Now, if I’d only finished the chapter on altruism in Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind before writing about it, I’d have been able to answer my own questions, posed at the end of yesterday’s Weekend Note. Robinson’s target is “that essential modernist position, that our minds are not our own.” Ah. That’s what she meant by “the exclusion of the felt life of the mind.” Also, if I’d gone on reading, I’d have encountered her astonishingly entertaining argument that what can’t be explained by natural selection can be explained by meme theory — not that she has much use for either.

She’s quite right about “that essential modernist position.” It’s the core of the bossiest school of thought in Western history. By comparison, the orthodoxy of medieval Christianity is essentially permissive: what it permits, and what modernism denies, is responsibility of knowing your own mind. Modernists, control freaks each and every one of them, insist that it’s precisely your (silly) ideas that stand between poverty and utopia. If you would only listen to them!

Still, I wonder, to borrow an uncongenial phrase, if I have a dog in this fight — this fight over the soul between thinkers like Steven Pinker and Marilynne Robinson.

Steven Pinker says, “The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle.” But the mind, or the brain, a part of the body just as Wilson says it is, is deeply sensitive to itself. Guilt, nostalgia, the pleasure or anticipation, even the shock of a realization, all arise out of an event that occurs entirely in the mind or brain, and they are as potent as other sensations.

Aside from a strong but not entirely coherent feeling that Pinker and Robinson are talking about apples and oranges here — to put it more fairly, Pinker is talking apples and Robinson is throwing oranges at him — I’m not sure that I care which one of them is right, or if either of them is. I have never been the “victim of an illusion” about God. When I was a child, I believed in hell, all right; it seemed like the natural continuation of the incredible tedium of everyday life. God as represented was not a figure with whom I wanted to spend much time; Jesus even less. There was nothing interesting or attractive about the religious experience for me. (The interest and attraction of religious display is another story!)

I think that it’s impertinent to say that I don’t know anything about God, and I don’t think that anyone else does, either. Even when think such things, as Mrs Clancy says, we don’t say them. What I would say is that I don’t know why anyone wants to believe in God, or draws any satisfaction from belief. Of course I’ve heard all my life about the comfort in affliction that religion provides, and I have to assume that, even though I never felt it — I have been lucky enough to know few genuine afflictions — other people really do, and that the feeling is not an illusion — as Robinson insists, it’s a mental, mindful fact. But I don’t understand it from the inside at all.

It’s a wonder I have the nerve to stand up here and write anything at all, given that I’m unresponsive to the two most powerful forces in contemporary society, religion and sport. Then again, I live in a world in which The Artist, since it opened last year, has brought in less than a third of the box office receipts garnered by The Grey in its first weekend. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2012 at 10:05 am.