanists can be misanthropic:we can be students of human nature, dismissing dogmas which held us down, but lamenting our fate in the existential context. Late modern humanists should know better than to parrot the exoteric dogma of semantic truth or to fall for the myth-laden explanation of technoscience’s great successes. We succeed not because we agree with nature, but because we’re predatory and psychopathic enough to aim to dominate it, but are also hapless and deluded so that instead we'll all be crushed and Mother Nature won't even have broken a sweat.

If Life is a Dream, which makes for the Best Story?

Bury, then, the anthropocentric notion of objective truth, with the theistic fictions. But is there a more fitting way of speaking philosophically about how we best relate to the world, besides the humdrum business of pragmatism? Perhaps our thoughts and utterances aren’t just instruments, but artworks, and perhaps all of nature consists of things created and destroyed, as the field of becoming. This metaphysical picture shouldn’t be thought of as true or false, for the above reasons. Instead, think of it as a poetic bet that honours the power of technoscience while not indulging in any anthropocentric delusion. At a minimum, as Heraclitus said, things in nature come and go. We too came and will go. Things everywhere are created and destroyed. Our technologies are creations of clever mammals created by a planet created by a star created by gravity acting on a nebula that was created by atomic and subatomic shenanigans. This means that aesthetics should take priority over semantics when we evaluate our judgments. Our worldviews are creations made of ideas. They are all therefore fictional, and the fictions can be more or less useful for various purposes, which is where aesthetics meets with pragmatism. But it’s not just our worldviews, our models, theories, philosophies, and myths that are works of art. Our reactions to the world that add up to the themes of our life are also our handiworks. Moreover, our perception of the world is a figment of the brain that interprets the inputs of the five senses. Put all this together and life becomes very like a dream, like a play or set of scenes that seems normal when stitched together but that unfolds strangely when viewed from a critical distance.

As the philosopher Kant pointed out, we think we understand the world because we’re aware only of how the world seems to us as we help to shape it with our basic categories and sensory modes. Other species might bring different mindsets to the task of making sense of a reality that ultimately eludes all our grasps. Our perceptions are collective hallucinations; the transductions may be mechanically guaranteed, but the concepts and logic we use to understand the sights and sounds are evidently detached from reality and tainted by our complaisance. We judge the neo-fascists as dupes and trolls, and we presume we liberals and critical thinkers are superior since our worldview is reality-based while theirs is a set of memes spun by a propaganda machine such as Breitbart or Fox News. This division may work for partisan purposes, but not for philosophical or spiritual ones. Ultimately, we are all dupes and monsters. We are predators that pretend to be passive observers who know what’s happening in the real world. We’re playthings of unfathomable natural powers that squeeze us even when we applaud ourselves for seeming to dominate the wilderness with our toy machines. And the sign that a worldview is reality-based is that it drives the contemplator to awe and to terror, not that it motivates him or her to espouse any sentimental notion such as that we all have equal rights. We’re all perfectly equal only in sharing the fate of being worm food. That fate could inspire us just as easily to attempt to be freeloaders, as to having empathy with others. Considering that life is a joke and our so-called reality is a dream world conjured by the brain and by the egotism and shortsightedness that drive mass culture, we might just as easily decide to outcompete and dominate weaker, more deluded players than to pursue gentler, socialist causes.    

All this would be so were there no aesthetic standards in addition to the delusional ones of morality, mass religion, and partisan games. If life is a dream, the question is which lives provide for the best stories. Which fictions are best as works of art? The problem with Donald Trump, for example, isn’t that he’s a psycho clown. We’re all psycho clowns in having to read the tea leaves supplied by our brain, to make any sense of what turns out to be a wholly alien and monstrous wilderness from which we hide under the circus tents of our self-serving, typically-ludicrous cultures. No, the problem specifically with Trump is aesthetic: his lies are dull, because his vocabulary is literally childish. That’s it. That’s enough reason to dismiss his whole life and his claim on your attention. Trump is boring to connoisseurs with good taste in life-fictions.

You’ll say this can’t be so, since the spectacles of Trump’s power plays are evidently riveting in that they hold much of the world’s attention through the mass media. Trump does hold our attention—like a train wreck. We consume news of the neo-fascists by rubbernecking, as we use these particular clowns as canaries in the coal mine. We search for signs of our civilization’s downfall as we learn that we can be pitiful enough to fall for fascism even after the catastrophic ends of the totalitarian regimes of the last century. We have little historical memory, precisely because social media entrances us with spectacles of the moment. The internet was supposed to bring everyone together in common knowledge; instead, the net ghettoizes us as we settle into our sub-niches. And technoscience should have been powerful enough to inform us of certain elementary facts of our nature and our past, but we’re as easily fooled by demagogues as were the ancients who worshipped their rulers as divine.

The phenomenon of Trumpism is important and it deserves our attention, but Trump himself makes for a dismal story. However greater the stakes were in his life, as he reckoned with billions of dollars whereas most people deal only with thousands, his deeds were unheroic and so as a protagonist he doesn’t attract the well-read viewer’s attention. His life story isn’t a book we should want to read, because we shouldn’t want the catharsis we’d achieve by identifying with Trump as a character. True, Trump became president of the United States, which is ordinarily heroic, but if Trump burns down the government he’s supposed to lead, the way he burned down his companies and conned his previous partners and investors, he’ll have reduced the presidency to his tawdry level and so spoiled the genre of American politics. More precisely, he’ll have given the game away, revealing the conflict between the psychopathy of all American presidents and the equally cold-blooded group-think of the American deep state.

In any case, this is how we should begin to evaluate life. Instead of congratulating some lifestyles for being based on truth and reality, while condemning others as fraudulent, we should be searching for inspiration as artists and as consumers of life-as-quasi-art. Not all social constructions and fictions are equal, just because nature laughs in all their faces. Some tales are original while others are clichéd and hackneyed; some resonate with your emotions and so help you be subjectively true to your inner self, while others seem mean-spirited or otherwise small-minded and function more like traps than like opportunities for mind-expansion or for testing the merits of your thought palaces. Life is but a dream—and we should be thankful that we lack the vantage point for taking in the cosmic whole, that we must content ourselves with fantasies and games to distract us so that we needn’t continually ponder the absurdity of our existential situation. Thank the strange heavens for killing off the gods of our babyish religions and for awakening us to the embarrassment of that secular fairytale of objective truth. 

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