Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

To condescend effectively it is clearly necessary to adhere to a narrow definition of relevant data. The existence of God and the ways in which his existence might be apprehended have formed an old and very rich conversation among sects and nations. That God or the gods might be hidden or absent is a recurring trope in religious literatures. The pious have seen the world as if empty of a divine presence and pondered the experience at length. Saints have had their dark nights and testified to them. It was Luther who wrote about the Deus Absconditus and the death of God as well, and Bonhoeffer who gave Grotius’s etsi Deus non daretur a new theological application. 9The characterization of religion by those who dismiss it tends to reduce it to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death, and this makes its persistence very annoying to them. Then there is the fact that it does persist, and here in America, a country as modern as any, except in this crucial regard. Further grounds for annoyance.

Bertrand Russell says, “Language sometimes conceals the complexity of a belief. We say that a person believes in God, and it might seem as if God formed the whole content of the belief. But what is really believed is that God exists, which is far from being simple…. In like manner all cases where the content of a belief seems simple at first sight will be found, on examination, to confirm the view that the content is always complex.” 10This good atheist, despite his contempt for religion, proceeds by introspection, by observation of the processes of his own mind as a means of understanding the human mind, and with a delight in the workings of language he assumes his audience is bright enough to share. His rejection of religion is real and deep, but he does not justify it at the cost of failing to acknowledge the intrinsic complexity of human subjectivity, whatever its specific content. To acknowledge this is to open the archives of all that humankind has thought and done, to see how the mind describes itself, to weigh the kind of evidence supposed science tacitly disallows.

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The adventitious use of the idea of “the primitive” seems always to involve the questionable use of questionable information. In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature , Steven Pinker debunks belief in the soul, that is, the Ghost in the Machine, as well as the Noble Savage and, in his view the most persistent of erroneous conceptions of the self, the Blank Slate. He takes all these terms to be simple and naive in a degree that is hardly consistent with the seriousness of the philosophic traditions from which they emerged. By human nature Pinker means the genetically determined factors in behavior, which he takes to be highly significant and broadly unappreciated. In his discussion of the notion of the Noble Savage, he offers a graph comparing male deaths caused by warfare in the twentieth century. The graph is presented as evidence that this rate of mortality among Europeans and Americans, as a percentage of deaths, is minuscule beside those reported among various contemporary “pre-state societies” who would have been the primitives of earlier studies. On the facing page Pinker has noted the errors of Margaret Mead in Samoa and the staged discovery of the “gentle Tasaday.” This is worth noting because two bars on his graph represent two subgroups of the Yanomamo, a society whose violent tendencies were the discovery of an anthropological venture whose reports have also been considered suspect. Since his argument is a rejection of “the image of peaceable, egalitarian and ecology-loving natives,” an argument that would certainly incline him to welcome information to the effect that these pre-stateans are indeed violent, it would be reassuring to see a slightly more even-handed use of evidence. It would be reassuring also to see some note taken of the susceptibility of such observations to hoaxing and manipulation that has been made so clear in the matter of the Tasaday, the Samoans, and, quite possibly, the Yanomamo, together with an acknowledgment that those who use such observations are susceptible in turn to overvaluing data that tend to confirm them in their views. 11

Other questions arise. What is meant by warfare? Would its victims include the millions killed in the regions of Africa from which rubber was taken for use by the armies of World War I? Or are only European and American casualties counted? Does colonialism itself fall outside the definition of warfare, presumably on the grounds that only one side has effective weapons? Should this reckoning exclude the nonmale deaths at the siege of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin? If the point at issue here is how prone societies are to engage in lethal violence, then male mortality caused by warfare is clearly too narrow a category to be meaningful. This is true even putting aside the fact that these pre-state people lack written records, and that traditional narratives of warfare tend to grossly exaggerate the numbers involved in it.

And is it not a little preposterous to make comparisons like this one on the basis of percentages when there are such radical differences in the sizes of these populations? Pinker notes that “two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States.” 12Is this a meaningful statement? Any extended family with twenty-five members suffers a death from time to time. Is this in any way equivalent to the loss of five million people out of the whole population? The destruction of ten million people would require a prolonged and determined campaign of violence mounted by societies that were equipped to carry it out — not unthinkable, given the history of the Western world. It would mean that the methods required to engage in violence on such a scale would have to have been in readiness, as we all know they are. Does this reflect at all on our predispositions? More to the point, deaths in a band of fifty could never fall below two percent, while the United States could lose two and a half million people and not exceed one percent, which, by this style of reckoning, would make us the less violent society. And why are we comparing a male war party to the entire population of the United States in any case?

Finally, is it reasonable to debunk the myth of the Noble Savage by pondering any twentieth-century society, however remote and exotic? We can have no knowledge of their history, so we cannot know if what appears to us as primitivity is not dispossession and marginalization. Pinker himself notes that some kind of cultural impoverishment happened among the Tasmanians after they migrated from Australia. 13I hold no particular brief for the notion of primal innocence, yet neither am I content to see so defective a case made against it. But the point of the graph Pinker uses to illustrate his argument is to make a statement about essential human nature, to tell us what we are, to propose an answer to as grave a query as we can make of ourselves, an answer leveraged against highly questionable data presented as if it had the authority of scientific objectivity behind it.

There is a slackness that is pervasively characteristic of this important conversation. I incline to attribute it to the myth of the threshold I mentioned earlier, the notion that, after Darwin, after Nietzsche, after Freud, after structuralism and post-structuralism, after Crick and Watson and the death of God, some assumptions were to be regarded as fixed and inevitable and others as exposed for all time and for all purposes as naive and untenable, supplanted by a better understanding. Galileo is invoked often. In denominating any moment in history, whether real or imagined, as the threshold moment, a writer or school is asserting a prerogative, the right to characterize the past and establish the terms in which discourse will be conducted from this point forward. Some transformative concept has obliged us to rethink the world in its new light, assuming pervasive error in previous thought and its survivals. The flood of neologisms into certain disciplines seems meant to signal radical departure. Since Darwinism is an important model for many writers in this style, one might expect the evolution of culture to have a place in their worldview. But this transformation they describe is like saltation so complete as to have leapt free of genetic inheritance. In culture as in nature there is no leaving the past behind, but to have done so, to have stepped over a threshold that separates old error from new insight, is the given from which these schools of thought proceed, as posture and as method. Triumphalism was never the friend of reason. And the tone of too many of these books is patronizing. Still, however these writers regard their readers, as bringers of truth to those who sit in darkness they should act on their stated devotion to intellectual rigor.