Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

“Worship” means the assigning or acknowledging of worth. Language, in its wisdom, understands this to be a function of creative, imaginative behavior. The suffix “-ship” is kin to the word “shape.” It is no wonder that the major arts in virtually every civilization have centered around religion. Darwin, always eager to find analogues and therefore inferred origins for human behavior among the animals, said that, to a dog, his master is a god. But this is to speak of religion as if it were mere credulous awe in the face of an apparently greater power and wisdom, as if there were only natural religion, only the Watchmaker. The relationship between creation and discovery — as Greek sculpture, for example, might be said to have discovered the human form, or mathematics might be said to have discovered the universe — is wholly disallowed in this comparison.

Religion is inconceivable because it draws on the human mind in ways for which nature, as understood by Darwinists, offers no way of accounting. Collaboratively, people articulate perceptions of value and meaning and worth, which are perhaps right and wrong, that is, profoundly insightful, or else self-interested or delusional, at about the rate of the best science. We tend to forget the long respect paid to the Piltdown man, a hoax whose plausibility arose from the fact that it seemed to confirm Darwinist evolutionary theory. We forget that it is only fairly recently that the continents have been known to drift. Until very recently the biomass of the sea at middle and great depths has been fantastically underestimated, and the mass and impact of microbial life in the earth has been virtually unreckoned. We know almost nothing about the biology of the air, that great medium of migration for infectious agents, among other things. The wonderful Big Bang is beset with problems. In other words, our best information about the planet has been full of enormous lacunae, and is, and will be. Every grand venture at understanding is hypothesis, not so different from metaphysics. Daniel Dennett attributes the brilliance of J. S. Bach to the fortuitous accumulation of favorable adaptations in his nervous system. Bach, of all people, is not to be imagined without a distinctive, highly elaborated conception of God, and life in a culture that invoked the idea of God by means of music. That is why his work is profound, rather than merely very clever. And it is profound. It is not about illusion, it is not about superstition or denial or human vainglory or the peculiarities of one sensorium.

We try now to establish value in economic terms, lacking better, and this has no doubt contributed to the bluntly mercenary character of contemporary culture. But economic value is extraordinarily slippery. Buying cheap and selling dear is the essence of profit making. The consumer is forever investing in ephemera, cars or watches that are made into symbols of prosperity, and are therefore desirable because they are expensive. So people spend a great deal of money for the advantages of being perceived to have spent a great deal of money. These advantages are diminished continuously by the change of styles either toward or away from the thing they have bought, which make it either commonplace or passé.

Or manufacture is taken from a setting in which adults work for reasonable wages and there are meaningful protections of the environment, and moved into a setting where children work for meager wages and the environment is desolated. This creates poverty among workers in both settings and destroys the wealth that is represented in a wholesome environment — toxins in the air or the water are great destroyers of wealth. So economic value is created at the cost of the economic value of workers who are made unable to figure as consumers, and of resources that are made unsuitable for any use. A few people may get rich, but the transaction altogether is a loss, perhaps a staggering loss. A global economy organized on these principles will be full of poor, sick, dispirited people, and shoddy goods, since they will be cheapened to suit the dwindling prosperity of the workforce, who are also the buying public. An objective accounting of value would find disaster here. Humane limits to the exploitation of people would solve the problem, but they would also interfere with competition, which is the great law of nature, supposedly, and which therefore functions as a value, because “science” has supplanted religion.

How much misery and premature death (most of it out of sight, granted) do we agree to when we accept this new economic order? Is it in any way an advance on colonialism? Do we imagine, as the colonialists sometimes did, that we are bringing benefits of civilization to the far reaches of the world? Are we not in fact decivilizing ourselves as we decivilize them? Why is there no outcry? Is it because we have cast off the delusion of human sanctity? I think we should study our silence for insight into other momentous silences in recent history.

This is not the worst of it. Now that the mystery of motive is solved — there are only self-seeking and aggression, and the illusions that conceal them from us — there is no place left for the soul, or even the self. Moral behavior has little real meaning, and inwardness, in the traditional sense, is not necessary or possible. We use analysts and therapists to discover the content of our experience. Equivalent trauma is assumed to produce more or less equivalent manifestations in every case, so there is little use for the mind, the orderer and reconciler, the artist of the interior world. Whatever it has made will only be pulled apart. The old mystery of subjectivity is dispelled; individuality is a pointless complication of a very straightforward organic life. Our hypertrophic brain, that prodigal indulgence, that house of many mansions, with its stores, and competences, and all its deep terrors and very rich pleasures, which was so long believed to be the essence of our lives, and a claim on one another’s sympathy and courtesy and attention, is going the way of every part of collective life that was addressed to it — religion, art, dignity, graciousness. Philosophy, ethics, politics, properly so called. It is a thing that bears reflecting upon, how much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam.

ANYONE WHO reads and writes history or economics or science must sometimes wonder what fiction is, where its boundaries are, if they exist at all. The question implies certain distinctions, as between fiction and fact, or, more cautiously, between fiction and nonfiction. I would suggest that, while such distinctions are real, they are also profoundly relative, conditional, and circumstantial. Almost everything we have a name for exists in the universe of time and matter, and should, so it seems to me, be assumed to share certain of their essential qualities, two of these being ineluctability and profound resistance to definition.

Yet we have put together among ourselves a rigidly simple account of life in the world, which we honor with the name Reality and which, we now assure one another, must be faced and accepted, even or especially at the cost of those very things which societies we admire are believed by us to value, for example education, the arts, a humane standard of life for the whole of the community. Science fetches back from its explorations mystery upon mystery, yet somehow we feel increasingly sunk in a world of mere things, in a hard-edged Reality that disallows imagination except to exact tribute from it, in portraits which assert its own power and ferocity, or in interludes and recreations which concede by their triviality that only Reality matters. Our present model of the world is a fiction, based on notions of objectivity and of the character and implications of science which are a hundred years out of date. It is based on the flotsam and detritus and also the floor sweepings of all disciplines — psychology, penology, economics, history, all of them. From them it takes its important tone, helpful in magnifying any present obsession. For many of us it is true to say, Reality marks our ballots, even rears our children. It is such a poor contrivance that we would not believe in it for a minute if we did not want to. Yet it flourishes, because it is the servant and gatekeeper of dearer interests, a prized dependent upon which we in fact depend.