Optimistic Nihilism

by David Landers

  I’m always picking up trash, not just at the grocery store, but on hiking trails, sidewalks, wherever. If I’m driving past trash in the road that’s too big for me to handle, I’m one of those concerned citizens who calls the police. I recycle almost obsessively, often carrying a can around with me for hours until I can find a proper receptacle. I must look hilarious while jogging because I might have a beer bottle in my hand that I picked up earlier down the trail. I know the world is gonna be destroyed eventually no matter what I do, but it’s the principle of the matter.

  I’m a regular blood donor and am on the national marrow registry. I sponsor a hungry kid in Africa through Save the Children. And I don’t complain much about my own food. When I’m dining out and find a hair on my plate, I pull it out, show it to whomever I’m with, and keep eating. I think it’s mind boggling that we don’t find more shit in our food than we do! I despise the mentality of the kind of person who freaks out about such things, as if it’s a long-awaited opportunity to raise hell. Like some kind of obnoxious hippie, I don’t have a chance to get mad at the hair because my thoughts immediately go to hungry people and I’d feel like an unappreciative asshole for bitching. I’ve never sent something back because it wasn’t what I ordered. And no, I don’t think it’s the cosmos trying to enrich my life by getting me to try something new. Someone just fucked up, like we all do, and I’m not gonna let the food go to waste. Now, I’m not crazy: If the food is cold, I’ll send it back for a warm-up, but insist they don’t start over. Nuke it—don’t you dare throw that out!

  Some Christians and meaning-mongers would be surprised that a foul-mouthed atheist is easily touched by romantic movies, especially the ones with transcendental/spiritual gobbledy-goo. When I was a Christian not long out of high school, of course I cried at the end of Ghost. But even in college, as I began dabbling in atheism, I still cried at the end of Far and Away (I’m so embarrassed to admit that, but of course this chapter is all about self-disclosure). And very recently, as a full-blown nihilist, I cried the hardest at the end of Cherry Blossoms. The latter is probably less well known to the mainstream, being German, but like many American movies, it’s about love, death, and transcendence. In any event, this might be one of my favorite movies of all time, and it moves me in a way that is almost unsettling. I ended up buying the DVD, and am currently awaiting, eagerly, until I feel like it’s been long enough to watch it again. In the meantime, whenever I want to feel all mushy inside, I watch the trailer on the internet.

  It’s not just me. In the documentary The Four Horsemen, Richard Dawkins expresses a surprising sentiment. He explains that he

  once did a British radio program called Desert Island Discs, where you have to go on and choose your six records which you take to a desert island and talk about it. And one of the ones I chose was Bach Mache dich, mein Herze, rein. It’s wonderful sacred music and the woman questioning me couldn’t understand why I would wish to have this piece of music [because it’s pious] … It’s beautiful music and its beauty is indeed enhanced by knowing what it means. But you still don’t actually have to believe it. It’s like reading fiction. You can lose yourself in fiction, and be totally moved to tears by it, but nobody would ever say you’ve got to believe that this person existed and that the sadness that you feel really reflected something that actually happened.2

  I’ve read two of Richard’s books and lightly perused a third, and this is my favorite sentiment of his I’ve encountered so far. It raises a lot of poignant questions about the distinction between fiction and reality and the capacities for each to affect us in a meaningful way.

  I like classical music sometimes, but am far from versed enough to add to Richard’s assessment. I have some favorite pieces, but I couldn’t name them, and I certainly wouldn’t know who composed them without researching it. But I can tell you that I have a very similar experience when I hear—wait for it—Elvis sing An American Trilogy. Every time he belts out “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” I get chills, like clockwork.

  One morning after I had been editing this section of my book, I woke up pondering these issues and lay in bed for a while fading in and out of sleep, thinking about which songs I would take to my deserted island. I paged through my favorite genres and when I got to spiritual-songs-that-are-emotionally-provocative, O, Holy Night stood out. I got out of bed, poured my coffee, and searched for renditions on Youtube, still in my pajamas, teeth not brushed yet. I tried Whitney Houston’s first, as I’ve always been drawn to her and her voice, but the video was a little too cheesy and I felt her version apparently wasn’t intended to be the passionate type I was looking for. So, I Googled the “most powerful rendition” of the song, and Celine Dion’s name seemed to pop up quite a bit. Back on Youtube, I chose her video that includes the lyrics so you can read along. When I played it—no kidding—I cried harder than I had in some time, so much so I had to get a paper towel to blow my blubbering nose!

  Something deep is obviously happening here, but I’m quite sure it has nothing to do with God being real, at least for me. In the moment, what did cross my mind—or more like my heart—was more akin to Ernest Becker’s discussions about our need, our longing, to have hope against annihilation. I was longing for God to be real, to hold me because no one else ever did adequately when I was growing up. Indeed, the whole thing felt a whole lot like when Patsy touched me at camp. Contacting the longing prompts a cathartic release of pent-up pain, and that feels good.

  There are all sorts of entire books exploring why gods and bibles are not necessary to lead a moral life, including Can We be Good without God; Ethics without God; Good without God; Sense and Goodness without God; and … The Moral Landscape. Most of the more general books about atheism have at least a chapter on the topic. Despite how much believers may think bibles are necessary for society to function, we atheists find the notion absurd.

  I actually haven’t read most of the books I’ve listed above, largely because I don’t need any more convincing, having experienced firsthand the transition from Christian to atheist without any apparent deterioration in my morals (which, I suspect, have been average, at worst). Again, if anything, I’ve become more moral since becoming atheist.

  Otherwise, it simply seems self-evident that morality is a human trait and not contingent upon religion or its manuscripts.

  Morality is necessarily in our genes. Humans are social creatures—we are not parasites, nor are we so-called solitary animals like cougars and bears and skunks. Social species, by definition, cannot exist without morality—they are social! If it had not been for naturally selected altruism and social cohesion the world never would have become so civilized to write the Holy Bible in the first place. As Christopher Hitchens said, “Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”3 Or, as I like to say, “Morality was the chicken that laid the egg of Christianity.”

  Some of the most magnificent civilizations in history, like Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese, were erected long before anyone even uttered the name “Jesus Christ,” in vain or otherwise. And many others have been erected since, like Mayan and Aztec, but in geographical isolation so that they never heard of the Golden Rule of the Holy Bible, either—but they apparently lived according to some version of it anyway. Of course, none of these societies were perfectly moral, but I don’t suspect they were particularly immoral compared to the average Holy Bible-reading society throughout history. For example, I’ve been taught slavery had a role in building some (if not all) of those ancient societies, but of course it also had a role in building America—and much more recently! And I don’t recall ever learning that the Bible had a major role in abolition in this country; if anything, as we discussed earlier, the Bible seems to condone slavery. No, I suspect that abolition was driven more by the increasing intellectualization of American society, just like abolition has been driven in other non-Christian nations as well. And I suspect that the world is destined for increasingly moral behavior as time goes on, not because of bibles,
but because of advancing intellect, awareness, and the extinction of secrecy.

  Careful scrutiny suggests that bibles are not particularly good guides for ethical behavior. As we’ve been discussing, they very often simply assert rules that most of us are already hard-wired to follow. It’s not like murder was relatively rampant before the sixth commandment of the Holy Bible was published and then significantly declined afterwards. Again, speaking from experience, I’ve met quite a few people who have killed before and I can say with confidence that murderers aren’t the least bit concerned about laws—whether from penal codes or scriptures—when they commit their crimes. When most killers kill, they’re on a different mental plane than the one that considers rules and punishment. I suspect that very, very few people throughout history on the verge of killing someone somehow changed their minds at the last minute because they were reminded of the sixth commandment.

  Another reason many commandments don’t work in practice is because they are sweeping statements too broad for widespread applicability. Reality is too complicated and nuanced for rules like this; judging others or even killing them has to be justified, under some circumstances. Ergo, some subjectivity in interpreting the rules is not just allowed but becomes imperative. And when subjectivity becomes an imperative part of interpreting a moral code, that moral code loses a lot of its utility. As we’ve already explored in this book, recall that the Holy Bible in particular demands so much subjectivity that we have to decide which rules have expired and must be disregarded entirely (again, I find those condoning slavery and the oppression of women glaring examples).

  And the punchline: For those commandments that just don’t suit us and our peers, we simply ignore them, unashamedly. Even in this God-fearing country, with some of the most radical Christians on Earth, adultery is rampant—literally a part of our culture, commonplace fodder for television sitcoms, dramas, reality shows, and news stories. Coveting is another American pastime, as our capitalist society continuously indoctrinates us to believe that we need things that we don’t. Largely for this reason, keeping the Sabbath day holy is a long-lost tradition, Sunday now being an important day for indulgence—because we have to spend so much of the rest of our time working in order to stay ahead!

  No, I don’t find the Holy Bible to be a very useful guide at all. I’m not even sure if I did when I was a Christian kid just beginning to explore the world of ethics. What I do recall, in retrospect, is feeling validated whenever I read commandments, rules, or directions that simply resonated with what I already felt was right. Now that’s what bibles are good for: allowing us to nod and smile and feel assured that we’re good (good enough anyway), that we’re behaving as our divinities desire (at least much of the time). Overall, it seems that bibles are not as much about directing us to immortality as they are about giving us hope that we’re already en route.

  To end the suspense, recent research does corroborate the suspicion that ethical behavior is not contingent upon religiosity. Wilhelm Hofmann and colleagues monitored the ethical experiences of over 1200 adults, some who identified themselves as religious, others who did not.4 Participants were summoned via their smart-phones at five random times every day for three days, at which points they documented whether they had committed a moral act within the previous hour. Among many other interesting things that you can read for yourself, the researchers found that “religious and nonreligious people commit comparable moral and immoral deeds and with comparable frequency.” I suspect this is surprising to many non-atheists, but perhaps it shouldn’t be.

  Imagine a catastrophic scene in a city, where, for example, an earthquake or other disaster causes a building to collapse. Of those nearby left unharmed, are the Christians rushing more quickly than the atheists to help? My gut just says no, which the research seems to validate. One difference might be, though, that in the aftermath the Christians would be inclined to attribute their heroic efforts to their spirituality, while the atheists would attribute it to nothing, or perhaps simply to fundamental human duty. The Christian reinforces his spiritual beliefs by assuming a connection between his beliefs and his heroism when there really isn’t one, not realizing that nonbelievers were working right there alongside him the whole time.

  On that note, Hofmann and colleagues also found that the religious participants in their study, compared to the nonreligious, did indeed have stronger psychological reactions to their behaviors. Specifically, they

  experienced more intense self-conscious emotions such as guilt, embarrassment, and disgust in response to the immoral deeds they had committed, and more pride and gratefulness in response to moral deeds.

  The scientists are not saying that the nonreligious were guilt- or pride-free, just that the religious felt these emotions more intensely. Presumably, these superfluous emotions of the religious stem from them attaching greater significance to their moral and immoral behaviors—that is, they believe on some level that their behaviors are relevant for their immortality. One has to wonder if this creates a cycle that feeds itself, so that the strong emotional reaction reinforces the belief that the behaviors have cosmic significance. The punchline is, of course, the dynamic is purely a subjective experience and has no practical utility (for example, it apparently does not increase moral behavior).

  British philosopher Colin McGinn might argue that the emotional experiences of the religious can actually be deleterious, somehow distracting them and robbing them of a more authentic experience—if not even making morality more tumultuous than it needs to be overall. In The Atheism Tapes, he shares the provocative anecdotal observation that people who have abandoned religion find moral behavior easier to come by than they had anticipated:

  And in fact it was better, because there’s a corrupting part to that conception of God, which is the idea that you’re doing something good because God will reward you and think well of you. And that’s a corrupting idea. It’s much better to do what’s good because it’s good, and only because it’s good, and that’s your only reason for doing it. But the idea you’re going to get the warm fuzzy feeling, “Oh, God’s really pleased with me today, you know, I did this,” that’s not what morality ought to be about.5

  Absolutely: Commandments are, by definition, superficial. Morality shouldn’t be about obligation—that cheapens it, no matter how “good” you are. Following commandments because they’re commandments is servile, not moral. Many atheists argue that the moral atheist is more moral than the moral Christian, because she exercises her morality on a deeper level. Christians talk about earning rewards in heaven, but atheists are moral for its own sake, right here on Earth, with no secondary gain.

  It’s also interesting to note that the schemes of commandments presented in bibles are reminiscent of what psychologists call the authoritarian parenting style, the “Do this because I told you so” approach. As any introductory psychology text will explain, this is the unhealthy way to raise children, relative to the authoritative parenting style that does not merely direct our behavior but counsels us on the pros and cons of how we behave. Sure enough, as secular households are becoming more popular in this country, scientific data are coming in to show that

  secular teenagers are far less likely to care what the “cool kids” think, or express a need to fit in with them, than their religious peers. When these teens mature into “godless” adults, they exhibit less racism than their religious counterparts … Many psychological studies show that secular grownups tend to be less vengeful, less nationalistic, less militaristic, less authoritarian and more tolerant, on average, than religious adults.6

  Morality should involve contemplation, analysis, and open-minded consultation with others, not reflexive allegiance to a system that has already proven itself unreliable. Besides being outdated, the Bible’s contradictory advice inhibits deliberation because it allows us to reflexively appeal to whichever rule we prefer. If we don’t want to associate with sinners (such as by serving homosexuals at our restaurant), we cite 1
Corinthians 15:33: “Bad company corrupts good morals.” However, if we do want to associate with sinners as such, we focus on how Jesus justified dining with them in Mark 2:17: “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” And just as we shouldn’t reflexively depend on the Bible, we shouldn’t automatically defer to our parents or cultures—whether religious or not—because they’ve obviously been wrong, too.

  Don’t be afraid to engage the turmoil of ethical deliberation! When I was Christian, I recall as recently as an undergraduate in college, I had a very adamant anti-abortion stance, bordering on belligerent. (And yes, I’m quite certain that my rigidity was driven more by concerns related to my own immortality than to the life of a fetus.) In any event, once I converted to atheism, I experienced an obnoxious polar shift to the other side and became an outspoken abortion proponent—again bordering on belligerent. I would caustically joke about getting pregnant just so I could exercise my right to abort. I fantasized about making a bumper sticker asserting, “I used to be pro-choice, but now I’m not: ALL babies should be aborted!”

  Today, I’m proud to announce that I’ve stopped the emotionally defensive splitting and instead sit restlessly atop the abortion fence. Of course, I’m not compelled by any sort of spiritual reason whatsoever. But, as with any life, I simply find a human fetus a miracle of nature and I’m uncomfortable with the idea of destroying it. And of course, I find that fetus much more valuable than any other animal that I don’t want to kill needlessly, whether a fly or a dolphin or anything else, because I appreciate what it can become, a fully sentient being who may live life to its fullest, loving others and having a generally worthwhile existence.