Optimistic Nihilism

by David Landers

  History is strewn with this sort of behavior, the volume of death in the Holocaust so great only because the technology and context permitted it. Nazi murderers were no more evil than anyone else; they just had the means to exercise their hatred more effectively than anyone had before. Other efforts since—including quite recently, such as in the Sudan, Rwanda, and Bosnia—have rivaled that genocide at least in spirit, and would have gladly matched the death count if the logistics had permitted them. That said, these more recent endeavors have been allowed to spill much more blood than they ever should have because the rest of the world hasn’t felt that the return on investment has justified adequate intervention. We’re disconnected, whether because those people are poor, black, or so far away. Whatever the reasons, it must make it impossible for us to even fully appreciate that they are people, because if we did we wouldn’t tolerate what happens to them.

  Those victims may be foreign but the hatred, evil, and insanity are not. Back home, the same awesome forces motivate murder all day, every day, on our streets and in our homes, schools, and movie theaters. Our church—God’s house—is not even safe, despite His assurance that “For where two or three have gathered together in My name, there I am in their midst.”4 Christians will continue to defend Him, however. I can readily envision some creepy painting, a deranged artist’s conception, of Dylan Roof shooting up the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, with Jesus sitting in the corner crying or perhaps escorting the deceased up some cloudy stairway to heaven. And the vision makes me angry.

  I’ve read the various defenses that Christians provide for why God permits such suffering in the world, and none of them are remotely satisfying. No matter how you cut it, He is either cruel, apathetic, or incompetent.5 That is, he’s either (a) choosing to impose incomprehensible suffering; (b) not imposing it but allowing it to happen; or (c) wants to intervene but is unable.

  Most Christians will quickly disregard option (c), which is fair, as the notion of an incompetent god is somewhat paradoxical and defeats the purpose of having gods at all; surely, the proposition has only been included sarcastically. Based on my personal religious experience and training throughout the first third of my life, my sense is that most believers subscribe to a hybrid of schemes (b) and (a). That is, God generally employs a laissez-faire approach to running the world, allowing Satan to tempt us and provoke evil but intervening at select other times, whether in response to prayer or unilaterally. In this system, God is not so cruel or apathetic. When a sinner suffers, it’s punishment. If a believer is subjected to the exact same suffering and survives, then it’s a test. If a believer does not survive the exact same situation, then God actually favors her and is gathering her to His Glory. The Power of Prayer works in a similar foolproof fashion. When our prayers are followed by good things and we get what we want, God answers prayer. When our prayers are followed by bad things, then our wishes were not in His plan and we are being tested; perhaps we were even being greedy for having asked in the first place and are now being bestowed wisdom and strength.

  Of course, some suffering and unanswered prayers will fall through the cracks and seem to defy even this invincible scheme, such as those endured by any given 100 Canadian child sexual abuse victims, at which point we are forced to give up and assert that God works in mysterious ways that we are too simple to comprehend—which is itself another test of our faith, perhaps the ultimate test even. Indeed, the more incredible the horror is, the better Christians we are for not doubting Him in the face of it. This maneuver is reinforcing on two levels, as it not only helps numb ourselves to the horror, but it also affirms our own immortality. Both aspects are soothing, and they feed one another.

  Well, any objective observer can see through the scam, if he only has the courage to critique it. High intelligence is not necessary; absurdity on this scale is glaring with just an open, rational mind.

  The universe is not divine. God is not good. Nothing is tending to our prayers. Our beliefs in holiness and magic are merely coping strategies—defense mechanisms—whose obvious and only goals are to help the living feel better in the face of the brutality of reality.

  And yes, Carlsbad Lady, your faith makes me angry. If you truly appreciated the magnitude of suffering and evil in the world, you wouldn’t believe, either. Your faith exists only because you are able to minimize the evil. In fact, it is largely the reason that you can ignore it! Your faith gives you the “strength” to wander the earth, soaking in God’s Glory while anesthetizing you to His Negligence. You are Candide’s Cunegonde, satisfied “that what was taking place in my father’s castle was standard practice.”

  We need to stop it. As the innocent victims of torture, murder, rape, and starvation endure their suffering, the least we can do is acknowledge the reality of what is happening. These are not punishments or tests; they are the natural acts of the cosmos simply unfolding as it does—heartless, mindless, and cruel.

  None of our rationalizations are helpful. It doesn’t matter if the perpetrators are caught and executed. Capital punishment isn’t justice; it’s vengeance, and unsatisfying at that. It’s unsatisfying because it doesn’t undo the damage that has been inflicted, nor does it bring anyone back. It is yet another coping strategy, of which we should be ashamed when it does seem to work, because insofar as it soothes us we’ve equated the lives of the psychopaths with those of their victims.

  It’s commonplace during news interviews for the surviving loved ones of victims of catastrophe to make assertions such as “I know the Lord was with him when he passed.” However, because I do forensic psychological evaluations for a living, I am, unfortunately, routinely able to compare the news story with the actual police reports, and I can assure you that I know for a fact that sometimes when we assume God’s presence, we’re simply wrong. No, there was nothing peaceful about what happened. If there was any deity present, it was the Devil; I’m afraid the Lord was nowhere in sight.

  I have a stellar example in mind but am not going to detail it or even provide a disguised version of it, out of respect for both the deceased and the survivors. This is the part where I begin to feel less angry and more sympathetic, as I couldn’t possibly blame a surviving parent, spouse, or sibling for resorting to spirituality to comfort themselves in a situation like this. The horror of real life can be truly inconceivable, wholly unacceptable, forcing us to be unrealistic. This may be the ultimate reason why we have religion in the first place. For some people sometimes, religion may be the only viable option. I guess I have to respect that, or I’m the one being insensitive.

  While we atheists must not ridicule the defensive maneuvering of surviving loved ones of such victims, the problem is that Americans—being obsessed with optimism and meaning—tend to overreact to the lead and go overboard. Our defensiveness has become a national pastime, a mass hysteria. We watch the news and we say, somewhat superficially, “How awful” the refugee crisis is in Syria, but we don’t really allow ourselves to care. Before our sympathy even has a chance to gel, we’re distracted by a stylish, noisy commercial about the newest smartphone or a news blurb on what the celebrities wore at some posh awards ceremony last night. Come Sunday, our preacher comforts us by reminding us once again that “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted,” which validates our position to not get too worked up about Syria and whatnot. After the service, we gaze at that painting of Jesus carrying the baby lamb around his neck, and it’s intoxicating. We’re drugged numb, brainwashed to believe that all of the pain in the world is acceptable, if not meaningful. We are passing the test!

  Every catastrophe becomes another opportunity to flaunt our optimism. Like looking for Waldo, we’re vigilant for any sort of silver lining in the horror. In 2011, after tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri killed over 150 people, the internet was strewn with pictures of the cross left standing at the otherwise leveled St. Mary’s Catholic Church there, as if that was some kind of inspiration for hope. The irrational courage of the relig
ious was described succinctly by Freud, in what may have been one of his wisest sentiments: “the secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes.”6 And so is the secret of their insensitivity.

  It’s not just the survivors of natural disasters. After every plane crash, mass shooting, refinery explosion, or building collapse, some survivors are literally glowing with thanks to the Lord while discussing the miracle of their survival to a news reporter. Of course, the unspoken but glaring implication is that the Lord chose to annihilate the victims who were right next to them. Again, I can’t criticize the survivor. He’s delirious with trauma, and of course doesn’t mean what he seems to be saying, that God esteems his life more than those of the deceased, that his loved ones’ prayers for his safety were more worthy than theirs.

  The word “hero” has become meaningless in America, as we spectators throw it around recklessly to describe anyone who was really just in shock and happened to survive a catastrophe, often driven by nothing more than a traumatic daze. Those who were lucid just did what any decent normal, non-heroic human should do. And of course this is how the heroes themselves describe their behavior, as natural and unremarkable. The heroes are not sensationalizing their behavior; it’s the rest of us, in an effort to cope with the horror that we’ve just witnessed, in hopes that some similar hero will save us if we ever end up in a similar situation.

  I’m ranting. We atheist writers can’t resist it. It’s probably not only because we’re angry at religion for minimizing the suffering in the world: We also have more selfish concerns—specifically, we’re scared. We’re scared because some of the people most “deranged” by the denial afforded by religion are not merely being passive in the privacy of their homes. As during the Inquisition, others are lawmakers and terrorists, so we feel threatened on multiple levels. Religious people are capable of anything, no matter how outrageous and disastrous. Part of the problem is that dying for one’s religious cause lets him reap the benefits of that cause! Worth reiterating, “the secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes.”

  To calm and wind it down, I should clarify: I’m not questioning whether looking at the world through Everything-Happens-for-a-Reason glasses helps many people feel good. There’s an entire branch of psychology called Positive Psychology that has produced volumes of research showing that thinking and behaving positively really can improve our mood and functioning. But, of course, just because something helps us to feel better doesn’t necessarily make it right. Ask George Bernard Shaw: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”7

  And of course, the exceptions don’t get much press, but they’re out there. While recently perusing old issues of the Monitor on Psychology I came across a news blurb, “Cancer survival not linked to a positive attitude, study finds.”8 Reporter E. Packard summarizes a study by James Coyne, Ph.D.: “Coyne and colleagues reported that emotional well-being in no way predicted survival among patients with head and neck cancer.” I especially appreciate how the article is closed: “Coyne believes it’s important to not blame cancer patients who don’t adopt an aggressively positive spirit … ‘People have to do what’s comfortable with them, but they have to do it without the burden of thinking they’ve got to have the right attitude to survive.’”

  What a refreshing dose of poignant and sensitive reporting—and in a publication from the national association that represents my otherwise Pollyannish field! This is a sad topic and this is sad news about it, but thank you for just letting it be sad and not trying to twist the whole story into some histrionic, Panglossian carnival about hope and optimism.

  Now, I’m not suggesting that we flaunt pictures of body parts on the news instead of those of the survivors. People really can be traumatized by simply looking at a picture; you don’t have to be at the scene of a crime. But we’ve distanced ourselves too much. We put too much emphasis on feeling good.

  Perhaps this is what Ernest Becker meant when he said that only by dropping the defenses can we appreciate our real humanness. Once we shed the comfort of spirituality, we will appreciate our mortality more deeply. As a result, we will appreciate our losses more deeply, for what they really are. Until then, we’re just children being sheltered.

  Becker studied Freud, who believed we can’t grow up until we first acknowledge that childishness:

  True, man will then find himself in a difficult situation. He will have to confess his utter helplessness and his insignificant part in the working of the universe; he will have to confess that he is no longer the centre of creation, no longer the object of the tender care of a benevolent providence. He will be in the same position as the child who has left the home where he was so warm and comfortable. But, after all, is it not the destiny of childishness to be overcome? Man cannot remain a child for ever; he must venture at last into the hostile world.9

  Religious folks fear that without faith there would be anarchy and chaos. After all, as bad as things are across the world today, faith has gotten us this far!

  The problem with this reasoning is that we haven’t explored the alternative much—in this hemisphere, anyway. It’s well known in atheist circles that the happiest nations on earth are often the least religious, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The dynamics behind such a correlation are certainly complicated, but evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber believes that the atheism-happiness effect is mediated by economics. That is, the citizens of these nations are happy primarily due to “a combination of national wealth and redistribution of resources via high taxation and a well-developed welfare state.”10 In other less alarming words, “European social democracies provide existential security … a secure standard of living for everyone.” Italics added. The suggestion is that once people achieve existential security through financial stability, they’re less desperate to look for it in religion.

  Meanwhile, back in the relatively religious “Greatest Country in the World,” we pretend that we’re happy but the existential insecurity of cutthroat capitalism running amok seems to be killing us. Americans are “less healthy and more likely to die from disease or accidents than those in any other affluent country … Even the best-off Americans … are sicker than their peers in comparable countries.”11 We “have had a shorter life expectancy than people in almost all the comparator countries and for the last three decades the gap has been widening, particularly for women.” The United States also leads affluent countries in teen pregnancy and STDs, as well as overall AIDS, obesity, lung disease, alcohol/drug deaths, and homicide.

  A country with those distinctions is not blessed or “under God.” That’s a country with a lot of misguided public policy, and that is living in all sorts of denial about it.

  No, the atheistic society is not the dysfunctional one. While Nigel Barber suggests that it’s the security of socialist leanings that fosters atheism, I suspect atheism also fosters socialist leanings. None of the atheists I know, if they were in charge, would ever implement or tolerate an economy that sustains a division of wealth like that in America today. Most of us don’t even esteem wealth personally. Being realists, we are acutely aware that materialism is more about greed and addiction than security. Also as realists, we are no longer able to ignore the suffering of those around us. We won’t feel peace and security until our neighbors have them, too. That includes the Mexicans, both those on the other side of town and those on the other side of the border. We embrace immigration because it’s easy for us to see that we might be immigrating, too—even illegally—if we had been born under some of their circumstances.

  Even one of the most sensationally depressive philosophers of all time, Arthur Schopenhauer, argued that a nihilistic view of nature could have the paradoxical effect of binding us together:

  In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.
Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Soci malorum, compagnon de miseres! This may perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in a right-light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life—the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow.12

  It’s a beautiful sentiment. Even the great Schopenhauer seems to find some meaning in his pessimism.

  People on the fence still clinging to religion often argue that there’s nothing to lose if they’re wrong about it all. However, it seems there may not be that much to gain, either—at least emotionally.

  I hadn’t intended to write a research-laden scholarly book, but we have to at least briefly consider some that addresses the relationship between religiosity and emotional well-being. One of the most efficient ways to do this is via a meta-analysis, that is, a super-study that combines as many preexisting research studies on a topic as possible and reanalyzes the data across them as a whole. It didn’t take me long to find one relevant for this discussion: Smith and colleagues compiled 147 different studies that had each already assessed the correlation between religiosity and depression, altogether involving almost 99,000 different subjects.13 They found that when looking at all of these studies together, the correlation between religiosity and depression was -0.096. In the simplest of layman’s terms, this means that religious people are less depressed than nonreligious people, on average. However, of all the variation we might see in a population’s scores on a depression test, religiosity only accounts for about 1% of it. Yes, that means that 99% of the variation in our depression scores is not related to religiosity. It’s related to other factors, like genetics—which other studies show accounts for about 40% of the variation in depression.14 Indeed, depression is a splendid example of a condition that results from approximately equal contributions of both nature and nurture. But, as far as nurture goes, religiosity is apparently only a tiny part.