Optimistic Nihilism

by David Landers

  I don’t think there’s anything funny about rape, but that’s a funny passage. It’s funny because the joke isn’t about rape. The joke is about people who have become so delirious with optimism, that they—on some level—excuse rape and other misfortunes, or have at least become unable to fully acknowledge them for the horrors that they really are. Some people can’t completely appreciate the terrors of the world because they have indeed convinced themselves that this is the best of all possible realities. Misfortune, and even terror, must have a place. God wouldn’t have it otherwise.

  Before Candide, constructs such as hope and optimism had had some sort of diplomatic immunity; it would have been blasphemous to make fun of those. Sure, I had seen hilarious and grotesque irreverence before, such as Eddie Murphy in Delirious, but this was different. Eddie Murphy joked about Michael Jackson, homosexuality, and bitches, but I had never seen anyone make fun of optimism before!

  But once Voltaire made me laugh at it, a seal broke; my vision cleared significantly and I felt liberated. Of course, it couldn’t possibly always be true that “Everything happens for a reason,” despite how assuring it sounds and how everyone nods and smiles when we make such claims. Perhaps this kind of reflexive optimism is a mass hysteria. And perhaps it can even be insensitive and toxic.

  My spankings growing up had never felt as if they were for the best, despite how my dad and the Bible always asserted they were. I had always realized they were technically legal, but the bottom line is that they were attacks, assaults, by none other than the adult who was supposed to be the most important person in my life, the person who was supposed to protect me from harm. With post-Candide vision, I could finally stop trying to rationalize how my whuppin’s must have brought out some good in me. On the contrary, it became easy to see that the most likely experiences they brought about were anger, depression, and estrangement from my father—and later, drug abuse and panic disorder that would almost kill me.

  And of course it wasn’t difficult to find much more intense suffering in the world than mine. Not even considering the glaring examples of genocide and famine and such, it seemed likely that for many people—perhaps even the majority of people who have ever lived on Earth—life is (or was) very hard, much harder than mine. It really can be unfair, and for many, full of relentless suffering. For some people at some times, assurances like “Think positive!” or “You can do anything, if you believe!” are unrealistic and therefore potentially discouraging or even offensive. As I thought about it carefully, I realized that encouragements like that had often nagged me, despite having been inspirational on occasion. Finally, having met someone else who found such imperatives vacuous (at best), I didn’t have to feel so dark about feeling that way. And who would’ve guessed: My companion was some French dude from centuries ago who probably wore one of those ridiculous white wigs with all the curls and whatnot.

  I had always thought my Candide experience was somehow unusual, that it was an odd catalyst for any sort of epiphany. At one point while writing my book I was even wondering if I was being silly to include this part of my story. Damnedest thing, though, in 2012, over 20 years after I read Voltaire’s book the first time, I read Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great. Christopher didn’t think my experience was unusual at all:

  Their [Pierre Bayle’s and Voltaire’s] method certainly tended to be irreverent and satirical, and no reader clinging to uncritical faith could come away from their works without having that faith severely shaken. These same works were the best-sellers of their time, and made it impossible for the newly literate classes to go on believing in things like the literal truth of the biblical stories.2

  Not only must the literal truth of the biblical stories become suspect, but also the literal truth of the inspirational passages between them. For example, 1 Corinthians 10:13 asserts that “God … will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able … to endure.” Verses like that simply don’t seem to apply to some of the people I’ve met more recently while working as a psychologist, like those who have had auditory hallucinations of the voice of God himself ordering them to do evil things. Clearly, some people are tempted beyond what they can endure, beyond what is reasonable and fair.

  Heck, some people aren’t even graced with temptation! For an obscure but illustrative example, there really is a condition called REM sleep behavior disorder in which people tend to act out their dreams, some of which, of course, are violent. Because of this, some people with the condition have seriously assaulted or even killed their loved ones without even being aware of what they were doing. This particular phenomenon is rare, but that’s not comforting to the victims, as obscurity rarely is. And as you consider other rare but similar phenomena they begin to accumulate so that rare becomes occasional. So occasional that most of our United States have an insanity defense so that one can defend herself by arguing that her mental state (or total lack thereof) prevented her from appreciating that what she did was wrong. Again, it’s not common, but people do win these at times—and they should—because sometimes people truly know not what they do. It seems, then, that the state law of Arkansas can be more realistic and reasonable than the Holy Bible!

  Now, you’re not gonna win an insanity defense if your primary mental illness is drug addiction, kleptomania, or pedophilia. However, at least in the realm of drug addiction, I have to entertain that some of those folks have also been tempted more than they can endure. Personally, I have known an inordinate number of people who have died from using drugs—good, fun, charming, successful, beautiful people even. Similarly, I’ve met quite a few people who were unable to resist the temptation to commit suicide, some of them just children. I just find it hard to entertain that all of these people are in hell as a result. Once you start to appreciate what the real world is like, Candide also starts to seem a lot more realistic and reasonable than the Holy Bible.

  Well, despite all my criticism of and frustration with the Bible, I’m actually not discouraging reading it. Even today, my own book complete, I truly believe that the Bible is beautiful and wonderful in places. I just don’t believe anymore that it’s holy or divinely inspired, and I haven’t since I was a kid. Lots of things can be inspirational despite being secular, from the Tao Te Ching to Shakespeare to Calvin and Hobbes.

  As far as I know, no one in my immediate family had ever graduated from college. My maternal grandfather had at least attended some, at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, but apparently didn’t graduate; family lore has it that he got distracted by his promising football career or flying fighter planes in World War II. Besides him, my dad sometimes alluded to some leaf on our family tree, way out on a low branch somewhere, who had been a physics professor. But that was it. My own father didn’t even finish high school. So, I was completely clueless about how college worked and just followed my friends on their own adventures, the first stop being Richland Junior College in Dallas, which was only about ten-minute’s drive from home. That really worked well for me, affording a chance to get a clue while still living at home.

  My dad had always viewed my potential college experience with some trepidation, for college was where many persons have their Christian faith challenged, with all the freethinking and pot and pussy and whatnot. And, frankly, he was right. At least about the freethinking and the pot; I was never much of a player.

  But yes, my very first semester, in the wake of the Voltaire experience in high school, I took an introductory philosophy course at Richland that smote me about as thoroughly as the French man’s little book. I’ll never forget that class or the instructor; if I had been a girl or gay, he would have been my first professorial crush.

  We learned about Plato’s forms, Kant’s categorical imperative, and Berkeley’s idealism. But perhaps most compelling was Descartes’s proclamation, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). Do you know where the statement came from? Descartes had been on a bit of a mission to distill undeniable truths, facts that simply could not be
doubted. And that’s the only one that endured. “I think, therefore I am.” I am having thoughts, therefore I must be existing, in some capacity. I might be asleep or dreaming—shit, I might even be dead—but whatever I is, I exists at this moment. A verb can’t exist without a subject!

  The accompanying message was that we can’t really know anything beyond cogito ergo sum. Everything else—everyone else—could be figments of my imagination, and may not even exist at all. But I know, at the very least, that I am existing, that I am. This is the only notion of which I cannot be skeptical. Everything else beyond this warrants skepticism.

  The idea resonated profoundly with me and would serve as the perfect foundation for my forthcoming college career. Perhaps all undergrads should begin their educations with an Intro to Philosophy course as such, the first lesson of all being to doubt everything you’ve been told to date, and everything you’re gonna be taught from here on out—including all this crap about Descartes in this class!

  As extreme as it all sounds, it is a guiding principle behind both our legal system and science. If you are going to make a claim that someone has committed a crime against you, society will entertain your claim, but the burden of proof to support it lies on the prosecution. We’re not just gonna lock someone up because you or the state says so. Science works similarly. Again, society will entertain your claim, whatever it is, but the burden of proof lies on you to produce the data to support it. Otherwise, it’s just a claim.

  The implications for religion are so glaring that it’s difficult for me to decide how to transition to the next topic. Perhaps I should clarify that despite being so moved I wasn’t done with Jesus yet. I had been raised in a home that couldn’t care less about skepticism and science, a home that preached “You shall not force a test on the Lord your God,” that the essence of faith is “the conviction of things not seen.”3 And I still had faith while in community college. Good ol’ fashioned Christian faith. Descartes made the most tremendous amount of sense to me, but I was able to keep logic and faith separated from one another, at least for the time being.

  Only two or three semesters after Intro to Philosophy starring Rene Descartes, I took a very general, relatively unstructured psychology course in which we were assigned to read a book called The 3-Pound Universe. Not coincidentally, I had already perused it in the library on my own time, but was now thrilled to be obliged to buy it and read some more. It was a great book for me, a smorgasbord of provocative topics in psychology with a fairly strong emphasis on altered states of consciousness, from dreaming to schizophrenia and beyond. It was particularly engaging material for someone who had just completed his own adventures in LSD and was ready to start studying to become a legitimate psychologist.

  One passage that caught my attention real good comes from interviews with John Lilly. He’s the guy who invented sensory deprivation tanks where you float in body-temperature salt water in total darkness. According to the book, Lilly invented these contraptions in an effort to better understand the experience of dolphins, which he had been studying for his career. Today, people use them to meditate and such. Lilly’s adventures apparently inspired two Hollywood movies: his dolphin work, The Day of the Dolphin (1973), and his LSD trips in isolation tanks, Altered States (1980). Yes, I’ve seen and recommend the latter, but don’t know much about the former.

  In any event, part of the interview goes as follows:

  “You know,” [Lilly] adds, “[mathematician Kurt] Gödel’s theorem, translated, says that a computer of a given size can model only a smaller computer. It cannot model itself. If it modeled a computer of its own size and complexity, it would fill it entirely and it couldn’t do anything.”

  “So the brain can never understand the brain?” we ask.

  “That’s right.”4

  I honestly don’t know if Gödel’s (or anyone else’s) theorem translates as such, but the proposition that the brain simply does not have the capacity to ultimately understand itself seems plausible, given the circularity. And I actually found the notion reassuring, particularly from a spiritual perspective (at least initially). If consciousness cannot be fully understood, that is, explicitly reduced to biology, chemistry, and physics, the possibility remains that there is something more to it, that perhaps there is a “soul,” or something akin to one, that endures when the body dies. Perhaps other non-Lillian scientists scoff at the notion of eternal life simply because it’s beyond the domain of human science. But maybe there’s nothing mysterious about the human soul at all: It’s just as real as the stomach and liver and everything else but simply outside the realm of understanding because it’s the thing trying to do the understanding! Perhaps aliens with more complicated brains would laugh at us for being so confused and might see our puzzlement over the soul amusing. Suddenly with this type of thinking, it seems that science and religion are finally standing on some of the same ground. My slippery slope just became a little less slippery and sloped. I could cling a little longer.

  This optimism was bolstered in a very well-written chapter later in the book, “Border Stations: The Near-Death Experience.” The authors, Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi, do a great job of presenting data and arguments both supporting and challenging the near-death experience (NDE), with its “tunnel, brilliant light, out-of-body-travel, [and] panoramic life flashbacks,” followed by “un-shakeable belief in postmortem survival.” Being one who cherished the notion of postmortem survival, it was relatively easy for me to pay attention to the pro-NDE arguments and rush past those from the naysayers. As objective and reassuring as ever, Judith and Dick close with this: “The NDE, if it is genuine, raises questions to which there are no answers … Sorry, but we have to leave this chapter without an answer.”

  Unfortunately, however, I just couldn’t let Lilly, Gödel, and the incomprehensible go. These are things that I liked to contemplate, and eventually too much contemplation spoiled the truce I had established between science and religion. That is, for the first time in my life I began to truly appreciate the convenience of spirituality.

  I had previously learned in my Intro to Psychology class that human brains simply do not like ambiguity. Although everyone seems to agree that this is the case, no one seems to know why. With amusing circularity, the explanations that I’ve heard seem far-fetched, if not downright silly—yes, the explanations themselves are more evidence supporting the notion, in that they all feel like desperate, unsatisfying attempts to answer the question!

  It soon became clear that one way to solve many of the restless, nagging paradoxes and incomprehensibilities is to throw God into the mix. Things like the beginning of time, the nature of space before the Big Bang, and the current edge of the universe—all of these mysteries are suddenly tidied up nicely when we clump them into one big mystery, an incomprehensible God who specifically has a commandment that we should not question or test him.

  Since it’s not necessary to go as far as the edge of the universe to be perplexed, everyone can benefit from the salve of gods. In a passage I like to read over and over, Ernest Becker asserted that the mere act of existing can be intrinsically baffling, if not frightening:

  William James and … [Rudolf] Otto talked about the terror of the world, the feeling of overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation—the miracle of it, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all.5

  I don’t know a lick of Latin, but that term resonates well. And so does “overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear … of the fact that there are things at all.”

  God can fix these discomforts of contemplation, and others as well—including the most popular, perplexing, and unacceptable problem of all: mortality.

  Indeed, perhaps the most inconceivable notion for me to comprehend is that of me no longer existing! I’m not even sure if I can do it, partially because the act of trying to do so involves the very activity that I’m trying to imagine not happening (that is, I’m trying to think of not
thinking, analogous to the old “Don’t think of a white elephant” imperative). Eternal life, whether in Heaven or Hell, solves this problem as well. (Of course, most of us are biased towards the Heaven alternative.)

  In these ways, God serves as bookends for the incomprehensibilities, corks for the holes of perplexity. All we have to do is have faith, and suddenly the paradoxes of our feeble minds are no longer paradoxes. God started time, and God will end it. Trees and dolphins and geodes are here because God put them here. Dying is not really dying; it’s more like going to sleep, only much, much better.

  Comfort ensues.

  Not for me, though. I was officially beginning to doubt my Christian affiliation at this point. Not that I was legitimately considering any other formal religion any more seriously. Maybe Buddhism, but I never saw it as much of a religion anyway.

  Once I got my freshman credits under my belt, stopped using drugs (except for alcohol and pot), and got a clue about how college worked, I followed the exodus of friends who had left Dallas the year before for The University of Texas at Austin. I majored in psychology, of course. That was all I had ever considered for a major, except for a brief stint fantasizing about photography. I guess I entertained philosophy as well, but everyone had been discouraging me with the obvious, that there’s not much a job market for philosophers.

  Choosing a minor was much more difficult. Professors advised me to toughen up my transcript by taking more biology and math courses and such. However, I was neurotic as hell about putting my coveted GPA at risk. So, still eager for more philosophy, I took a class on ethics, along with an elective from the same department called Classical Mythology. The mythology professor was one of the best I had ever had, so I went with Classical Civilization as a minor, partially motivated by the prospect of taking more classes with him. That was smooth sailing. My GPA would thank me.