On a recent episode of The Late Show, host Stephen Colbert and frequent visitor Neil deGrasse Tyson joked about the astronomical insignificance of New Year’s Day.

Before long, Tyson was talking about the role the Catholic Church played in creating the calendar as we know it. “The world’s calendar is the Gregorian calendar after Pope Gregory,” Tyson explains. “Put that into place in 1582, because the previous Julian calendar was messing up in the year. It was off by ten days. And the pope said, ‘We got to fix this…’ There’s a Vatican Observatory to this day. At the time, before telescopes were invented, these Jesuit priests were put into the service of figuring out why the calendar was shifting in the year.”

Colbert, known for his openness about his Catholic faith, then asks Tyson if it’s true that a Catholic priest formulated the Big Bang Theory. “Yes,” Tyson responds. “Georges Lemaître. Using Einstein’s equations … he deduces that the history of the universe must’ve started with a bang. So Catholics have been in there in multiple places.”

This little exchange might have seemed uninteresting in another era, but not today. The rise in the new atheism and Biblical literalism have made it a commonplace that science and religion are in conflict, and young people are absorbing the idea as axiomatic. In her recent book iGen, about the least religious generation in U.S. history, Dr. Jean Twenge quotes one young person as saying: “I knew from church that I couldn’t believe in both science and God, so that was it. I didn’t believe in God anymore.”

That may be true in some churches, but not the Catholic Church – and it’s worth repeating just as often as the opportunity allows. In Catholicism, belief in science and God are compatible. In fact, Tyson and Colbert’s conversation is a glaring reminder that many Catholic priests and believers have been leading scientists themselves. There are theological and historical reasons for this, but the bottom line is this: Catholicism is a science-friendly religion, and it’s enshrined in the Catholic Catechism.

Even at the peak of the new atheism and its mockery of all things religious in the 2000s, one man seemed to draw the respect and attention of people like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher: Fr. George Coyne, a priest and astrophysicist who ran the Vatican Observatory outside of Tucson. His very existence was a challenge to the view that religion “poisons” rational, scientific thinking. Like Drummond at the end of Inherit the Wind, who marched out of the courtroom with both the Bible and On the Origin of Species in his hands, Coyne represented an intriguing third option outside of the fray.

The new atheists have largely faded, and affable agnostics like Tyson have filled the vacuum. He may not be an unwavering fan of religion (the first episode of his TV series Comsos painted 16th-century Catholic clerics as anti-science), but he is committed first and foremost to advancing knowledge, not denigrating religion. This is a welcome turn of events, one that has resulted in more positive encounters like the one with Colbert.

And they really only scratched the surface. Catholic scientists were not only behind the formation of the calendar and the formulation of the Big Bang Theory: they were behind groundbreaking discoveries about the size of the earth (Fr. Jean-Félix Picard), pasteurization (Louis Pasteur), and genetics (Gregor Mendel). In fact, one of the first people to correctly explain rainbows was a 13th-century Dominican friar! There’s Roger Bacon, Pascal, Descartes – the list goes on and on. The Church’s unfortunate treatment of Galileo (whether the actual events, or the mythical spin on the events lodged in our collective consciousness) was, at worst, a brief spat in a long and respectful friendship. And Copernicus and Galileo, let’s not forget, were both Catholics themselves.

At the end of the interview Colbert asks what “mystery” of the universe keeps Tyson up at night. His response reveals a deep humility about the observable universe. In the future, dark energy will render the universe so large that all of the galaxies – the source of “everything we know about the history of the universe” – will be “ripped” from view. Then he wonders: was some previous chapter of the universe ripped away from us? “Here we are touching the elephant, not knowing that in fact there’s an elephant standing there. Or maybe there’s the shadow of the elephant and the elephant has been moved. We don’t know what we don’t know.”

The shadow side of the material universe – past, present, and future – is baffling indeed. But what we do know is this: when it comes to putting the tools of observation and the light of reason to good use, science has an ally in the Catholic Church.

The colorful six-minute animation from the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt recently raked in millions of views with a brief history of...well, everything. The narrator offers a naturalistic view of the entire universe, but carries it to nihilistic conclusions.

 
You’ve heard the story before: In its infancy, humanity believed in God, purpose, and the centrality of human life to cope with the scariness of earth. As we got “older,” science showed us how backwards these ideas were.

The condescension toward believers and the assumed conflict between faith and reason is not surprising. What is surprising is Kurzgesagt’s conclusion about what this all means in the end. In short, we come face to face with an inconceivably enormous universe that is from nothing, for nothing, and amounts to nothing, culminating finally in its own heat death.

Knowing just how crushing a realization this is, Kurzgesagt wants to change the way we think about it, countering “existential dread” with “optimistic nihilism”:

You only get one shot at life, which is scary, but it also sets you free. If the universe ends in heat death, every humiliation you suffer in your life will be forgotten. Every mistake you made will not matter in the end. Every bad thing you did will be voided. If our life is all we get to experience, then it’s the only thing that matters. If the universe has no principles, the only principles relevant are the ones we decide on. If the universe has no purpose, then we get to dictate what its purpose is. Humans will most certainly cease to exist at some point, but before we do, we get to explore ourselves and the world around us. We get to experience feelings. We get to experience food, books, sunrises, and being with each other …
 
If this is our one shot at life, there is no reason not to have fun and live as happy as possible. Bonus points if you made the life of other people better. More bonus points if you help build a galactic human empire. Do the things that make you feel good. You get to decide whatever this means for you.

This line of thinking is not uncommon. In a Big Think video on “Hope & Optimism,” theoretical physicist and atheist Lawrence Krauss argues that the secret to living in an accidental universe headed for a “miserable future” is this: “We make our own purpose. We make our own joy.” A recent New York Times article about “poetic naturalism” (which Brandon Vogt has written extensively about here at Strange Notions) and finding meaning in the mundane argues: “Meaning begins and ends with how we talk about our own lives, such as our myths and stories.” Then there is Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous line from the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life …”

This might seem like a charming idea to some. It appeals to our modern sensibilities (of independence, creativity, and love of science) and to some our most basic desires (for meaning, connection, and joy). But charm is deceptive. The appeal is more a medicine show than a philosophy, and the elixir of “optimistic nihilism” so much snake oil.

In its entry on nihilism, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes almost immediately that nihilism is “often associated with extreme pessimism.” This isn’t the result of lazy thinking or an accident of history, but of dealing honestly with nihilistic premises. If the world has no inherent purpose, and if everything ends in oblivion with no God to gather it up, then hope becomes naiveté. When Shakespeare’s Macbeth sees the nothing that life signifies, he simultaneously sees the noise and idiocy of it all. And Nietzsche’s dictum “God is dead” isn’t uttered by a heroic secularist, but by a prophetic madman running through a marketplace with a lantern. He didn’t see nihilism as a positive development. It spelled incredible trouble for man.

So we whistle past God’s graveyard. But can’t we still “transvaluate” all values? Can we still find hope and happiness in our own constructions? The intellectual quagmires of relativism – Can’t one person’s happiness easily be another’s misery? Who can value certain behaviors as deserving “bonus points” if there are no values to begin with? – are well-known. But if the only moral rule we have is “do the things that make you feel good,” there’s no good reason to think humanity should find happiness, much less avoid disaster. Just as our chaotic weather events reflect the gradual warming of the globe, our chaotic social realities seem to reflect just such a gradual narrowing of the heart.

Optimistic Nihilism acknowledges that the story of the world ultimately isn’t about us – which is true. It’s not about us. But if it’s ultimately about nothing, then the universe stares blankly back at our own freedom to go beyond good and evil.

If philosophy and history have taught us anything, it’s that this is nothing to be optimistic about.

At the halfway point of HBO’s unsettling new series Westworld – a J.J. Abrams reboot of the 1973 film written and directed by Michael Crichton – some big plot questions remain. Is William a younger Man in Black? Is Bernard really a host? And what’s this maze all about?

The premise of the show is (relatively) straightforward: In the distant future, scientists and businessmen collaborate to create a vast amusement park in the style of the Old West, populating it with artificially intelligent robots (or “hosts”) that are so advanced that they are completely indistinguishable from human beings. Wealthy patrons (“newcomers” to the hosts) come to the park to act out fully immersive fantasies without consequence (they can hurt and even “kill” the hosts, but by design the hosts can’t kill the patrons), while an intricate network of underground employees work around the clock to clean up and reset the hosts, reprogram their character and storyline glitches, and continually enhance the park’s veil of realism. It’s a well-oiled machine, every centimeter of it designed for the lurid entertainment of the upper class.

Only, as of late, the realism is getting a little too real.

With each episode, it becomes a little bit clearer who is driving it and why (SPOILERS AHEAD), but the key twist is that some of the hosts are exhibiting “aberrant” behaviors, e.g., going off of their programmed storylines, “remembering” violence committed against them prior to system resets, and generally connecting dots that, in theory, it’s not possible for them to connect. In short, the hosts are increasingly acting more like a human being than a computer.

With the introduction of this theme, everything about the show – its plot twists, its characters, its graphic content – is subsumed under two key philosophical questions. First, can computers think? And second, are human beings really just computers?

On a surface level, Westworld really only deals with the first question and the social implications of creating such unpredictable machines. (Leading scientists and innovators – Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk among them – have raised a red flag about the exponential advance of artificial intelligence and the dangers it poses for human life. There’s still a lot of show left, but it doesn’t look like Westworld will be offering much to countervail those fears.) But because these two questions really come down to the same question – what is human consciousness? – the first question always entails the second as well.

So how does Westworld answer these questions?

Can Computers Think?

Computer scientist Alan Turing famously devised a test whereby computers, for all intents and purposes, could be shown to be intelligent. Turing described the following hypothetical situation: Suppose a computer and a person were in an enclosed room, separated from an interrogator whose goal it is to discover which is which through a series a questions. The aim of the person is to lead the interrogator to acknowledge the computer as the computer, while the computer is programmed to lead the interrogator to falsely acknowledge the computer as the person. If at the end this “imitation game” the computer so closely mimics the human responses that the interrogator incorrectly identifies the machine as the person, the computer has passed the “Turing test” for exhibiting intelligent behavior.

It’s widely assumed that the Turing test is a sufficient condition for showing that a computer has attained something like human thought. The qualifiers we use to talk about current technologies that mirror intelligence (“smart phone,” “cognitive robotics”, “artificial intelligence”) further reinforce that assumption.

But Westworld exposes the limitations of the Turing test. In the second episode, a young man converses with a host in a waiting room that leads into the park. “Are you real?” he asks her, clearly feeling a little silly. “Well,” the host responds, “If you can’t tell, does it matter?” This is the logic of behaviorism undergirding the Turing test. But the answer to this – based on everything we’ve seen about the park’s normal mode of operating – is clearly “yes.” Being tricked by a host into treating it as human (or human-like) doesn’t change the fact that the hosts are routinely dragged into a cold, dark underground and programmed, to the letter, to say and do everything they say and do. They may act like autonomous thinkers, but there’s nothing “real” about them (at least, not at first).

These limitations become explicit in the third episode when the park’s founder, Dr. Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins), describes the early days of Westworld with his partner. “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test after the first year,” Dr. Ford explains. “But that wasn’t enough for Arnold. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of intellect or wit. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness [emphasis mine].”

The implication here is that what makes the thought of human beings really and truly thought is the presence of a mind or consciousness to engage in it. Mimicry of a thing doesn’t attain the whole reality of that thing; and the reality of human consciousness is evidently a “something more” that goes beyond observable behaviors.

This brings us to a pause in the first question to jump to the second.

Are Human Beings Really Just Computers?

Discussions about whether computers can think simultaneously involve questions about whether human thought can be said to involve a mind or consciousness beyond the material brain in the first place. If there is no such thing as mind or consciousness, then the Turing test is a perfectly valid way to determine whether a computer has become a thinker in the same sense that a person is a thinker. On this view, human beings are really no different from the average host in Westworld. All your choices, beliefs, and sensations – in short, the whole spectrum of “immaterial” experiences you associate with a single subject you call “myself” – are just a convenient fiction. The only difference is that where the hosts are programmed by artificial processes to behave as if they’re special subjects, we’re programmed by natural processes. You are your material structures and their motion, and nothing more.

Westworld clearly doesn’t adopt this materialist perspective on human life. The whole drama of the show is that the hosts are going beyond the Turing test to attain something of a different kind, and therefore, on the second question, the attainment of something beyond the material structures of the brain that humans possess. But what is that something?

Giants of modern philosophy differ widely on this point. John Searle’s “Chinese Room” experiment is the most popular critique of the Turing test, and focuses on understanding. Others such as Thomas Nagel ("what is like to be a bat?") and David Chalmers (the “hard problem of consciousness”) have made awareness a kind of bulwark against materialism.

One of the least recognized but most important critiques of materialism, however, is the argument from intentionality. In Edward Feser’s book Philosophy of Mind, he gives a cogent argument that the “ancient problem of intentionality” is what really lies behind arguments of understanding or awareness:

“The term ‘intentionality’ derives from the Latin intendere, which means ‘to point (at)’ or ‘to aim (at)’ – hence the use of the term to signify the capacity of a metal state to ‘point at,’ or to be about, or to mean, stand for, or represent, something beyond itself. (It is important to note that intentions, for example, your intention to read this chapter, are only one manifestation of intentionality; your belief that you are reading a book, your desire to read it, your perception of the book, and so forth, exhibit intentionality just as much as your intention does.) The concept was of great interest to the medieval philosophers but Franz Brentano (1838 -1917) is the thinker most responsible for putting it at the forefront of contemporary philosophical discussion. Brentano is also famous for regarding intentionality as the ‘mark of the mental’ – the one essential feature of all mental phenomena – and for holding that their possessing intentionality makes mental phenomena ultimately irreducible to, and inexplicable in terms of, physical phenomena.”

If the hosts of Westworld are attaining something beyond the material, it is, in a word, intentionality. Their sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and desires are no longer self-contained in a string of physical mechanisms. They are about their objects, directed toward them. They simultaneously seem to be unlocking hidden doors to perception, reason, and will – and even contemplating meeting their “maker” – precisely through the “about-ness” of mental states so characteristic of human life.

If Feser is right that intentionality is the best argument for the immateriality of the mind, and Westworld treats intentionality as the immaterial “something” that the hosts now have, we’re brought back to the first question. Can a computer actually attain human thought, understood as the operation of an immaterial mind?

Westworld wants to say “yes”, but justifying that answer adequately is completely beyond the scope of the show – and besides, would drain out all the drama. The show drops hints that through a lucky recipe of ingredients (ingredients that were also present in primal man), “somehow” the hosts moved from unintentional symbol exchange to intentional symbol understanding, and from unconsciousness to emergent consciousness. We willingly suspend any disbelief we might have to go on that journey; however, as one neuroscientist explains, we have “very compelling reasons” to believe this is never really going to happen.

Whatever the answer to the first question, in dealing with the second in just this way, Westworld open the door to another ancient philosophical problem. 

Westworld as Metaphor

One of the taglines of Westworld is that it’s about “the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” The first half of that description, which focuses on the hosts, is obvious, and involves all of the issues discussed above. But what about “the future of sin”?

The focus here seems to be on the patrons who frequent the park, typified in the character of Logan. Early in the series, a visitor to Westworld says that the first time he came to the park, he brought his family and went fishing, but the second time, left the family behind and “went straight evil.” William’s future brother-in-law Logan is just such a seasoned veteran of Westworld. He has no misgivings about doing whatever he pleases with the hosts in any given moment. William laments at one point that Logan just wants to kill or sleep with everything he sees – and he has a point. For the wealthy young businessman, the only thing that matters is his own power and pleasure. In fact, his greatest desire is for something at the outer reaches of the park, “the biggest game there is” – namely, all-out war.

This says more about Logan than it does about the park. Walker Percy once remarked (in a line that could’ve easily been written about Westworld) that the modern self is so bored and alienated, and so frustrated by its boredom and alienation, that it “needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war.” The park’s creators profit handsomely from this assumption, isolating the patrons’ longing to dramatically effect something and setting it loose without a cost to the world around them.

But we know that the illusion is an illusion. The patrons’ actions are not, as they suspect, without consequence. They are inflicting deep wounds, and lasting memories of those wounds, in their conscious hosts. More than any abstract discussion about sentience or awareness, this point is made in a more visceral, intuitive way. Time and time again, the camera lingers on the hosts’ eyes, and through these “windows to the soul”, we see worry, hope, sorrow, and wonder. More than mere awareness, primal understanding, or even intentionality, we see a reflection of the mystery of ensoulment and the dignity it accords.

If we set aside the thorny question of computer consciousness and read this symbolically, the show becomes less a crystal ball into the future, and more a mirror of the present. The hosts symbolize the weak, the young, the voiceless, the helpless – anyone on the margins of society that is manipulated, brutalized, and thrown away, often without fully understanding what is being done to them or how to stop it. Lisa Joy, one of the show’s co-creators, confirms this reading when she describes Westworld as being about “what it means to be human, from the outside in…a meditation on consciousness – the blessing and the burden of it.” The blessing for the hosts is that they are coming to know and understand the world around them – and the burden is, as it is for so many people, precisely the same thing.

The patrons can similarly be read as agents of decadence, brute power, and disregard for vulnerable human life. They hold the hosts under their thumbs for their own gratification, which is ultimately all that matters to them. In the park, they treat objects like people, only to treat them like objects again; but the great irony is that the objects, in becoming “others”, re-reveal the impulse the patrons have come to let loose and leave behind – namely, the objectification of the other. In a roundabout way, then, the show is all about this addiction to treating people like objects, which is not the future of sin, but the reality of sin itself. Indulging that addiction in its most graphic forms – to get back to Percy’s line – becomes about much more than escape for the patrons. It even becomes about more than re-constructing one’s self. It becomes about re-constructing the very meaning of existence to conform to the self. “The world out there,” the Man in Black explains to a host in one scene, “the one you’ll never see, was one of plenty…Every need taken care of, except one: Purpose. Meaning.”

Is this all so unthinkable? One of the hosts, remembering a past narrative “loop” as a teacher of Shakespeare, warns another using one of Friar Laurence’s lines from Romeo and Juliet: “These violent delights have violent ends.”

As a show not just about the future but about the present, Westworld seems to deliver exactly the same warning – not just about the swiftness with which we develop human-like objects, but also about the inhumanity with which we objectify each other.

On both counts, the question we’re left with is a hair-raising one: Is the West clanging headlong into Westworld?

Right before becoming hypnotized by a UFO in the middle of the road – a fatal error which puts him halfway through “self-actualizing” hairdresser Peggy Blumquist’s windshield – Rye Gerhardt, the youngest son of a North Dakota crime family, corners a judge in a waffle hut in a fledgling attempt at extortion. Before Gerhardt resorts to shooting everyone in sight, the judge sighs and explains why he’s wasting his time:

“One day, the Devil came to God and said, ‘Let's make a bet between you and me for the soul of a man.’ And from on high they looked down on Job, a devout man, religious. And the Devil said, ‘I can change his mind and make him curse your name.’ And God said, ‘Try and you will only fail.’ So the Devil begins. He kills Job's herds and takes his fields. He plagues him with boils and throws him on the ash heap. But Job's mind remains unchanged. So I ask you, son, if the Devil couldn't change Job's mind, how the hell are you gonna change mine?”

Coen Brothers fans will recognize the extraterrestrial MacGuffin of season two of Fargo; the melancholy barber Ed Crane had a similar close encounter in The Man Who Wasn’t There. It’s the first of many nods to the Coens’ films, from O Brother Where Art Thou (when a mournful rendition of “O Death” plays) to Fargo itself (when a character bangs on top of a static TV in a remote hideout).

But the reference to Job offers a deeper thematic connection to the Coens: existentialism. From Barton Fink toNo Country for Old Men, angst and death are the warp and woof of the Coens’ world, sometimes with a comic flair that few filmmakers can pull off. The episode titles (“The Myth of Sisyphus,” “Fear and Trembling”) and later dialogue (deli worker Noreen Vanderslice carries and quotes Camus) are more recognizable references; but while existentialism is often associated with a Camus or Sartre, it runs through the heart of Western thought, not dividing atheists and theists so much as the dispassionate and passionate. Long before the French systematized being and nothingness, that righteous man of the Bible was tempted to “curse God and die.”

Fargo draws existentialism to tell a bleak story of human life, where “the dizziness of freedom” releases a wildfire of violence, anguish, and horror. If the presence of aliens feels prosaic and unsurprising (“It’s just a flying saucer, Ed – we gotta go!”), it’s because Fargo’s characters are alienated themselves. Whether “good guys”, “bad guys”, or something in-between, their freedom to choose (and as the last episode hints, their freedom to speak) sets them apart from the world around them. “To be human,” Czesław Miłosz put it, “is to completely alien amid the galaxies” – and this could very well be the epigraph of season two of Fargo, which is brimming with misfits and lost souls. They wonder as they wander, asserting themselves in hollow spasms of violence to try and overcome their disconnection from the world.

That disconnection is never fully bridged. Where Job heard God assure him of his sovereignty, the characters of Fargo can only confront the eternal silence of space. Their human predicament – like the UFOs – remains an absurdity, one that just comes and goes without so much as a cursory explanation of why.

But from True Grit to A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers never succumb to nihilism, and Fargo follows suit. In the final episode, we return full circle to the faith of Job in a dialogue between Noreen and the dying wife of state trooper Lou Solverson:

Noreen Vanderslice: “Camus says knowin’ we’re gonna die makes life absurd.”

Betsy Solverson: “Well, I don’t know who that is. But I’m guessing he doesn’t have a 6-year old girl.”

Noreen Vanderslice: “He’s French.”

Betsy Solverson: “I don’t care if he’s from Mars. Nobody with any sense would say something that foolish. We’re put on this earth to do a job. And each of us gets the time we get to do it. And when this life is over and you stand in front of the Lord…Well, you try tellin’ him it was all some Frenchman’s joke.”

Like Marge Gunderson’s final monologue in the original film, Betsy Solverson’s words are a kind of self-critique of the Fargo universe. Noreen hasn’t seen everything the viewers have, so her matter-of-factness seems naïve; still, her insight cuts to the heart of the story in an unexpected way. In the riddle of our finitude and freedom – and our freedom for evil – the light of faith breaks through, and has the power to change everything. Not as a magic wand that denies the world as it is, but as a lived reality that makes the existential picture of man – as Sisyphus, as stranger, as a “saint without God” – complete.
 
 
(Image credit: Archetype Online)

Irrational Man, the 45^th film from the prolific Woody Allen, starts Joaquin Phoenix as Abe Lucas, a philosophy professor in a small town undergoing an “existential crisis.” You suffer from despair,” Emma Stone (who plays one of his students) tells him – and it appears she’s right. The professor has a drinking problem, suffers from “dizziness and anxiety,” and is tormented by a quest to commit a “meaningful act.”

Early reviews suggest that Irrational Man will go the way of Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point: Lucas’ meaningful act will be the perfect murder. The trailer’s lighthearted tone notwithstanding, a crazed Phoenix wandering through a park portends the kind of downward spiral we saw in Blue Jasmine.
 

 
All of this is familiar territory for Woody Allen fans – not only because of the murder plot, but also because of the emphasis on “the question of the meaning of being” that runs throughout his films. There was the neurotic character Mickey (Hannah and Her Sisters) who becomes convinced that he has a brain tumor, only to find out that he has something much worse: meaninglessness. Then there was that scene (one of my personal favorites) in Play It Again Sam, which – with sophisticated New Yorkers, an art museum, romantic attraction, and talk of suicide punctuated with a joke – is as good a minute-long summation of Allen’s movies as you could ever hope to find. In a word, Woody Allen has always been an existentialist.

In fact, Irrational Man takes its title verbatim from a 1958 book by existential philosopher William Barrett. As the Guardian notes, Barrett’s book – which was responsible for introducing existentialism to the English speaking world – “no doubt formed part of Allen’s self-taught intellectual life in the late 50s and early 60s.”

Barrett (following Matthew Arnold) argues that the West is divided into two competing impulses: Hebraism and Hellenism. The first, which we receive from the Jewish religious tradition, is a philosophy of action, moral law, and ontological finitude – in a word, the vital. The second, which we receive from the Greek philosophical tradition, is a philosophy of knowledge, theoretical science, and epistemological certitude – in a word, the rational. The first is earthy: it looks “down” on the concrete and particular, focusing on individual people and what they stake their lives on. The second is ethereal: it looks “up” to the abstract and timeless, focusing on universal ideas and what they demonstrate. The first gives us saints, mystics, and artists; the second gives us philosophers, scientists, and industrialists.

Barrett links the second impulse, Hellenism, with the modern philosophical tradition inaugurated by Descartes in the seventeenth century. With its removal of the spirit from nature, its method of detached observation, and its quest for mathematical certainty and industrial conquest, Cartesianism embedded a new Platonism in the heart of the West, one which severed its last connections to the vital by sloughing off the religious and ethical precepts that structured man’s intellectual life. (Barrett would wrestle with the history of modern philosophy right up until his last book, Death of the Soul.)

On the other hand, Barrett links the first impulse, Hebraism, with existentialism. “The features of Hebraic man,” he writes, “are those which existential philosophy has attempted to exhume and bring to the reflective consciousness of our time.” The philosophical figures that have haunted all of Woody Allen’s works – e.g., Nietzsche in Hannah and Her Sisters and Dostoevsky in Love and Death – are presented as exemplars of the concrete. Though widely divergent in their religious and moral outlooks, the existentialists countered the Enlightenment ideal of reason and science with matters that struck to the core of “the whole man” – matters like alienation, anxiety,freedom, suffering, finitude, and death.

This analysis is striking for three reasons. First, it presents itself as a comprehensive account of the history of ideas. Barrett obliterates the notion that existentialism was a mid-century French fashion or literary movement, and instead situates it at the heart of the West’s struggle to understand itself.

Second, unlike “subtraction” histories that divide the West “laterally” into a bygone age of faith and the present age of unbelief, Barrett’s “vertical” division accounts for the variety of religious beliefs across the philosophical spectrum. It’s true that he sees both Judaism and Christianity (especially the bloodline of Paul, Augustine, and Pascal) as basically existential. “Though strongly colored by Greek and Neo-Platonic influences,” Barrett writes, “Christianity belongs to the Hebraist rather than to the Hellenist side of man’s nature because Christianity bases itself above all on faith and sets the man of faith above the man of reason.” Still, Hellenists and Hebraists each have their figures of faith (Kant v. Kierkegaard) and unbelief (Hume v. Nietzsche), which is still very much the case today.

Third, Barrett doesn’t frame this division as inevitable. From the beginning, he admits that there is an innate disposition in Hebraism toward the rational:

“We have to insist on a noetic content in Hebraism: Biblical man too had his knowledge, though it is not the intellectual knowledge of the Greek. It is not the kind of knowledge that man can heave through reason alone, or perhaps not through reason at all; he has it rather through body and blood, bones and bowels, through trust and anger and confusion and love and fear; through his passionate adhesion in faith to the Being whom he can never intellectually know.”

He also sees an innate disposition in Hellenism toward the vital:

“While existential philosophy is a radical effort to break with this Platonic tradition, yet paradoxically there is an existential aspect to Plato’s thought…we have to see Plato’s rationalism, not as a cool scientific project such as a later century of the European Enlightenment might set for itself, but as a kind of passionately religious doctrine – a theory that promised man salvation from the things he had feared most from the earliest days, from death and time.”

The Hellenistic and Hebraic impulses then forged an “uneasy alliance” in Augustine, later cultivated by the “unbounded rationalism” of medieval thinkers for whom faith was “beyond reason, but never against, or in spite of it.” In short, Christendom gave us peacetime in the great battle of the vital and rational:

“St. Augustine saw faith and reason – the vital and the rational – as coming together in eventual harmony; and in this too he set the pattern of Christian thought for the thousand years of the Middle Ages that were to follow…dogmas were experienced as the vital psychic fluid in which reason itself moved and operated and were thus its secret wellspring and support…The moment of synthesis, when it came in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, produced a civilization perhaps as beautiful as any man has ever forged, but like all mortal beauty a creature of time and insecurity…”

For Barrett, the medieval synthesis was shattered by a battle between intellectualism (the entrenchment of the rational) and voluntarism (a resurgence of the vital), part of a broader disagreement between Thomists and Scotists that helped launch both Protestantism and Rationalism. Protestantism “placed all the weight of its emphasis upon the irrational datum of faith, as against the imposing rational structures of medieval theology”. Rationalism, on the other hand, removed reason from the “psychic fluid” of the vital, leading us to the “bitter end of the century of Enlightenment” where “the limits of human reason had very radically shrunk”.

In the end, Barrett would take the fideism of a Kierkegaard over the rationalism of a Hume any day, and to understand Barrett’s rallying cry is to understand Woody Allen: “We have to establish a working pact between that segment [reason] and the whole of us; but a pact requires compromise, in which both sides concede something, and in this case particularly the rationalism of the Enlightenment will have to recognize that at the very heart of its light there is also a darkness.”

Still, if Barret is right – and I think he is – it goes both ways: a vitalism without reason is as blind as a rationalism without vitality is volatile. The existentialists are right that there’s more to life than rationality; but if pure reason leaves us cold, pure vitality burns us up. Both sides of our being long not just for a compromise but an integration. We long to be both fully vital and fully rational. For that reason I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Catholicism haunts so many of Woody Allen’s films. Following the logic of the Incarnation, Catholic Christianity has always striven to achieve a “both/and” with regard to the rational and suprarational, a kind of hypostatic union of the mind that – so long as we’re committed to defending it – will make us whole again.
 
 
(Image credit: Konbini)

I once saw a startling exhibition in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin titled “Kingship and Sacrifice.” On display were two “bog bodies” – “Clonycavan Man” and “Old Croghan Man” – which, because of the chemical composition of the bogs in Ireland, were preserved in fairly recognizable shape for over 2300 years. Scientists and historians were able to extract a surprising amount of information from these bodies. The Irish Examiner explains:

"Both men had been subjected to gruesome deaths, indicating ritual killings. Old Croghan Man had holes cut in his upper arms through which a rope of hazel withies was threaded in order to restrain him. He was then stabbed and he had his nipples sliced, before finally being cut in half.
 
Clonycavan Man had been disembowelled and struck three times across the head with an axe and once across the body. This brutality is not confined to Irish bog bodies and has been paralleled on human remains from British and continental bogs.
 
Kelly believes that both men were failed kings or failed candidates for kingship who were killed and placed in bogs that formed important tribal boundaries. Cutting the nipples was more than simply a brutal act. Its purpose was to dethrone the king. “Sucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission in ancient Ireland,” says Kelly. “Cutting them would have made him incapable of kingship in this world or the next.”

There was obviously plenty to be disturbed about here. But looking down and seeing the two leathery bodies, their violent end sealed on them forever, was the most disturbing thing of all. This brutal Celtic past was not a hypothetical or even an abstraction – it was ossified flesh in a glass case beneath me.

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill reminds us that this behavior was not confined to the ancient Celts, and that nearly all early peoples sacrificed human beings. At a certain point, human sacrifice becomes “unthinkable,” and is substituted with animal sacrifice – but blood sacrifice remains, and almost always as part of a religious ritual. Why?

Our anachronistic impulse is to see the latter as causing the former. Religion thirsts for victims to appease a fearsome deity, and sacrifice satiates it. What could be clearer? But we “delude ourselves,” Cahill argues, if we reduce the “complex history of religious feeling” to this caricature. In reality, sacrifice and the sacred – linked though they are – are both functions of a deeper cycle of victimization written into the very heart of social order.

Anthropologist and Catholic convert René Girard has spent a lifetime trying to better understand this cycle. According to Girard, ancient human societies were destabilized by mimetic conflicts: two parties who desired the same object would start to imitate each other’s desire until the rivalry erupted into a kind of contagion which threatened to destroy the whole community. Then, a hidden mechanism was triggered which transferred the blame onto a third party, one that was either uniquely strong (e.g., a mighty king) or uniquely feeble (e.g., a decrepit itinerant). The collective sacrifice and sacralization of this figure, enshrined in religion, was a sort of release valve that restored peace and order in the community. Girard termed this third party “the scapegoat” after a rite of atonement in ancient Judaism in which the “transgressions of the Israelites” were transferred to a goat and driven out into the wilderness (Lev. 16: 21-22).

The explanatory power of Girard’s theory is immense: the ritualized sacrifice, collective persecution, and mythical traditions of the ancient world are all best explained by one and the same scapegoat mechanism.

But it doesn’t end there. The theory also clearly has something to do with Christianity and our “Holy Week”. But what exactly?

Anthropologist James Frazer saw in Christianity one more mythical story of death and rebirth. On this reading, Christianity is modeled after scapegoating only insofar as it's modeled after other mythical situations. But for Girard, this misses the obvious point of departure: that Christ is declared an innocent victim. The scapegoat mechanism doesn’t see innocent victims; it doesn’t see victims at all. It only sees that guilty outsider, that “true” threat that has to be eliminated.

But the New Testament, building on the groundwork of the Old, exalts victims of collective violence through a supreme, innocent Victim. There’s an irony in this: the summit of scapegoating violence unexpectedly collapses on itself through itself. As Girard puts it: “God Himself reuses the scapegoat mechanism, at his own expense, in order to subvert it.” (An early metaphor for Christ – that of a mother pelican gnawing at her own breast to feed her starving young – captures this idea perfectly.) The Christian sacrifice is an inversion of all sacrifice, one which tilts the scales back against the community by mirroring its violence back at itself.

The same is true of the Mass. The ancient world was so immersed in ritual violence that the Mass was, in the second century, suspected of being a cannibalistic cult which consumed the flesh and blood of its members. The reality, of course, was far less strange – there was only ordinary bread and wine – but talk of sacrifice, and of consuming of the body and blood of a victim, remained. In the Mass, as in Good Friday, reflections of the outward forms of scapegoating are present, but only to redound upon the head of the community. The whole interior logic had become one of self-sacrifice – and Christ’s love, not man’s violence, had become the means of restoration.

In Ireland – as in so many countries still immersed in human sacrifice – this mighty itinerant, decrepit king, and “Lamb” of God transitioned the people from ritual violence to collective disarmament. Cahill explains:

“Patrick declared that such sacrifices were no longer needed. Christ had died once for all...Yes, the Irish would have said, here is a story that answers our deepest needs – and answers them in a way so good that we could never even have dared dream of it. We can put away our knives and abandon our altars. These are no longer required. The God of the Three Faces has given us his own Son, and we are washed clean in the blood of this lamb. God does not hate us; he loves us. Greater love than this no man has than that he should lay down his life for his friends. That is what God's Word, made flesh, did for us. From now on, we are all sacrifices –but without the shedding of blood. It is our lives, not our deaths, that this God wants.”

The song “There Is a Valley” by Bill Fay captures this historical transformation in a few powerful verses filled with pathos:

There is a valley where the trees stand tall and an icy wind blows
Trees don't speak, but they speak to each other of a people long ago
When the soldiers came and took away the villages one by one
And the fury of that moment they felt, but could only silently look upon
 
There is a mountainside where sheep are grazing with their young
Sheep don't speak, but they speak to each other of a killing long ago
When the people came and sacrificed their children to the sun
And the fury of that moment they felt, but could only silently look upon
 
There is a hill near Jerusalem that wild flowers grow upon
Flowers don't speak, but they speak to each other of a crucifixion
Guess because he said he was the son of God
And the fury of that moment they felt, but could only silently look upon
Every city bar brawl, every fist fight, every bullet from a gun
Is written upon the palms of the Holy One.

This anthropological perspective on Christ's death is indispensable; it gives proper context, for example, to the film The Passion of the Christ. As one journalist notes, the film’s apparent fixation on violence makes perfect sense through a Girardian lens. “The blood and gore of the supreme sacrifice is not a distraction from the Christian message,” he writes. “It is the message itself.”

Even if we accept this, we’re still faced with the difficulty Girard poses in his most recent book: “Why is there so much violence in our midst?” Cahill argues that “cut flowers, Christmas trees, vigil lights, and the Mass may be the last vestiges” of sacrifice. Nothing could be further from the truth. The twentieth century has been called “the bloodiest century in modern history.” A bombardment of headlines about mass beheadings, mass shootings, and mass nuclear threats – not to mention domestic violence, school violence, and gang violence – portend more bloodshed in our own. Why, if the above is all true, is the world still so violent?

Girard argues that even though ritualized violence has largely collapsed, scapegoating continues to play out “at the level of individuals and communities.” Without access to their original structure, these violent impulses (whether they play out physically or not) become more sporadic and random, and occur “in a shameful, furtive, and clandestine manner.” We all see oppressors everywhere (a religion, a political party, a neighbor, a family member), but we don’t see ourselves as being involved in the same nexus in our own way. Scapegoating, paradoxically, is “universal as an objective experience, and exceptional as a subjective experience…It would appear that everyone participates in this phenomenon, except each one of us.” Put another way: “to have a scapegoat is to believe one doesn’t have any.”

To tear up scapegoating up at its roots, we have to confront the full picture Christ’s saving action existentially. In Girard’s view, “knowing the emissary victim requires a certain kind of conversion, namely, that one has to come to see oneself as a persecutor.” We deny this up and down, of course. Why can’t we just apply Jesus’ moral message (a more palatable version, anyway) and stop short of faith? We can, and we do; but still, we feel increasingly helpless to shake the curse of our own habitual violence. For Girard, this is no coincidence.

The 1999 documentary Messiah pairs Handel’s oratorio with the less attractive features of modern life, including its spasmodic brutality. In it, one sequence leads us to the victorious “Hallelujah” by way of some disturbing footage of mob violence (warning: graphic). We’ve all heard this “Hallelujah” song before, usually as capturing some moment of superficial joy in a movie or commercial. But here, it reclaims its original meaning though this Girardian prologue. The bass soloist, who seems to laugh at the insanity of it all, wonders why people rage against each other the way they do. The tenor announces the breaking of this endless cycle of persecutors and victims “like a potter’s vessel.” Then the chorus of Easter emerges again with new power: the humbling of every kingship, the subversion of every sacrifice, and the freeing of every scapegoat – all except for One.
 
 

 
 
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

Philosophers are a maligned group these days. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, suggested that the paradigmatic philosophical question is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (Cute idea, in other words, but let’s not waste our time.)

So when the internet exploded into a full-blown panic over whether a dress was white and gold or black and blue, I know philosophers everywhere slept well that night. No one knew, because everyone was sure—but evenly split. Raw feels set sons against fathers, wives against husbands. “It’s obviously blue and black,” Taylor Swift tweeted. Another actress declared, “If that's not white and gold, the universe is falling apart.”

Exasperated, people turned to neuroscientists for answers, finding little consolation. “A color only exists in your head,” explained one neuroscientist. “There’s such a thing as light. There’s such a thing as energy. There’s no such thing as color.”

So colors aren’t real qualities of things? But then, how does a secondary quality like color appear to me at all? What does it mean for color to exist in my head? Is it in my brain? Or in my consciousness? Is consciousness real? If not, how do we make sense of the feeling of seeing white and gold? Help us, philosopher man!

John Searle seems to have a point: other subjects make sense “only in relation to their philosophical implications.” In fact, there’s a sense in which philosophy is “the only subject.” Color is one of those unique cases where the inevitability of philosophy becomes apparent very quickly.

Vox.com sympathizes with the materialist position and concludes that, where the “mystery” of color and the brain is concerned, “it’s extremely likely that an explanation will be forthcoming.” Psychedelic futurist Jason Silva agrees that color is “not an objective feature of reality,” but argues that color does exist as part of the Cartesian “theater” of consciousness which “sits in our brain.”

Not unexpectedly, the rival positions of reductive materialism and substance dualism quickly come to the fore. For the former, color is a “trick” of the brain; for the latter, it’s the within the purview of incorporeal mind-stuff. For the former, we land in a strange kind of anti-realism about color; for the latter, color is shoved (with all other qualia) to the mind side of the body-mind divide.

But enough about color. The Independent made the interesting point that the “perception is reality” phenomenon of “Dressgate” is bigger than optics:

"You probably had an argument with a friend, colleague or stranger this morning about what colour the dress was. They said one combination, you said another—and then nothing happened.
 
Because there are some things that will never be objective. And since they’re not in the external world, you can never properly argue about them.
 
This is true, of course, of issues bigger than the dress. God, morality, truth: ultimately you can never convince anyone of anything about them, because your language can’t make reference to things that can’t be seen in the world (or so say some philosophers)."

In other words, the phenomenological quandary of Dressgate is a perfect analogy for a broader cultural situation. On ultimate questions—like Does God exist? How should I live? and What is truth?—we are sharply and intractably divided. We see what we see and can’t imagine how anyone could see it otherwise. We point to our picture of the world: “Look. That’s white. And that’s gold. Are you blind?” Another person points to the same world. “No. That’s blue. And that’s black. What’s wrong with you?” Our experience of the way the world is feels so immediate, so incorrigible, precisely because it’s our own.

From a bird’s eye view this certainly looks like relativism, but in reality, there are very few relativists. The great myth of the age is that we’re all happy to sit back and say: “Well, I guess what’s white and gold for you is black and blue for me, and that’s all there is to it.” We’re clearly not. We can’t do this with a stupid dress, much less God! We’re subjectivists, to be sure, but we believe that our “subjectivity is objective,” to quote Love and Death. We wouldn’t believe what we did if we thought it were just one viable path among many. Even when we’re modest (“well, of course I could be wrong”), ultimately we believe we’re more likely right than not.

So it goes with God, the good life, and truth. “All religions lead to the same God” is a truth claim that overrides all the truth claims of all those religions. Quantum indeterminacy would appear to create an atmosphere congenial to ethical relativism—yet, as CS Lewis pointed out, people are always quarreling and point to an external standard of fairness. “There is no objective truth” is self-refuting, because apparently there’s at least one objective truth. We can’t help but state a fact of the matter. The only apparent alternatives are skepticism (doubt) or agnosticism (ignorance). But the pressure to decide catches up to us eventually. We are already adrift on the sea of life; we need to believe and to know our belief is correct. How many people feverishly took to Google to find out what color the dress really is? Or looked up articles about what color really is, feeling a little freaked out by the whole thing?

Here’s the truth: the dress really is black and blue, even though it looks white and gold to me.

There is a fact of the matter about God and morality too. Like Dressgate, there’s real colors behind the divided perceptions. By the law of non-contradiction, not everyone can be right. Thankfully, where the autonomic processing of rods and cones is beyond our control and leaves little to debate, there are fascinating arguments about God and morality that we can tease out with our minds and respond to with our wills. More importantly, dialogue can change our perspective (if not our mind).

From a certain angle, the dress all of a sudden looked blue and black to me. I could see and appreciate the other side, if only for a second. It’s the same with dialogue. Argumentation is not a mere language game, and listening to other perspectives is not an exercise in futility. On the contrary, it’s one of most enriching activities there is (which might explain why, day in and day out, people who disagree fiercely still hang around Strange Notions).

In the end, though, whenever I get out of bed for the day, dialogue recedes into the background, and I have to make the choice for myself. “The search” in the ethical and religious domain is like a Google search for the color of the dress: I set aside what my lazy inclinations tell me and what others have shared and set out to find out what’s really the case. And while the colors of a dress have no bearing on our lives whatsoever, with this search—where the colors are life’s meaning—a change in perspective can change us forever.
 
 
(Image credit: Huffington Post)

Two fantastic articles at Strange Notions in recent weeks have turned from the question of God to the question of the human self. In “Atheism and the Personal Pronoun,” Patrick Schultz explores what he calls a “doorstop” argument for the soul: under materialist atheism, we are mindless machines, but given that every one of us is inescapably a subjective “I,” materialist atheism looks false. In “Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine,” Matthew Newland counters this argument by looking at brain-mind causality, naturalistic “emergence,” and split-brain research, concluding that the conscious mind may very well be a kind of “city” of proto-minds operating in unison. I find points of agreement in both pieces, but would like to reframe the question from a third perspective. (If nothing else, I hope this whole discussion is a reminder that there is room in the Catholic Church for vastly different conclusions on some very fundamental questions.)

There’s an old Irish joke that Richard Dawkins recounts as well as anyone in The God Delusion:

“A journalist, researching for an article on the complex political situation in Northern Ireland, was in a pub in a war-torn area of Belfast. One of his potential informants leaned over his pint of Guinness and suspiciously cross-examined the journalist: “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” the Irishman asked. "Neither," replied the journalist; “I'm an atheist.” The Irishman, not content with this answer, put a further question: “Ah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?”

The absurdity of the joke is that the Irishman is so entrenched in the local standoff that he can’t help but see a hapless outsider as belonging to one side or the other. As far as he’s concerned, there is no third option.

This is a perfect analogy for what has happened with modern philosophy of mind. Instead of Catholics and Protestants, we have rationalists and empiricists; instead of Jesus, our common reference point is Descartes. And instead of unbelievers, we have those who doubt the wisdom of the epistemological turn inaugurated with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”

That turn, like it or not, wields enormous influence on all of Western thought and culture, especially modern philosophy. On the continent, Descartes’ fellow rationalists were all hugely influenced by his epistemology, and though they came to different conclusions, all continued the angelic quest for the foundations of reason. Across the English Channel, the empiricists also put on the mantle of epistemology, but were skeptical about “innate ideas”, seeing in man only a bundle of sense perceptions. Kant, awoken from his “dogmatic slumber” by Hume’s skepticism, attempted to rectify these two traditions with his Critique of Pure Reason, catapulting us further into rarefied spiritual air with the German and British idealists – which, in turn, capitulated us into the logical positivism that has dominated the Anglo-American universities until just recently. Even today, most maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, from Chalmers’ p-zombies to Dennett’s Cartesian theater, are situated in the same contextual snare. Like quicksand, the more we wrestle with Cartesian notions of the self, the deeper he sinks us into the epistemological tradition—and round and round we go.

Schultz and Newland, too, both reference Descartes in their articles. Schultz, echoing Aquinas, notes that the soul is “an animating principle” of the body, but the analogy of emptied suits and the language of a brain “belonging” to a soul both conjure, however slightly, the shadow of Cartesian rationalism.

In reaction to this, Newland proposes to “exorcise” the “ghost from the machine” by exploring Whitehead’s empiricism, positing a bundle of “little minds” that emerges from its “environment, structure, and chemical reactions.” Newland mirrors the arc of empiricism in one other crucial way: the invocation of an Aristotelian “soul” feels redundant. What is this “soul” if not an unnecessary metaphysical tier tacked on to what’s already been broken down and explained? This seems to be the arc of naturalism from Locke to Dennett where our spiritual side is concerned: the effervescent “soul” becomes as wispy and feckless an appendage as a phantom limb. It seems cleaner and more efficient to just cut it off and move on.

These two systems, often in very subtle ways, tend to push us to one side or the other whenever we approach the self, dragging us into an endless tug-of-war over one and the same epistemological rope. Henri Bergson, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, sought a way out through the concept of intuition, arguing that the two traditions were “dupes of the same illusion,” both “equally powerless to reach the inner self.” Jacques Maritain, a young student at the Sorbonne, had been in suicidal despair over the positivist view of life until he sat in on Bergson’s lectures. Eventually, he and Étienne Gilson, another student of Bergson’s, initiated a twentieth century revival in Scholastic metaphysics, abandoning their master’s philosophy but continuing his attack on the Cartesian-Kantian bloodline.

This revolt was not some isolated French fashion. As Charles Taylor shows in his essay "Overcoming Epistemology", recent philosophy has seen a succession of attempts from both analytic and continental thinkers to get out from under the crushing weight of the epistemological tradition. There is the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (carried forward today by Jean-Luc Marion) and the existentialism which sprouted from it; there is the late turn in Wittgenstein’s thought away from logical analysis toward ordinary language; there is neopragmatist Richard Rorty’s hugely influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature published in 1979; and there is Taylor’s own book, Sources of the Self, which looks to the “moral sources”—cultural, historical, and religious as well as philosophical—that inform our modern notions of the self.

What that self finally is for each of these thinkers obviously varies greatly. But Taylor argues that what’s more important is what they have in common:

"We argue the inadequacy of the epistemological construal, and the necessity of a new conception, from what we show to be the indispensable conditions of there being anything like experience or awareness of the world in the first place. Just how to characterize this reality, whose conditions we are defining, can itself be a problem, of course…For all this extremely important shift in the center of gravity of what we take as the starting point, there is a continuity between Kant and Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or Merleau-Ponty. They all start from the intuition that this central phenomenon of experience, or the clearing, is not made intelligible on the epistemological construal, in either its empiricist or rationalist variants."

In other words, we need to step out of the stream of consciousness and out into the broader valley surrounding it. We need to, like the atheist in the Irish joke, proclaim our freedom from the provincial dilemma which creeps up in increasingly subtle ways. It’s not the Cartesian ghost we need to exorcise, but the epistemological séance that conjured it in the first place.

That reorientation of man back toward our being-in-the-world—one that simultaneously resists the perennial impulse toward reductionism—is well underway. We see, to use Bergson’s phrasing, an empiricism “worthy of the name” on the horizon, one which is “obliged to make an absolutely new effort for each object it studies.” Gilson’s formulation—with its eye squarely on the wisdom of classical philosophy—rings true for all of us, and is as good a place as any to start:

“Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good, and who enjoys them as beautiful.”

 
 
(Image credit: Culture CPG)

“We have to make this planet as good as we possibly can and try to leave it a better place than we found it.”

The crowd, gathered to hear Richard Dawkins debate the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, responds to the trite apothegm with unsurprising applause. But off-stage, after the cameras are turned off, the proverbial devil of the details rears his ugly head.

A weary Dawkins—one almost gets the sense that he’d rather not talk to anybody at all—kneels besides a disabled woman in a wheelchair, handing her a signed copy of his book and forcing a smile for the camera. The woman looks ecstatic to meet her hero; Dawkins seems to still be busy pummeling on Pell in some dusty corner of the same restless mind that gave rise to The God Delusion almost a decade ago.

We see this all play out in the 2013 homage to the New Atheism, "The Unbelievers", a sort of promotional travelogue which follows Dawkins and fellow atheist Lawrence Krauss around the globe to—like two real-life Hazel Moteses—spread the gospel of unbelief.

But Dawkins recently admitted something about people who, like this particular fan, suffer from a lifelong disability: it would have been better for them to have never been born.

Contemplating over Twitter what a woman pregnant with a Down Syndrome child ought to do, Dawkins said: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” The controversial and callous remark—certainly not the first from Dawkins—was not so much walked back as walked forward in his formal apology.

Dawkins is not the only New Atheist that has been mired in public controversy in recent years. From Krauss' cringe-worthy debate with a Muslim scholar to Sam Harris' recent comments about Islam on Bill Maher's show, bizarre, off-color public statements from the New Atheists—often made, or at least said to be made, because of an unflinching commitment to naturalism—are resulting in charges of brutality, misogyny, bigotry, and the same kinds of unflattering associations Dawkins had hoped to keep squarely on God’s head.

Of course, no mountain of personal controversies could discredit the claims of these self-styled “brights” or of atheists more generally. To suggest otherwise would be to engage in the very ad hominem attacks of which some of them are all too fond. But these headlines are, in their way, a visible symptom of what seems to be the diminishing traction and declining vitality of the entire New Atheist movement.

To put it in no uncertain terms: the New Atheism, if not already dead, is quickly dying.

This is first evident in a very literal way, in their fallen ranks. The “fifth horsemen” of the New Atheism, Victor Stenger, passed away a few months ago, but the loss of their leading horseman Christopher Hitchens in 2011 immediately comes to mind.

With Hitchens’ death, the New Atheism lost its scintillating, seductive flair. The wittiest, most likeable new atheist may not have converted as many as he would’ve liked, but certainly won the attention and admiration of many in the Christian community. In one of the first articles at Strange Notions, titled “Why I Loved to Listen to Christopher Hitchens,” Father Robert Barron confesses:

“I think I watched every Hitchens debate that I could find on YouTube; I subscribed to Vanity Fair largely because Hitchens was a regular contributor; I read every one of his books...No one wrote quite like Christopher Hitchens. Whether he was describing an uprising on the streets of Athens, or criticizing the formation of young men in the British boarding schools of the 1950s, or defending his support of the Iraq war, or begging people to let go of what he took to be their childish belief in God, Hitchens was unfailingly intelligent, perceptive, funny, sarcastic, and addictively readable.”

If Christopher Hitchens was the most stimulating New Atheist, the erudite Santa-lookalike Daniel Dennett was always the most scholarly. But, like Saint Nick himself, the philosopher has vacated the public eye so suddenly as to cast doubt on his very existence. Dennett has made no new enemies, inflamed no Twitter wars, and penned no blog screeds about the stupidity of faith. Instead—perhaps with an eye toward securing his legacy as a serious philosopher—he’s been sitting down with respected Christian thinker Alvin Plantinga for a civil, serious dialogue about science and religion.

And here, we see the root cause of the New Atheism’s decline: its lack of a sturdy philosophical foundation. Any organization can withstand its bad press if it’s grounded in something human, something wise, something timeless. But all along, scholars have grumbled that—unlike the writings of a Nietzsche, Sartre, or Russell—the New Atheism lacked intellectual depth and was doomed to self-destruction.

And they were right. Krauss looks like a farm team player brought up to revitalize a crumbling organization, trying (and failing) to recreate Hitch’s signature rhetorical jukes. Meanwhile, Dawkins is resorting to odd trick plays which never get off the ground. (His bizarre mutations of the mind art show comes to mind.) Nothing is meshing the way it used to, and the overcompensation on the part of the remaining leaders—and pushback from their rank and file—is telling.

Meanwhile, less vociferous unbelievers are gladly rushing in to fill that profitable cultural space. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, has rightly been accused of bungling the history of the Church with relation to science in his new "Cosmos" series—but he’s also quick to admit that he doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to God. “The only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist,” Tyson says in a Big Think interview. “What is my stance on religion, or spirituality, or God? I would say if I’d find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic...Atheists I know who proudly wear the badge are active atheists. They’re like in-your-face atheists, and they want to change policies, and they’re having debates. I don’t have the time, the interest, the energy to do any of that. I’m a scientist.”

Then there is Thomas Nagel, a renowned philosopher who—going beyond Tyson—is an avowed atheist. Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False drove fellow atheists up the wall, not only for its defection from the creed of naturalism, but for its alignment with the arguments of Alvin Plantinga—the same Christian enemy who has been sitting down with Dennett for tea.

Lastly, there’s physicist and atheist Sean Carroll who—going even beyond Nagel—is committed to the materialist conception of nature. Carroll penned an insightful piece recently titled “Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things About Philosophy.” While men like Dawkins, Krauss, and Stephen Hawking routinely dismiss philosophy as obfuscating gibberish that only serves to embolden the theologians, Carroll acknowledges that philosophy adds quite a lot to the modern scientific project. “The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works,” Carroll writes. “Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway...It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest.”

This, happily, is the new tenor of the conversation. The apparently intramural rivalry between two fundamentalist spins on the world looks increasingly at odds with the problems and possibilities an open-minded majority face on the ground, and warriors from each side are deigning to say to the other, like Pound to Whitman:

I have detested you long enough...
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.

That’s not to say that passionate disagreement has ended—it hasn’t, and never will. But the tone and style of "The Unbelievers" seems a decade too late; the moment has passed. As celebrities like Bill Pullman and Cameron Diaz offer public support for this un-dynamic duo, and Krauss proudly holds up a tweet from Miley Cyrus with his picture and the quotation “forget Jesus,” the only real message that gets across is that intellectual fashions, like all fashions, come and go.

And as things continue to change where philosophical substance is concerned, the New Atheists and their readers will either change too, or fade away, raging against the dying of the brights.
 
 
(Image credit: YouTube)

In his dark 1977 novel Lancelot, novelist Walker Percy brings us into the walls of a mental institution to hear a man named Lancelot tell his life story, a tale of empty commercialism, salacious self-destruction, and one murderous act of vengeance. Now confined by the four walls of an asylum, he confides in his old friend, a priest and psychiatrist, about the “quest” that led him there and the truth of the world outside:

“In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil. You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God…but suppose you could show me one ‘sin,’ one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt…‘evil’ is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.”

Like Chekov’s “Ward No. 6”, Percy’s story is meant to invert our normal understandings of the patient and the doctor, the madman and the well-adjusted citizen. Lancelot—despite evoking the reader’s just suspicion—hits a nerve with his diagnosis of modern America, especially in his central question: is there such a thing as an evil act, pure and simple? One that evades sociological or biological reduction? In short: does sin exist?

I thought about Lancelot as I started watching Guillermo del Toro ("Pan’s Labyrinth", "The Devil’s Backbone") and Carlton Cuse’s new vampire series "The Strain". (Interestingly enough, a character is seen reading Percy’s Lancelot in Cuse’s hit series "Lost".) The series is a new spin on vampirism at least insofar as it brings a sci-fi thriller element, complete with a panicky CDC, high-profile quarantines, and revolting autopsies. The first episode plays most like "The Andromeda Strain" than "Dracula"...
 

 
...that is, until we actually meet the creature behind all the mayhem. Soon it becomes abundantly clear that this “strain” is a tad worse than a viral outbreak, as victims begin losing their genitals, shooting elongated killer tongues out of their mouth, and feasting on the blood of their family members. Clearly, this is not Ebola—it’s something supernatural, a kind of force…something truly evil.

The lead character, the drowsy epidemiologist Ephraim Goodweather, eventually agrees to hear out an elderly Armenian man who insists that he knows what this is all about and how to stop it:

“This scourge we are now witnessing has existed for millennia. It is a corruption of both flesh and spirit. It ravages what is human in its victim and instills the raging thirst. That is his goal: to destroy humanity…I suppose you might call him patient zero. He spreads his virus through the parasites in his blood, driven by his horrible will...The Master excels at manipulation and disinformation, which is why they created a scapegoat…Take away the cape, the fangs, the accent. He’s a predator, a leech, a blemish.”

Abraham then describes seeing this “devil,” this “disease” with “an intelligence,” with his own eyes in one of the extermination camps during World War II. Late at night, Abraham watches the “strigoi”—which has that supernatural-yet-natural look and feel of del Toro’s creations—sneak into their cabin to feast. The next morning, Abraham tells his brother Jacob, who dismissed it as a nightmare. “Stop looking for monsters,” Jacob snaps. “We’re already surrounded by them.”

In this key scene, the gross-out, occasionally ridiculous tenor of The Strain transcends itself, and we can begin to read “the strain” as a metaphor for human evil—for sin.

First, there is the biological nature of the strain. It’s a purely negative force—a leeching privation of the good—that passes from person to person like an infection. Father Robert Barron, in his review of "World War Z<", explains the connection:

“Original sin is passed on from generation to generation, ‘propagatione et non imitatione’ (by propagation and not by imitation)…sin is not so much a bad habit that we pick up by watching other people behave, rather, it is like a disease that we inherit or a contagion that we catch…addressed only through the intervention of some medicine or antidote that comes from the outside.”

Also, there is the origin of the strain. It’s fitting that a mysterious Jewish character (Abraham, of all names) is the one to explain this origin, as Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus read like an epidemiological traceback of sin. (The mention of a “scapegoat” is striking too, given the role the scapegoat played in ancient Jewish rites of atonement.) Moreover, Abraham’s description of “the Master”—a manipulator and deceiver driven by an inflated will to infect and destroy humanity—rings a bell or two.

Lastly, there is the effect of the strain on its hosts. Again, Father Barron’s review of "World War Z" is fitting:

“If sin were just a bad habit, then it wouldn’t reach very deeply into the structure of the self; but were it more like a contagion, it would insinuate itself into all the interrelated systems that make up the person…sin causes a falling-apart of the self, a disintegration of mind, will, emotions, and the body, so that the sinner consistently operates at cross-purposes to himself.”

Likewise, the strain causes a corruption of both “flesh and spirit” in its hosts: their internal organs shrivel up; their eyes become cold and lizard-like; their rational mind vanishes; their will is squelched, driving them only to use and discard their next victim; and most strikingly, they are driven to hurt the ones they love first.

This corruption of love is an especially horrifying—and apparently central—element of the story, one that perhaps calls sin to mind the most. The first recited words of the first episode touch on the subject:

“Hunger is the most important thing we know, the first lesson we learn. But hunger can be easily quieted down, easily satiated. There is another force, a different type of hunger, an unquenchable thirst that cannot be extinguished. Its very existence is what defines us, what makes us human. That force is love.”

If love is what makes us most human, than the corruption of love by the strain is what makes us most inhuman. To the Master’s scheming assistant, Thomas Eichorst, it’s the other way around—love corrupts, and the strain liberates. “What I find fascinating is how love is considered a gift, a blessing,” he says as he tortures one of his victims, “with no acceptance to the fact that it also binds, chokes, and strangles.”

With all of this in mind, it’s no surprise to learn that Carlton Cuse and Guillermo del Toro are both Catholic. In fact, the explicit Catholic references in the show are numerous: holy water, a rosary, a Roman collar, a Mary candle, and the sign of the Cross are all seen or mentioned, most often as a kind of weaponry vis-à-vis the strain.

In an interview with Busted Halo, Cuse confesses that his Catholic faith is “very important” to him, describing the interaction of faith and storytelling in this way:

“I think religion becomes most meaningful in people’s lives when it’s told in the form of stories where people can connect…in a lot of ways the Bible is a great story, and you find the meaning underneath that, but I think its relevance is not just because of the embedded meaning, it’s also because the stories are so good.”

Del Toro also discussed his own religious background in the Wall Street Journal:

“My basic substance is Catholic…It was very much intertwined with the way I wrote the book. It is an incredibly powerful way of mythologizing about good and evil…One of my favorite books, and one of the most mysterious books in the Bible, is the Book of Job. I thought it would be great for the character of [Ephraim Goodweather] to be sort of the chosen one, but to be taken apart by destiny, point by point, until he finds the voice of God in ways that are very subtle.”

Of course, the attitude toward sin reflected in "The Strain" has its critics. On one reading held by many atheists today, malevolent acts are a holdover from millennia of animal ancestry; these are not “evil” so much as “defective” behaviors that, countered with reason, science, and education, will sizzle and shrivel under the hot light of progress like del Toro’s vampires. Like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, they proclaim that there can be no redemption from sin, because there was never any sin to begin with.

But has history borne this out? In the mid-nineteenth century, Dostoevsky was already countering this dream of an Enlightenment “utopia” with his “Underground Man” who, as William Barrett explains:

“…Might die of boredom, or out of the violent need to escape this boredom start sticking pins in his neighbor – for no reason at all, just to assert his freedom. If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.”

Dostoevsky, it turns out, was something of a prophet. Just when we hoped to see the dawn of universal brotherhood, we saw instead a torrent of bloodshed and mass murder unparalleled in recorded history. In the horror of World War II, the raging waters of the irrational rose up once again; and through the evolutionary ethos of Nazism, Abraham met the Master face to face. Man, one Roman playwright wrote, is man’s wolf—and nowhere is this more evident than in the twentieth century.

Today, our digital age only magnifies the increasingly random horrors at home and abroad. Love, peace, “coexist!”—these are the catchphrases we hear (and say) over and over. But is there anything in such short supply? As anthropologist René Girard puts it in his new book: “Why is there so much violence in our midst? No question is more debated today. And none produces more disappointing answers.”

The “human strain” is self-evident down through the centuries. But the question remains: is it sin? The term seems to presuppose an objective moral order grounded by God. But as Lancelot saw it, the quest for sin has precious little to do with these things. Instead, it’s about observing the world as it is, openly and without prejudice, to see whether pure, irreducible evil—whatever you want to call it—is a fiction. Unfortunately, we don’t have to travel very far in this quest. We don’t even have to take a single step.

Many will be tempted to write off "The Strain" as a mindless entertainment. But I think it does something more: it paints a picture of the evil that really and truly infects the world, the kind that—once exposed within—impels its host to don sackcloth and ashes, and whisper with that underground dweller, to no one in particular: “I am a sick man…I am a wicked man…”
 

 
 
(Image credit: Movie Pilot)