Optimistic Nihilism

by David Landers

  But enduring love is clearly not the norm. It seems that most people—assuming they can find a mate at all—have to settle for something less. For many, compatibility is the most reasonable longterm expectation, which may not even include much legitimate affection at all. At worst, I see a lot of toxic incompatibility that has never had any business being a relationship in the first place. In the grandest scheme of things, I feel very confident to speculate that if we consider all of the humans who have ever existed on Earth since the beginning of time, the vast majority have died without having had the opportunity to fully indulge true love. In contrast, the pangs of romantic love are ubiquitous. Certainly, the vast majority of humans who have ever existed have experienced the “irrational coup de foudre” of romantic love.

  There seems to be some controversy over divorce statistics, but the rate really has been about half in recent decades.8 And of course, many of those who stay together probably shouldn’t, but they’re just trapped for various reasons, such as family or cultural pressures (both explicit and implicit), financial security, loneliness, fear, or just plain-old defensiveness (for example, not wanting to admit they’ve been wrong all along). Now, divorce statistics wouldn’t be so interesting if we knew that the divorcing couples didn’t really feel in love when they married. But we can’t say that’s the case. Instead, it’s routine for couples—even those who we all knew were truly in love—to ultimately divorce. And it doesn’t just happen in trailer parks: It happens to the successful, talented, intellectually endowed, Oscar winners, and even royalty.

  We’ve all been at some magnificent wedding that was like a scene from a Hollywood movie, with beautiful flowers, a string orchestra, and some bridesmaid we didn’t know who was practically bawling the whole time. We were dazzled by the way the couple stared at each other and recited their own vows; they were nervous and awkward at times but gave off an undeniable aura that smote everyone in its wake. And the reception was brilliant: We drank expensive champagne in real glasses, shared chummy cigars, and there were adorable children dancing around in little tuxedos. It was one of those rare occasions we actually enjoyed chatting with strangers because magic was in the air. The whole time we were fantasizing that one day we’ll be having a wedding like this of our own, because this is the real deal, and that’s all that really matters in life. A wedding like this would fix everything.

  Shockingly—but uncannily routine—things die down and a few years later that couple divorces, and sometimes quite nastily. Harsh critics will argue that they were never really in love—that’s why it failed! But I don’t buy it, and I suspect that many readers won’t buy it, either. I’m not ready to disregard those feelings of passion as fake, partially because I’ve been victimized, too.

  I’ve met Her and become so overwhelmed that I can’t sleep, but that’s okay, because I’m giddy and smiling all night long. I can’t focus the next day at work because I can’t stop thinking about her, but that’s okay, too, because the fantasies I’m having are much more engaging than my stupid job. When I start to realize she might be having some of the same experiences, my excitement increases without bound, and I start to have hopes about this being It and me becoming whole. We make it to bed soon, but not before the tension gets right to where it needs to be. By that time, I’m so consumed with excitement there is no way to stop until every piece of her flesh has been in my mouth, the overall experience being the perfect balance of affectionate and dirty. Later, I write her poetry—lengthy, heartfelt stuff baring my soul—and she loves it! It’s clear by this time that this is indeed It, as we spend an inordinate amount of time staring at each other’s faces while holding hands and not talking. At other times, we’re loud and reckless and the whole entire universe can fuck off, because we’re the only two really in it.

  Oops! Turns out, I was wrong. We both were. It didn’t work. Over time, things happened and our perspectives changed. The fantastic feelings we had were replaced by much less desirable ones, such as regret, embarrassment, humiliation, and even anger. And here’s the most hilarious part: I’ve been through this whole shenanigan more than once! And I know many of you have, too. Praise Jesus for birth control. I’m sure I’d have at least one illegitimate child by now if it weren’t for it—and by illegitimate I mean conjured by a devilishly deceptive passion, an almost evil spell that tricked me as badly as I’ve ever been tricked before.

  Of course, if I had made a kid, I’m absolutely positive that I would love him or her, well beyond anything else in the world, including myself. I’m proud to argue that I’m very feminine in this regard. All of those annoying assertions you parents make that us childless adults can’t understand what it’s like to have a child? I agree. The parent-child bond should be the greatest bond in nature, not because Jesus is real, but because evolution needs us to care for our kids even more than our spouses—perhaps even more than ourselves at times. I don’t know what that bond feels like. I can’t imagine; you’re right.

  Again, it’s important to be perfectly clear: By no means am I trying to suggest that our feelings towards our romantic partners are fake, not real. They are real, just as real as the physical pain from a broken collarbone. That’s the point: If the experience wasn’t convincing then it wouldn’t work! Broken bone pain has to demand a certain behavior—in that case, utter immobility of the broken part—or you could die. Similarly, we need an extraordinarily powerful motivation to drive us to merge with another, to forfeit any sense of privacy we typically have—or our genes could die with us. We have to trust our mate, not feel vulnerable anymore, want them—need them—so badly that we must rub our naked bodies against them as hard as we can. We can’t be shy about their slobber and other juices—indeed, we’re more likely to complete a successful mating act the more we’re willing to embrace all that good stuff. Along the way and for some time thereafter, we have to be so moved by the whole experience that we’re not interested in anyone else. In fact, we’re so devoted to our mate (and our offspring) that risking our lives for them would come naturally, without hesitation.

  Love must be more special than physical pain because it faces a greater challenge: transcendence. Pain and hunger and such are relatively simple experiences in that the neurons that mediate them connect the stimulus site in question (broken shoulder; empty stomach) directly to the brain parts that are responsible to tend to them. However, love and other interpersonal experiences, such as shame and camaraderie, are more complex, abstract, as they need to promote behavior that transcends the individual, that makes acting on behalf of or in reference to others rewarding (or aversive, in the case of shame). Perhaps those warm feelings of spirituality that we experience when we do a good deed or connect with someone else—especially when we fall in love—is what natural selection has devised to motivate such interpersonal, that is, self-transcendent, behaviors.

  Recall our discussions from previous chapters in which scientists have shown there are spiritual mechanisms in our brains that can be stimulated directly by drugs, neurosurgery, seizures, or even g-force. Those brain areas must be there for a reason; they didn’t evolve for LSD parties. Perhaps they evolved along with our consciousness to afford a feeling of profundity, irrationality, so that we’ll do some crazy things we need to in order to promote our genes—crazy things like behaving altruistically, even risking our lives for others at times, or wrapping our legs around someone so they can literally put their disgusting body parts inside us.9

  Maybe that’s the only real difference between us and the weaverbird. We both have the instinct to mate, but we humans have this self-consciousness and rationality that are potential obstacles. Where the weaverbird doesn’t contemplate its behavior, we have to transcend ourselves and our fears, one of which is admitting that we are also beasts. We need to feel bigger than our animal natures, à la Ernest Becker, so we glorify our mating behavior as something much more meaningful and dignified than it necessarily is. We buy flowers and diamonds and say beautiful things about how lov
e conquers all, but really its goal is just to make babies. Maybe there’s nothing really magical about it. Maybe it is just fucking, clouded by our wild imagination and insatiable need to distance ourselves from our instincts, so that we can continue to feel spiritual—and immortal.

  Transcendent when it’s working, love is devastating when it’s betrayed. News stories (and real statistics) show us that one of the largest groups of murder victims in this country is lovers and ex-lovers. Every time I see one of these accounts, I wonder to what degree that couple also thought they were in love. I think about their wedding and wonder if some of the guests there had been overwhelmed with spiritual feelings, dabbing away tears with fancy little monogrammed napkins. I wonder if the murderer himself had been overwhelmed with romantic feelings at some point. His girl raised his expectations to places where they had never been before. She was going to save him, and all of his sufferings in the past would finally be forgotten because the future would obviously be so different. Love is what he had been living for all this time, and he felt so lucky to be one of the few who finally found it. This was the kind of love that proves there’s magic in the cosmos, that there is someone (or something) watching over us, and that some things in the universe are truly eternal.

  If love was truly a cosmic, spiritual phenomenon, I don’t think it would treat us like this. It wouldn’t be associated with so much deprivation, deception, and destruction. Of course, not all love ends in murder. But loneliness, infidelity, and temptation are norms. It’s all very mysterious, and frustrating, when conceptualized as some kind of magic bestowed upon us by God or the Cosmos or something. But it makes splendid sense when seen as a product of our genes, chosen and honed over millions of years of evolution in an effort to create babies. As far as evolution is concerned, passion works wonderfully, in the vast majority of cases. Again, genes don’t care how the individuals who carry them suffer, as long as babies are being made and are at least given a fair chance to live to mating age themselves. Genes actually like our loneliness and the irrationality that overwhelms us when we think we’ve found a solution, our soul mate. And genes are just fine when lovers go their separate ways, because now they can fall in love again and mate elsewhere and enrich the gene pool more than they would have otherwise. Albert Camus’s assertion was hyperbole, but poignant nonetheless: “there is no eternal love but what is thwarted.”10

  As much as I’ve been studying while writing this book, it has been unusual to come across commentary such as this in which love is reduced to just another product of natural selection. I suspect that many pure evolutionists do believe that it can be, but they feel that the notion’s simply taboo. They don’t want to be ostracized or to deflate their audience, so they just keep it to themselves.

  Others give the impression that they, too, believe that love has some sort of immunity from the denigration of evolutionary accounts because it is indeed different, somehow spiritual. Love, for many of those who have no other spiritual outlet, may be the last bastion against depressive nihilism. Love can provide a purpose or meaning to life for those who have rejected other mechanisms of spirituality. Perhaps love is the one human experience that can replace spirituality and make life worthwhile without it. Because love is the most transcendent of human feelings, it provides some vague sense of immortality when we can’t find it elsewhere.

  But if we entertain the notion that there’s nothing spiritual about love, that it is just a spiritual feeling mediated by neurons and hormones—just like every other subjective human experience—we arrive at the beating-a-dead-horse question for this book: Does it belittle the experience?

  And the beating-a-dead-horse answer is once again: absolutely not! Paradoxically, it may honor it!

  Deferring to the evolutionary account does not prevent one from experiencing love, no more than it prevents one from experiencing hunger, physical pain, fear of heights, or guilt. However, it does put the experience into some perspective, perhaps subduing it just enough so that it can be managed instead of running amok and becoming destructive.

  When we overindulge love at first sight, we may actually be behaving less human than when we remain grounded and patient. Getting married within just a few months of meeting is the equivalent of a dog getting a good scent off some other dog’s butt, then mounting before introductions are even finished. The more human reaction would be to practice patience. Get in touch with your superego (the frontal lobes of your brain) so that it can prevail over your id (the reptilian brain). The irony is that we think we’re being more human by indulging the passion and sealing the deal, as if we’re fulfilling some transcendental, spiritual prophesy, but we’ve got it all backwards. We’re being deceived by our animal genes that just want us to hurry. But we can beat them, once we understand them.

  And apparently we are beginning to: The most recent data I’ve seen is that we are waiting longer and marrying older, and the divorce rate is declining!11 Let the excitement dwindle a bit—which it will, it has to—then think about these extraordinary life-changing decisions. We need to make sure that we really care about our mate after we’ve been mating for a while and before we enter a legal contract—and, God forbid, before we bring illegitimate children into the world, victims of our own impulsivity and recklessness. This is an exceptionally common but serious problem with families (and our society) today: Couples have children not because they’re ready, but because they’re not ready. That is, they have babies because they think bonding over children will help fix their crappy marriage that they rushed into earlier … having rushed into them because they were so sure that Jesus was on board with them the whole time.

  I want to assure prudent readers by explicitly asserting that as I began to identify with the animal side of human mating, I haven’t had the reaction that spiritual folk likely fear, that is, to discard my morals and devote my life to hedonistic debauchery, full of sex parties with panties and dildos flying around my bedroom in a tornado of sweat and stink. No, the evolutionary perspective has not become an excuse, carte blanche, or any other dysfunction. On the contrary, analogous to my reaction to evolutionary perspectives on mental illness discussed above, I mostly feel validated and soothed. The evolutionary perspective finally helps me wrap my head around my own frustrating experiences, such as my insatiable horniness and fear of long-term commitment. It also helps me feel less guilty—but by no means does my guilt disappear. In fact, my guilt becomes more honed and functional compared to when it was associated with religion. Religious guilt always seemed somewhat ambiguous and disorienting, as it tended to blanket my whole person, making me feel that the issue at hand was not a particular behavior but whether I was a good person.

  In contrast, I’ve since learned that naturally selected guilt—once contacted openly and honestly—is less deprecating, as it helps me focus on my behavior as opposed to my character. The Bible simply ordered me to not lust after someone else’s wife, but evolution does much more. First, it acknowledges that the urge to commit adultery as such is actually quite common and may even be “natural,” so I shouldn’t feel so depraved for feeling lusty and tempted. I know now that the animal side of my genes just wants me to mate, regardless of whom it hurts. However, I also realize that there’s a more prosocial, human side to my genes that cherishes other social bonds besides sex, social bonds that are built on trust and the golden rule. When I succeed and forgo the adultery in the world of evolution, I have something to really appreciate: Not that I followed orders like a good boy, but that I weighed the options nature presented and I chose the relatively human path, not the beastly one.

  This is the exciting and even fun challenge of being a human living in a world of evolution: engaging in a tug-of-war between the animal and human sides of our nature. For most of us, we do have some say in how we behave and we can foster our humanity, again, approximately what the Freudians called the superego, and what neuroscientists now know is mediated by the prominent frontal lobes of our brains.

  T
o close my rambling monologue on evolution, I must cite Stephen J. Gould who warns against over-applying natural selection to try to explain everything.12 Just because something is the way it is doesn’t mean evolution carefully selected it to be that way. Some things just are, or have stuck around not because they help but because they haven’t been particularly harmful. Stephen illustrates via the “puzzle” of the oddly small arms of tyrannosaurus rex. He suggests these appendages were not honed to be small: They ended up relatively small because they were simply outstripped by the jaws and hind legs, which adapted so well by themselves that the beast just didn’t really need arms anymore. In other words, the forelegs just got left behind, and it didn’t matter.

  It seems reasonable to assume that there are salient features of us humans that were not necessarily naturally selected either, at least directly. For example, I’ve felt that the evolutionary accounts I’ve heard so far to explain our affinity for music often feel forced and are not very convincing. Maybe there was no selection pressure to create and enjoy music, but our appreciation of it is instead an epiphenomenon, side effect, or even malfunction of some other adaptation. Maybe brains just like rhythm because it gives them something to focus on besides their own thoughts running wild.

  Such notions are intriguing because they suggest that some messiness, and perhaps even mystery, will always be with us. It’s interesting to consider which aspects of us humans are not necessarily here for a cosmic or even useful purpose, but instead are fascinating leftovers or random gifts—or even curses—from animals of eons past.

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  1 Some professionals make a distinction between the two terms, but inconsistently so it depends on whom you ask; many of us consider them synonyms, and prefer psychopath. In general, they describe someone who is callous and lacks empathy, negotiating life with manipulation and/or force in order to suit his wants and needs. However, technically speaking, a person never has to break the law to be a psychopath. You have probably encountered many more people with psychopathic tendencies than you are aware.