My last three posts were easy to write. They explained humanity's zest for living as an evolutionary freak that made human beings cravers of life and sex and high-level reasoners and fantasizers. Evolution has hardwired us to love life, not death. Finding genuine solace for dying is hard.
Some think it's impossible. Dying is so contrary to what most people want that a vast majority of the earth's population denies, ignores, and euphemizes it. All the major religions preach some type of immortality. Most people who say they believe in a god without belonging to a church usually claim to believe in life after death, as do many agnostics and skeptics, among them the composer Brahms. Omitting direct reference to Christianity from his Requiem, Brahms nonetheless avows immortality throughout the work as humanity's only real compensation for dying.
The human wish to hide and soften death is equally understandable. From mashed and bloody roadkill seen through a car window to the stench of an unseen carcass in the woods hitting your nose like a fist, it can be ugly. Slaughterhouses aren't for the weak of heart or stomach. Nor are the institutions that process human remains -- morgues, mortuaries, medical schools, and the like. Little wonder dead animals in general and dead human beings in particular are so rarely seen. Seeing them can be shocking to those who don't handle them professionally or kill them for sport or a living. Euphemisms like"passed on" or "passed away" counteract our instinctive recoil from imagining ourselves as rotting cadavers or being eaten alive.
Such denials and evasions mirror a tragic contradiction at the heart of human existence. We're born with instincts that drive us toward life and away from death. We yearn to live, yet all our experience of the world teaches us we unfailingly die.
The contradiction is intractable. Though religionists claim to have found supernatural answers to it, they've in fact found only human fraudulence, self-deception, and craziness. Their so-called revelations and miracles never withstand scientific scrutiny, which tells us instead that sentient intelligence is nothing but a random offshoot of insentient and unintelligent natural processes.
These processes are, I believe, ultimately linked to an unpredictable and immeasurable substance or stuff at the core of reality. This stuff or substance is an infinite potentiality capable of becoming countless kinds of finite matter by somehow transforming its potential into the chaotic lawfulness we see around us in our own cosmos. In 6th century B.C.E. Greece, Heraclitus explained this chaotic lawfulness as the product of an endless flux of warring elements, an explanation that, while wonderfully insightful at the time, needs some updating. Heraclitus' hard-matter universe of flux is today better imagined as an infinite, meta-dimensional energy field or reservoir that somehow unpredictably morphs itself into countless subsidiary kinds of finite matter. It might be thought of as quantum uncertainty writ infinitely large.
So alien to life in general and human thought and feeling in particular is this basic energy that human existence seems altogether incidental and insignificant in relation to it. So far as we know, it in no way echoes or responds to human intelligence or emotion. If this isn't discouraging enough, its infinite particularity or singularity also alienates us from one another.
This is because all material reality is infinitely divisible. No matter how far you burrow into smallness or expand into bigness, you never reach an end. You never find a final, indivisible object. There is always an infinity of additional particulars and singularities awaiting you, and they always have an inimitable and unrepeatable uniqueness no other material objects ever have. They are all absolutely separate and different from each other, no matter where in the All they are and no matter what kind of dimensionality, compactness, diffuseness, monotonousness, or other feature they have. What unites them is the basic substance they're made of. And one of the key attributes of that substance, along with its infinite potentiality and unpredictability, is an infinite divisibility that entails uniqueness on every object it becomes.
I say "entails" because the separateness of material objects from each other that follows from the infinite divisibility of ultimate matter is in my opinion an inescapable fact of existence. Imagining the All, as I do, as a material stuff or substance whose potential to become subsidiary objects is infinite, yet which never itself objectifies, implies that every existing object is finally indefinable.
This in turn implies not only that all material objects are radically separate from and alien to each other but that finally what they're made of and where they come from can't be fixed or specified. All objects are totally alien to all other objects and have absolutely indeterminate origins.
I find little solace for dying in these convincing (to me) speculations. Unlike the All, human beings are instinctively affectionate. They're capable of strong emotional attachments to each other and to pets, homes, nature, and countless other things. Unlike inorganic objects, they can sense and comprehend the world around them, imagine fictional worlds, generate and reciprocate love. Compelled to try to understand the workings and origins of nature, they've repeatedly explained it as the handiwork of deities onto whom they project their own capacity to think and feel. While such explanations have been completely undermined by modern science, they're still at least partly believed in by most people and have an enormous impact on their notions of reality. Most people persist in believing that the universe personally cares about them and their well-being. They refuse to think of themselves as radically alienated objects in a material All made of some absolutely indefinable, uncaring stuff.
Those of us who do think of ourselves in this way find living and dying in such cosmic -- and metacosmic -- isolation cold comfort at best. I myself find it dubious luck to have been born, through no choice of my own, with a capacity to think and feel that I'll lose forever when I die. I get little solace from knowing that the beauty and vibrancy of living will completely end with my death. As Clint Eastwood puts it in The Unforgiven, when a man dies he loses "all he has and all he's ever going to have."
Materialists have always acknowledged the harshness of human mortality. Lucretius says he wrote De Rerum Natura in verse to help sweeten the bitterness of its doctrine of personal annihilation. Even religious skeptics like Kierkegaard prefer leaps of faith to what they see as the existential horror of the Lucretian viewpoint. Dostoevsky's rumination on the decapitated head that for an instant grasps what has happened to it before it dies has chilled everyone who's read it -- theists, agnostics, and atheists alike.
I've had two close encounters with the Grim Reaper myself. Since I narrate one of them at length in the "Wilderness" section of the May 19, 2011 post of this blog, I won't rehash it here except to say it's about the heart attack I had in 1995 hiking alone in the Sierra Nevadas.
The other happened in the summer of 1951 when I was driving through rural upstate New York with my brother. We were returning to school in New England from our first summer with our guardian aunt and uncle in San Diego after our mother's death the winter before. Though only fifteen, I was an experienced driver and realized I had to slow for a hill I'd just started down in a light rain. Touching the brakes, I felt the tires hydroplaning us into a long, horrible skid I couldn't control. As we spun halfway round and began hurtling backwards down the two-lane road, I thought, So this is how I'll die.
Along with fear, shock, and disbelief, I remember above all tensing for a huge, crushing blow. Nothing flashed before my eyes but what was flashing by outside the car: every nerve and muscle in me was too busy trying to protect itself from that pulverizing blow. When suddenly I realized the car had spun all the way round and was again heading frontwards down the road, I fought without success to control it. We bounced off the left shoulder down a steep bank onto somebody's back lawn, which the front bumper hit with a frame-springing jolt. We sat a moment, dazed but unhurt. The skid had slowed us almost to a stop before we went off the highway.
Both of these near-death experiences showed me how little I want to die. Like everything else in this post, they suggest how hard it is for most human beings to find much solace in their own destruction. It can be even harder when close friends or relatives die, especially if they're one's own children.
Yet I do think such solace is possible. In my next post I'll explain why.
*********
requi
Friday, January 13, 2012
Sunday, December 11, 2011
CONSOLATION TWELVE: ZEST FOR LIVING (3)
In my last post, I argued that a zest for living is the strongest instinct terrestrial organisms have. Reinforced by billions of years of evolution, it helps them survive long enough to mate and perpetuate the genetic advantages natural selection's given them over the course of countless generations. It also helps blind them to their own mortality.
But in human beings and perhaps other large-brained mammals like whales and elephants, the chance emergence of high-level intelligence has created a personal awareness of dying that runs counter to their survival instincts. Though all human beings recoil naturally from their own extinction, many for example choosing to believe that the sensual/cognitive mechanisms they call "soul" or "spirit" are immaterial and immortal, atheists reject such notions, insisting that human death is total and irreversible.
In today's post I'll conclude my Zest for Living series by arguing not only that human self-awareness is a product of insentient nature but also that it both enhances and undermines our will to live. Obviously, all organic brains on planet earth have always consisted of nothing but a vast number of several atomic elements, chiefly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Jumbled into more and more complex molecules by evolutionary process, these atoms eventually became self-enclosed, self-regulating biological systems able to sense the outside world. As these sensing mechanisms got increasingly acute, neuronal circuitry to harness the information they fed their owners' brains got increasingly elaborate. Currently, the most complex terrestrial product of the process has been the human brain.
In other words, humanity's ability to apprehend, reason, imagine, fantasize, dream, sense, and so on emerged from chance combinations of atoms, each without a hint of any such ability. Human percipience and cognition arose from the oblivion of atomic mass and energy and consists now of nothing but trillions of electrochemical events constantly occuring in the human brain, each as void of consciousness as a grain of sand. The components of human intelligence are literally dumb as dirt.
But while we're alive and our brains are working, we have a vibrant sense of being alive and conscious that may be utterly unlike anything in this or any other cosmos. While the odds of human-like intelligence elsewhere in this cosmos seem high, given the billions of known galaxies and the billions of stars in each galaxy, there's no question that, even if intelligence has evolved elsewhere, it's as unique to each brain that manufactures it there as ours is here.
Throughout these Zest for Living posts I've stressed this uniqueness, which I've also called particularity or singularity, as essential to cosmic objects and by extrapolation to the All. I find it deeply consoling. If the All's basic stuff is infinitely singular, a conclusion implied by the empirical evidence of our cosmos, every thing it constitutes is infinitely unique and original. Every human life is as fresh and radiant as the entire cosmos but, unlike the cosmos, aware of being so -- another reason I love being alive.
The assumption that at bottom the All is as insentient as the natural order of our own cosmos, and that sentience is its rare and accidental offshoot, diminishes neither kind of being. It makes both more wonderful. Though consciousness is inorganic matter fortuitously jumbled awake, it can change itself and its surroundings in amazing ways. Rather than bemoaning the All's indifference to humanity, I cherish our great good luck in being able to experience and savor our human existence at all.
A billion years before it evolved, human intelligence was foreshadowed by primitive forms of mentation that were already miracles of happenstance. But with human intelligence a huge range of new realities materialized. Though the brain of an early sea-creature could neuronally re-create its surroundings, it couldn't make tools or fantasize. The human brain could.
When and in what sequence human beings began making tools, fantasizing, communicating, and doing the things that require human brainpower isn't known. But without an ability to communicate through sounds (speech) or markings (writing), they couldn't have reported real events or told made-up stories, though then as now fact and fiction often blurred. Nor could they have created and maintained social, religious, political, and military systems of order.
All such creativity depended on the communication of consciousness from brain to brain by one brain's putting its thoughts into some kind of symbolic code like spoken or written language, then a second brain's translating the code back into its own electrochemical impulses. All communication consists of a constant translation of brain impulses into and out of coding systems. No human thought or feeling ever exists except as a material brain event or as codified matter.
Many philosophers dismiss the theory that human consciousness is streaming electrons as crudely reductionist. They argue that the theory doesn't account for the creativeness and originality of what they call purely mental states of being. I disagree. Human thought and feeling are obviously generated by brain electricity, and accounting for them in this way is anything but crudely reductionist. In the first place, more than a century of brain research has shown that all animal intelligence is so generated. To deny or ignore this research and cling to exploded theories of immaterial mentation is like insisting the sun orbits the earth daily.
A related claim is that yes, human consciousness consists of electrons but no, the thoughts and feelings it produces aren't the same thing as electrons. Electrons can't know or feel, yet human brains throb with knowing and feeling. To equate electrons with thought and feeling is both to mix apples and oranges and to deny that the brain creats a brand-new emergent reality out of electrons.
While I agree that a thought or feeling is in some ways unlike an electron, I disagree they're fundamentally different. Like an internal combustion made of individually impotent but collectively potent parts, the brain is made of countless neruonal circuits that organize electrons into doing what brains do. Just as an engine is nothing but the sum of its parts, so too is a brain. Without gas for the engine and electrochemistry for the brain, neither works. No material system ever mysteriously transcends the sum of its parts. The most basic part or component of reality is an unknown stuff or substance with an infinite potential to realize itself in new combinations. The only difference between an engine and a brain is that one's a product of intelligent design and the other isn't.
The newness, freshness, and originality of brain products is what I think the anti-reductionists are getting at in not wanting to "reduce" intelligence to electrical energy. They don't want to lessen the uniqueness of the different stages of cosmic evolution or suggest that they were planned or pre-determined in any way. Nor do I. I too see every event in cosmic history s having a uniqueness that nothing else in the All has. One of the most astounding and unlikely of these events was the evolution here on earth of the human brain.
Human intelligence has created countless new realities, among them many interesting fictions about, and one solid factual explanation of, cosmic origins. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have traditionally held that a single deity created heaven and earth is six days, populating it with fish and birds on day five and animals and a man and woman made in the deity's own image on day six, and then on day seven rested. Though scores of other creation stories exist, they tend to echo this one's fictional charm and factual emptiness. Very different is the scientific explanation know as the Big Bang theory. It rests on centuries of experimental proof that gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces separated thirteen billion years ago in the Big Bang and now dominate cosmic mass and energy.
All such mental creations are unique. They're as fresh, new, and beautiful as my sense of winter sunlight or your sense of summer moonlight. They can be as fearsome and unsettling as a sudden insight into one's own mortality, an insight most organisms are incapable of having. Human existence is a uniquely unplanned and spontaneous product of the All, as are each of the molecules human beings are made of and each of the electrons that generate their thoughts and feelings. To equate human consciousness with the electrons that cause it is not to crudely reduce it but to link it to the infinite worth of absolute material Being. So seen, human life assumes an All-like gloriousness.
But it's also perishable in a way the All's inhuman and oblivious fecundity is not. The human joy of living and knowing ends in death. No matter how it's rationalized, dying is a hard, hurtful fact of human existence. Having a capacity to reason sequentially and to create original marvels like space travel, digital technology, and artificial intelligence has helped enhance our zest for living, to the point of making some of us want to postpone death by somehow replacing or renewing our aging minds and bodies. Though I don't share this wish, I acknowledge the tragic underside of human life and its utter transience. I know I must get myself emotionally and intellectually ready to die.
In my next post I'll begin explaining how, as an aging materialist and atheist, I'm trying to do just that.
*******
But in human beings and perhaps other large-brained mammals like whales and elephants, the chance emergence of high-level intelligence has created a personal awareness of dying that runs counter to their survival instincts. Though all human beings recoil naturally from their own extinction, many for example choosing to believe that the sensual/cognitive mechanisms they call "soul" or "spirit" are immaterial and immortal, atheists reject such notions, insisting that human death is total and irreversible.
In today's post I'll conclude my Zest for Living series by arguing not only that human self-awareness is a product of insentient nature but also that it both enhances and undermines our will to live. Obviously, all organic brains on planet earth have always consisted of nothing but a vast number of several atomic elements, chiefly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Jumbled into more and more complex molecules by evolutionary process, these atoms eventually became self-enclosed, self-regulating biological systems able to sense the outside world. As these sensing mechanisms got increasingly acute, neuronal circuitry to harness the information they fed their owners' brains got increasingly elaborate. Currently, the most complex terrestrial product of the process has been the human brain.
In other words, humanity's ability to apprehend, reason, imagine, fantasize, dream, sense, and so on emerged from chance combinations of atoms, each without a hint of any such ability. Human percipience and cognition arose from the oblivion of atomic mass and energy and consists now of nothing but trillions of electrochemical events constantly occuring in the human brain, each as void of consciousness as a grain of sand. The components of human intelligence are literally dumb as dirt.
But while we're alive and our brains are working, we have a vibrant sense of being alive and conscious that may be utterly unlike anything in this or any other cosmos. While the odds of human-like intelligence elsewhere in this cosmos seem high, given the billions of known galaxies and the billions of stars in each galaxy, there's no question that, even if intelligence has evolved elsewhere, it's as unique to each brain that manufactures it there as ours is here.
Throughout these Zest for Living posts I've stressed this uniqueness, which I've also called particularity or singularity, as essential to cosmic objects and by extrapolation to the All. I find it deeply consoling. If the All's basic stuff is infinitely singular, a conclusion implied by the empirical evidence of our cosmos, every thing it constitutes is infinitely unique and original. Every human life is as fresh and radiant as the entire cosmos but, unlike the cosmos, aware of being so -- another reason I love being alive.
The assumption that at bottom the All is as insentient as the natural order of our own cosmos, and that sentience is its rare and accidental offshoot, diminishes neither kind of being. It makes both more wonderful. Though consciousness is inorganic matter fortuitously jumbled awake, it can change itself and its surroundings in amazing ways. Rather than bemoaning the All's indifference to humanity, I cherish our great good luck in being able to experience and savor our human existence at all.
A billion years before it evolved, human intelligence was foreshadowed by primitive forms of mentation that were already miracles of happenstance. But with human intelligence a huge range of new realities materialized. Though the brain of an early sea-creature could neuronally re-create its surroundings, it couldn't make tools or fantasize. The human brain could.
When and in what sequence human beings began making tools, fantasizing, communicating, and doing the things that require human brainpower isn't known. But without an ability to communicate through sounds (speech) or markings (writing), they couldn't have reported real events or told made-up stories, though then as now fact and fiction often blurred. Nor could they have created and maintained social, religious, political, and military systems of order.
All such creativity depended on the communication of consciousness from brain to brain by one brain's putting its thoughts into some kind of symbolic code like spoken or written language, then a second brain's translating the code back into its own electrochemical impulses. All communication consists of a constant translation of brain impulses into and out of coding systems. No human thought or feeling ever exists except as a material brain event or as codified matter.
Many philosophers dismiss the theory that human consciousness is streaming electrons as crudely reductionist. They argue that the theory doesn't account for the creativeness and originality of what they call purely mental states of being. I disagree. Human thought and feeling are obviously generated by brain electricity, and accounting for them in this way is anything but crudely reductionist. In the first place, more than a century of brain research has shown that all animal intelligence is so generated. To deny or ignore this research and cling to exploded theories of immaterial mentation is like insisting the sun orbits the earth daily.
A related claim is that yes, human consciousness consists of electrons but no, the thoughts and feelings it produces aren't the same thing as electrons. Electrons can't know or feel, yet human brains throb with knowing and feeling. To equate electrons with thought and feeling is both to mix apples and oranges and to deny that the brain creats a brand-new emergent reality out of electrons.
While I agree that a thought or feeling is in some ways unlike an electron, I disagree they're fundamentally different. Like an internal combustion made of individually impotent but collectively potent parts, the brain is made of countless neruonal circuits that organize electrons into doing what brains do. Just as an engine is nothing but the sum of its parts, so too is a brain. Without gas for the engine and electrochemistry for the brain, neither works. No material system ever mysteriously transcends the sum of its parts. The most basic part or component of reality is an unknown stuff or substance with an infinite potential to realize itself in new combinations. The only difference between an engine and a brain is that one's a product of intelligent design and the other isn't.
The newness, freshness, and originality of brain products is what I think the anti-reductionists are getting at in not wanting to "reduce" intelligence to electrical energy. They don't want to lessen the uniqueness of the different stages of cosmic evolution or suggest that they were planned or pre-determined in any way. Nor do I. I too see every event in cosmic history s having a uniqueness that nothing else in the All has. One of the most astounding and unlikely of these events was the evolution here on earth of the human brain.
Human intelligence has created countless new realities, among them many interesting fictions about, and one solid factual explanation of, cosmic origins. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have traditionally held that a single deity created heaven and earth is six days, populating it with fish and birds on day five and animals and a man and woman made in the deity's own image on day six, and then on day seven rested. Though scores of other creation stories exist, they tend to echo this one's fictional charm and factual emptiness. Very different is the scientific explanation know as the Big Bang theory. It rests on centuries of experimental proof that gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces separated thirteen billion years ago in the Big Bang and now dominate cosmic mass and energy.
All such mental creations are unique. They're as fresh, new, and beautiful as my sense of winter sunlight or your sense of summer moonlight. They can be as fearsome and unsettling as a sudden insight into one's own mortality, an insight most organisms are incapable of having. Human existence is a uniquely unplanned and spontaneous product of the All, as are each of the molecules human beings are made of and each of the electrons that generate their thoughts and feelings. To equate human consciousness with the electrons that cause it is not to crudely reduce it but to link it to the infinite worth of absolute material Being. So seen, human life assumes an All-like gloriousness.
But it's also perishable in a way the All's inhuman and oblivious fecundity is not. The human joy of living and knowing ends in death. No matter how it's rationalized, dying is a hard, hurtful fact of human existence. Having a capacity to reason sequentially and to create original marvels like space travel, digital technology, and artificial intelligence has helped enhance our zest for living, to the point of making some of us want to postpone death by somehow replacing or renewing our aging minds and bodies. Though I don't share this wish, I acknowledge the tragic underside of human life and its utter transience. I know I must get myself emotionally and intellectually ready to die.
In my next post I'll begin explaining how, as an aging materialist and atheist, I'm trying to do just that.
*******
Saturday, November 12, 2011
CONSOLATION ELEVEN: ZEST FOR LIVING (2)
In my last post, I argued that the ultimate source of the human zest for living is the interconnectedness and unrepeatableness of the material All from which we and the rest of the cosmos came. I stressed the randomness of cosmic evolution and its collision between order and disorder, a collision I infer is in some way basic to the All. I also pointed out the solace I draw from my own existence, which I consider as valuable and self-justified as any.
In today's post, I want to highlight terrestrial evolution as the immediate source of our zest for living. Once Earth had aggregated from planetessimals into a crusted, molten ball and chanced to acquire the size, orbit, tilt, and solar position it has, it became a unique platform for organic life.
Exactly how this happened is not fully understood. For example, astronomers have just discovered a nearby star at the center of a sphere of gas with huge amounts of water frozen to near-absolute zero at the sphere's outer fringes. They theorize that earth's oceans may have resulted from similarly frozen water at the fringes of our own solar system, transported to earth's surface by comets. The theory contradicts most current assumptions about how the earth's oceans formed. Rather than filled with rainfall from earth's own clouds, our oceans may have filled with the water of comets from deep solar space.
What were the odds against human intelligence emerging from such an accidental series of events? The primordial gasses and dusts of the solar system had to be just massive and moving enough to create a sun of just the right size and heat, with just enough leftover debris to create a planet with just the right orbit and spin for collecting comet-ice (if it did), then warm it for billions of years with sunlight and vulcanism. Random molecular action in this oceanic hatchery had to produce increasingly complex, self-replicating inorganic compounds, which then had to enclose themselves in membrane sacs and turn into organic cells.
The odds against all this happening must have been off the charts. Similarly mind-boggling is that each of these cells was an absolutely new and inimitable object in the cosmos. It was a perfect singularity, not in the sense of being physically unexplainable but rather of being a unique event in cosmic space-time. Nothing else did, would, or could ever occupy its slot in the cosmos. Though organisms on countless other planets in countless other solar systems and galaxies may be constantly evolving from inorganic matter, they're as unique there as ours are here. The existence of each of these cells and of every other particle of matter in the cosmos cannot and will not be repeated elsewhere.
Whether such singularity is true of the All as a whole is impossible to know. If space, time, mass, and energy before our Big Bang were indistinguishable and interchangeable parts of a featureless soup of infinite heat/density, as the physics of post-Planck Era symmetry-breaking implies, of what precisely did their uniqueness consist? Furthermore, states of being having more or less than the four dimensions of our space-time, assuming such states exist, may not particularize objects the way our cosmos does.
Yet by extrapolating from the empirical evidence here, I suspect that the fundamental stuff of the All is infinitely singular and particular. Since this is a pretty counterintuitive proposition, let me put it another way: the basic component of ultimate reality -- the core ingredient or material of all existence -- is, like every object in space-time, infinitely divisible. No matter how many times you halve something in space-time, you can continue dividing it forever. There is no irreducible particle of stuff or matter anywhere, and when I speak of such basic stuff or matter I think of it as being somehow infinitely divisible. Since infinite divisibility implies not only endless particularity but endless equality of value among all particulars, I must be a singularity that is as valuable as anything that exists. Though obviously speculative, this inference is based not on wishful thinking but on good empirical evidence.
In other words, even before terrestrial organisms developed sensations of any kind, they were unique singularities within the cosmos and probably unique singularities within the All. The visceral belief of all human children that they're immortal stems in part from their sense of their own uniqueness as physical objects. Vastly more important, though, is their gut feeling they cannot die. So potent is this feeling that most people never outgrow or unlearn it, seduced as they are by magical thinking into seeing something in themselves as immaterial or supernatural. Against overwhelming natural evidence, they refuse to believe in their own mortality.
Their uniqueness as material objects has been transformed into a sense of immortality by the two most powerful instincts imbedded in them by natural selection. The first, of course, is the instinct to survive. Only organisms that adapt well to their environment through genetic mutation do survive, and every such mutation reinforces both their sense of their own indestructibility and their zest for living.
The second is the instinct to reproduce. Superficially, reproduction doesn't seem to be as obviously self-aggrandizing a drive as personal survival. Sexuality, controlled by more specialized biological triggers than the other three primal f's (feeding, fighting, fleeing), doesn't in the same way affect the individual organism's own quotidian survival. Yet, absent reproduction, every species will quickly die out, so in every successful species sexuality is as important as outliving famines, predators, or life-and-death battles.
These two primal instincts, along with countless supporting instincts and sensors, strengthened every organism's sense of individual selfhood to the point of overwhelming its ability to grasp or even intuit the fact of its own death. Many survival mechanisms, such as herd, flock, or school bonding, evolved to preserve and enhance this feeling of personal indestructibility, though many other instincts like self-sacrifice for the hive or colony, muscular paralysis in the jaws or claws of predators, or white-light visions at death point the other way.
I'm oversimplifying, of course. Exactly how each of the countless species that have existed on the earth's surface developed, and how intense their zest for living was, are questions answerable only in a generalized, proof-poor way. But the basic facts of organic evolution are indisputable. First, all terrestrial organisms are locked into the mortal cycle of birth, life, and death. Second, all terrestrial organisms except perhaps certain bacteria sustain themselves by absorbing the nutrients of other organisms, which has made the earth seem to some people a murderous place (others have called it a charnel house or death-kitchen.) Third and most important, all terrestrial organisms instinctively deny they will die.
This instinctive denial shows how deeply engrained our zest for living is, saturating every cell, bone, nerve, and muscle of our being. We love life because we came into existence through a multi-billion-year process of genetic mutation that brought our ancestors from sea to land, to mammalian reproduction, to bi-podal locomotion, and to extraordinary brain size. Thoroughly random, the process endowed each new species with an entirely new kind of cosmic reality and each new creature with a singularity unique in cosmic history.
In my next post, I'll discuss how the emergence of human intelligence both enhanced and challenged our zest for living.
*********
In today's post, I want to highlight terrestrial evolution as the immediate source of our zest for living. Once Earth had aggregated from planetessimals into a crusted, molten ball and chanced to acquire the size, orbit, tilt, and solar position it has, it became a unique platform for organic life.
Exactly how this happened is not fully understood. For example, astronomers have just discovered a nearby star at the center of a sphere of gas with huge amounts of water frozen to near-absolute zero at the sphere's outer fringes. They theorize that earth's oceans may have resulted from similarly frozen water at the fringes of our own solar system, transported to earth's surface by comets. The theory contradicts most current assumptions about how the earth's oceans formed. Rather than filled with rainfall from earth's own clouds, our oceans may have filled with the water of comets from deep solar space.
What were the odds against human intelligence emerging from such an accidental series of events? The primordial gasses and dusts of the solar system had to be just massive and moving enough to create a sun of just the right size and heat, with just enough leftover debris to create a planet with just the right orbit and spin for collecting comet-ice (if it did), then warm it for billions of years with sunlight and vulcanism. Random molecular action in this oceanic hatchery had to produce increasingly complex, self-replicating inorganic compounds, which then had to enclose themselves in membrane sacs and turn into organic cells.
The odds against all this happening must have been off the charts. Similarly mind-boggling is that each of these cells was an absolutely new and inimitable object in the cosmos. It was a perfect singularity, not in the sense of being physically unexplainable but rather of being a unique event in cosmic space-time. Nothing else did, would, or could ever occupy its slot in the cosmos. Though organisms on countless other planets in countless other solar systems and galaxies may be constantly evolving from inorganic matter, they're as unique there as ours are here. The existence of each of these cells and of every other particle of matter in the cosmos cannot and will not be repeated elsewhere.
Whether such singularity is true of the All as a whole is impossible to know. If space, time, mass, and energy before our Big Bang were indistinguishable and interchangeable parts of a featureless soup of infinite heat/density, as the physics of post-Planck Era symmetry-breaking implies, of what precisely did their uniqueness consist? Furthermore, states of being having more or less than the four dimensions of our space-time, assuming such states exist, may not particularize objects the way our cosmos does.
Yet by extrapolating from the empirical evidence here, I suspect that the fundamental stuff of the All is infinitely singular and particular. Since this is a pretty counterintuitive proposition, let me put it another way: the basic component of ultimate reality -- the core ingredient or material of all existence -- is, like every object in space-time, infinitely divisible. No matter how many times you halve something in space-time, you can continue dividing it forever. There is no irreducible particle of stuff or matter anywhere, and when I speak of such basic stuff or matter I think of it as being somehow infinitely divisible. Since infinite divisibility implies not only endless particularity but endless equality of value among all particulars, I must be a singularity that is as valuable as anything that exists. Though obviously speculative, this inference is based not on wishful thinking but on good empirical evidence.
In other words, even before terrestrial organisms developed sensations of any kind, they were unique singularities within the cosmos and probably unique singularities within the All. The visceral belief of all human children that they're immortal stems in part from their sense of their own uniqueness as physical objects. Vastly more important, though, is their gut feeling they cannot die. So potent is this feeling that most people never outgrow or unlearn it, seduced as they are by magical thinking into seeing something in themselves as immaterial or supernatural. Against overwhelming natural evidence, they refuse to believe in their own mortality.
Their uniqueness as material objects has been transformed into a sense of immortality by the two most powerful instincts imbedded in them by natural selection. The first, of course, is the instinct to survive. Only organisms that adapt well to their environment through genetic mutation do survive, and every such mutation reinforces both their sense of their own indestructibility and their zest for living.
The second is the instinct to reproduce. Superficially, reproduction doesn't seem to be as obviously self-aggrandizing a drive as personal survival. Sexuality, controlled by more specialized biological triggers than the other three primal f's (feeding, fighting, fleeing), doesn't in the same way affect the individual organism's own quotidian survival. Yet, absent reproduction, every species will quickly die out, so in every successful species sexuality is as important as outliving famines, predators, or life-and-death battles.
These two primal instincts, along with countless supporting instincts and sensors, strengthened every organism's sense of individual selfhood to the point of overwhelming its ability to grasp or even intuit the fact of its own death. Many survival mechanisms, such as herd, flock, or school bonding, evolved to preserve and enhance this feeling of personal indestructibility, though many other instincts like self-sacrifice for the hive or colony, muscular paralysis in the jaws or claws of predators, or white-light visions at death point the other way.
I'm oversimplifying, of course. Exactly how each of the countless species that have existed on the earth's surface developed, and how intense their zest for living was, are questions answerable only in a generalized, proof-poor way. But the basic facts of organic evolution are indisputable. First, all terrestrial organisms are locked into the mortal cycle of birth, life, and death. Second, all terrestrial organisms except perhaps certain bacteria sustain themselves by absorbing the nutrients of other organisms, which has made the earth seem to some people a murderous place (others have called it a charnel house or death-kitchen.) Third and most important, all terrestrial organisms instinctively deny they will die.
This instinctive denial shows how deeply engrained our zest for living is, saturating every cell, bone, nerve, and muscle of our being. We love life because we came into existence through a multi-billion-year process of genetic mutation that brought our ancestors from sea to land, to mammalian reproduction, to bi-podal locomotion, and to extraordinary brain size. Thoroughly random, the process endowed each new species with an entirely new kind of cosmic reality and each new creature with a singularity unique in cosmic history.
In my next post, I'll discuss how the emergence of human intelligence both enhanced and challenged our zest for living.
*********
Saturday, October 22, 2011
CONSOLATION TEN: ZEST FOR LIVING (1)
Most non-atheists see atheists as unhappy campers. They think that atheists find no meaning or purpose in human life and nature as a whole. They believe that without a transcendent, supernatural intelligence to validate it, nature offers no basis for human joy. To them, it seems impossible that an atheist who on one hand denies a divine plan for humanity and on the other affirms a random materiality at the core of being can find human life happy or fulfilling. They feel that all atheists must be uniquely prone to pessimism and depression in the face of existential discouragements like those caused by today's hard economic times.
In this and follow-up posts I want to explain to those who feel this way why I and most other atheists do not agree. On the contrary, we feel at least as much zest for living and as much pleasure in having been born as they. Furthermore, we much prefer our explanation of the world to theirs. The world is not the creation of supernatural and immaterial deities, we hold, but instead a boundless web of material substance that during the Big Bang lost its initial symmetries and became the time-space-mass-energy manifold that generated every atom in our cosmos,
Today I'll begin by explaining how I think this human zest for living, joie de vivre, or Lebensfreude originated. As I've said in earlier posts, materialists like me believe that all existence is material and that so-called nothingness and non-existence are human fictions. Everything, including human thought and feeling, consists at bottom of mass-energy. Every particle in our cosmos came from the Big Bang, which released all the matter of our stars and galaxies as well as the space-time they occupy. All the best evidence indicates that the Big Bang was a chance eruption of unknown natural forces.
We infer from the facts of our own cosmos that this eruption was not caused by a human attribute like cognition or emotion but was, like all the natural objects it produced -- stars, galaxies, black holes --, the result of a fundamentally non-rational, non-human randomness at the heart of reality. But how could objects as predictable as the black holes, galaxies, and stars of our world have emerged from such unpredictability?
Almost certainly, I would argue, from the same kind of clash between material order and disorder we see everywhere around us. Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces obey a rigid lawfulness yet intersect randomly in space-time. Not one black hole, galaxy, or star was planned, predestined, or "necessitated." They all arose from these four fundamental forces blindly driving atomic mass into black holes and stars. Then they just as blindly began recycling the debris from exploding stars and colliding galaxies into subsequent-generation solar systems. Everything in the cosmos emerged from a material order utterly oblivious of itself.
So too our solar system. Its originatiing clouds of dust and gas were pulled by gravity into a rotating disk with just enough mass and motion to cause a nuclear ignition at the centerpoint and just enough debris elsewhere to coalesce into orbiting satellites. Among these satellites, our earth was just close enough, just tilted enough, rotating on its own axis just fast enough, with an orbit just circular enough (and so on) to evolve human sentience. The laws of nature formed our oxygen-wrapped planet and us by chance.
Somehow human sentience emerged from this mystifying blend of order and disorder. I say "mystifying" because from a human point of view the ultimate facts of existence are unknown and quite probably unknowable. So-called supernatural revelations are products of human fraud or delusion and useless except as case examples of crime or craziness. Scientific study is incomparably more useful and valid, but it too is limited by its current inability to verify anything beyond the physics of our cosmos -- or even to understand that physics fully. It hasn't yet ascertained what the "dark energy" making space-time balloon nor what the "dark matter" comprising most of cosmic mass are. It doesn't yet know for sure whether neutrinos travel faster than light. It has no idea how or why the Big Bang happened.
All we can currently do is speculate about where nature's from and headed by extrapolating from what we know about it here to the mysterious unknowns that enfold us. One conclusion I've drawn from this kind of speculative extrapolaton is that infinite reality is as natural and material -- and as interconnected and continuous -- as the finite reality we experience here. The All, as materialists since Epicurus and Lucretius have termed it, is an endless and timeless continuum of some fundamental substance.
Another conclusion I've reached is that the finite particulars of our Big Bang, our cosmos, our solar system, and our species are unique and original within the All. That is, they are finite manifestations of infinite material Being. No matter how closely ours may resemble other Big Bangs, cosmoses, solar systems, planets, or species elsewhere in the All, the particulars of the mesh of pattern and accident that formed us here can never recur. That unique mesh created a circumstance and reality different from any other that ever did or will exist.
We are the only material objects of precisely our shape and substance that could have emerged from the randomly interacting natural laws of our cosmos. The melding, blending, and amalgamation that resulted from the clash of order and disorder here is inimitable. As products of evolutionary chance, we think and feel in a way nothing else ever did or will.
In other words, our sentience is the unique offshoot of random convergences in this unique cosmos. While it may resemble sentience elsewhere here or in the All, it can never be duplicated or even approximated. It stands irreducibly alone, occupying an entirely new and unrepeatable existence within the totality of the All's patterned chaos. It's as worthy and valuable as the All itself simply because it too exists. Material existence in any form never needs any validation or justification. It is as infinitely self-validating and self-justifying as the All itself, which is all material being. Its possibilities for self-realization are limitless, to me an exciting and inspiring thought. Moreover, my sense of my own value and uniqueness in this infinity of material being makes me especially glad that, unlike the inorganic matter I'm made of, I'm somewhat self-aware.
In my next post, I'll extend this notion of value and uniqueness to human evolution and argue that my zest for living is rooted in, but not confined to, that same inorganic matter.
**************
In this and follow-up posts I want to explain to those who feel this way why I and most other atheists do not agree. On the contrary, we feel at least as much zest for living and as much pleasure in having been born as they. Furthermore, we much prefer our explanation of the world to theirs. The world is not the creation of supernatural and immaterial deities, we hold, but instead a boundless web of material substance that during the Big Bang lost its initial symmetries and became the time-space-mass-energy manifold that generated every atom in our cosmos,
Today I'll begin by explaining how I think this human zest for living, joie de vivre, or Lebensfreude originated. As I've said in earlier posts, materialists like me believe that all existence is material and that so-called nothingness and non-existence are human fictions. Everything, including human thought and feeling, consists at bottom of mass-energy. Every particle in our cosmos came from the Big Bang, which released all the matter of our stars and galaxies as well as the space-time they occupy. All the best evidence indicates that the Big Bang was a chance eruption of unknown natural forces.
We infer from the facts of our own cosmos that this eruption was not caused by a human attribute like cognition or emotion but was, like all the natural objects it produced -- stars, galaxies, black holes --, the result of a fundamentally non-rational, non-human randomness at the heart of reality. But how could objects as predictable as the black holes, galaxies, and stars of our world have emerged from such unpredictability?
Almost certainly, I would argue, from the same kind of clash between material order and disorder we see everywhere around us. Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces obey a rigid lawfulness yet intersect randomly in space-time. Not one black hole, galaxy, or star was planned, predestined, or "necessitated." They all arose from these four fundamental forces blindly driving atomic mass into black holes and stars. Then they just as blindly began recycling the debris from exploding stars and colliding galaxies into subsequent-generation solar systems. Everything in the cosmos emerged from a material order utterly oblivious of itself.
So too our solar system. Its originatiing clouds of dust and gas were pulled by gravity into a rotating disk with just enough mass and motion to cause a nuclear ignition at the centerpoint and just enough debris elsewhere to coalesce into orbiting satellites. Among these satellites, our earth was just close enough, just tilted enough, rotating on its own axis just fast enough, with an orbit just circular enough (and so on) to evolve human sentience. The laws of nature formed our oxygen-wrapped planet and us by chance.
Somehow human sentience emerged from this mystifying blend of order and disorder. I say "mystifying" because from a human point of view the ultimate facts of existence are unknown and quite probably unknowable. So-called supernatural revelations are products of human fraud or delusion and useless except as case examples of crime or craziness. Scientific study is incomparably more useful and valid, but it too is limited by its current inability to verify anything beyond the physics of our cosmos -- or even to understand that physics fully. It hasn't yet ascertained what the "dark energy" making space-time balloon nor what the "dark matter" comprising most of cosmic mass are. It doesn't yet know for sure whether neutrinos travel faster than light. It has no idea how or why the Big Bang happened.
All we can currently do is speculate about where nature's from and headed by extrapolating from what we know about it here to the mysterious unknowns that enfold us. One conclusion I've drawn from this kind of speculative extrapolaton is that infinite reality is as natural and material -- and as interconnected and continuous -- as the finite reality we experience here. The All, as materialists since Epicurus and Lucretius have termed it, is an endless and timeless continuum of some fundamental substance.
Another conclusion I've reached is that the finite particulars of our Big Bang, our cosmos, our solar system, and our species are unique and original within the All. That is, they are finite manifestations of infinite material Being. No matter how closely ours may resemble other Big Bangs, cosmoses, solar systems, planets, or species elsewhere in the All, the particulars of the mesh of pattern and accident that formed us here can never recur. That unique mesh created a circumstance and reality different from any other that ever did or will exist.
We are the only material objects of precisely our shape and substance that could have emerged from the randomly interacting natural laws of our cosmos. The melding, blending, and amalgamation that resulted from the clash of order and disorder here is inimitable. As products of evolutionary chance, we think and feel in a way nothing else ever did or will.
In other words, our sentience is the unique offshoot of random convergences in this unique cosmos. While it may resemble sentience elsewhere here or in the All, it can never be duplicated or even approximated. It stands irreducibly alone, occupying an entirely new and unrepeatable existence within the totality of the All's patterned chaos. It's as worthy and valuable as the All itself simply because it too exists. Material existence in any form never needs any validation or justification. It is as infinitely self-validating and self-justifying as the All itself, which is all material being. Its possibilities for self-realization are limitless, to me an exciting and inspiring thought. Moreover, my sense of my own value and uniqueness in this infinity of material being makes me especially glad that, unlike the inorganic matter I'm made of, I'm somewhat self-aware.
In my next post, I'll extend this notion of value and uniqueness to human evolution and argue that my zest for living is rooted in, but not confined to, that same inorganic matter.
**************
Monday, September 26, 2011
CONSOLATION NINE: HOW ATHEISM HELPED ME SURVIVE THE GREAT RECESSION
In my last post I suggested that atheism helps people manage money. Knowing how risky investing is, I didn't try to claim that atheism makes investing easy, merely that it fosters realistic, rational, and moderate habits of mind consistent with saving money and avoiding debt, setting modest investment goals and pursuing them sensibly, and resisting financial panics and euphorias. I argued that in many ways atheism is better suited than other worldviews to the hard facts of economic life. In this post, I'd like to explain how this atheistic mindset has helped me not just survive the recent Great Recession but turn it to financial advantage.
Let me start with the worst financial mistake I've made in recent years. Back in the 1970s, before I'd thought my way through to atheism, I felt I could make money easily. One of my ploys was to buy 50 one-ounce American Gold Eagles for about $20,000, or roughly $400 each, at the height of the 1970s gold bubble. Then for the next twenty years, while I was still working, I watched the Eagles tank, kicking myself for having swallowed all the 1970s hype about gold soaring to fabulous heights. Finally, when gold fell to under $200 an ounce, I swore to sell the Eagles as soon as they got anywhere near where I'd bought them and in 2002, seven years after retiring, dumped them for $368 apiece. Today they'd be worth five times that much -- if I still had them.
The cardinal rule I broke when I bought and sold the Eagles was the oldest and best in investing -- buy low, sell high. Pre-atheism, I acknowledged the rule but often ignored it, flitting in and out of stocks, bonds, and REITs like a moth around a light bulb. Post-atheism, I resolved to set my financial house in order. I began by investing only in mutual funds and not in individual stocks or bonds.
This meant switching all my pension, 401k and IRA stock holdings to indexed, broadly-diversified stock mutual funds. It also meant maximizing my annual contributions to these tax-free, deferred-compensation programs. And since I was approaching retirement and lived in Maryland, a high income-tax state with a triple-A bond rating, I started putting the rest of my money in a diversified Maryland municipal bond fund.
When I retired in 1995, I initiated my TIAA-CREF pension not as a defined benefit but as a defined contribution, in which the money I and my employers had contributed to my TIAA-CREF account over the years remained under my and my heirs' control -- except, of course, for the annual minimum distributions required by the IRS.
The tech bubble of 2000, the 9/11/01 attack, and the ensuing market volatility made me aware of a reality that I might well have missed in my pre-atheism days. It was that the stock market doctrine I'd always followed -- buy and hold -- was no longer working. So in 2004 I chose cautious market timing instead. Before, I'd been putting fixed amounts in my TIAA, IRA, and 401k accounts over the years and thus averaging market ups and downs. But since retiring in 1995, I'd only been taking out, not putting in, and I didn't want to expose my nest egg unnecessarily to the volatility of the post-2000 markets.
So I began timing the market in the most risk-averse way I could. In early 2004, having 100% of my deferred-compensation accounts in stock, I got nervous about the equity markets and began shifting my stock funds into money market funds (i.e., cash), which I could do without paying any fees or capital gains tax -- a huge advantage of the deferred-tax system that all investors should try to exploit. By late 2005 I was 100% in cash and, feeling the stock market was stabilizing, once again began moving back into stocks. By late 2006 I was again 100% in stocks, having dragged the transfer process out over months so as to cost-average. Luckily, my stock funds rose some 7% during the next eight months.
Then I really started getting nervous. For years I'd been watching the real estate market with disbelief, as shacky dumps and McMansions soared in price. Investment banks leveraged 30 to 1 were buying and selling the no-money-down mortgages of these shacky dumps and McMansions as exotic financial derivatives that no one seemed to understand. I certainly didn't, and when in early 2007 I started seeing reports that banks didn't even have these derivatives on their balance sheets, I concluded the bubble was ready to burst. So on May 18, 2007, I switched the 100% I had in stock 100% back into cash.
It was the best financial move of my life. Though it involved a lot of my own hard-earned bucks, it struck me then and now as all but risk-free. On one hand, everything pointed to a looming debacle in the housing and stock markets. On the other, my money-market funds were paying 5% interest -- a no-brainer of a choice. Sure enough, by March 2009 the markets had plunged by half, and I'd already begun inching back into stocks, a switch completed in late 2009. For a year, I watched the stock funds rise more than 10%, at which point I reversed again and began switching back into cash. Currently, I'm once more 100% in cash, where I'll stay till the current roller-coaster market settles down, hopefully to where I can again buy low.
In short, this old atheist dog did learn new tricks, not from atheist handbooks on how to invest, which don't exist, but from atheism's realistic, rational, and moderate turn of mind, which does. Behind all my financial moves in recent years has been an atheistic skepticism towards every kind of religious or economic panacea. I pay no more attention to the prophets of a new economic heaven or hell than to the old religious prophets. Above all, atheism's given me a flexible, broad-minded view of macro-economic reality I didn't used to have. Basing financial decisions more on national and international facts than on ups and downs in the markets, I now do my best to anticipate these ups and downs. And I always move slowly to smooth out market fluctuation. Though recently market-timing has worked far better than buy-and-hold, I'm open to changing the strategy at any time. The key, as all atheists know, is first to recognize and then to deal rationally with proveable realities.
Maybe I give atheism too much credit. Maybe sooner or later I'd have changed from buy and hold to market timing anyway. Yet I do feel that atheism's realism, rationality, and moderation helped me here. They made me a more disciplined and cautious investor and sharpened my sense both of the world's overall riskiness and of the vulnerability of my own life savings. They've made me better understand how careless and accident-prone many of my earlier maneuvers were and how careful money-wise I must now be.
In any case, since I began timing the markets in 2004, my deferred-compensation accounts have increased in value by 27%, despite extreme market volatility and the worst economic recession since the 1930s. My Maryland muni fund, which I 've steadily added savings to, has grown by 33%. All the while, I've been siphoning off a comfortable retirement income from both. In other words, I feel I've taken great economic comfort and consolation from atheism in these hard and dangerous times.
************
Let me start with the worst financial mistake I've made in recent years. Back in the 1970s, before I'd thought my way through to atheism, I felt I could make money easily. One of my ploys was to buy 50 one-ounce American Gold Eagles for about $20,000, or roughly $400 each, at the height of the 1970s gold bubble. Then for the next twenty years, while I was still working, I watched the Eagles tank, kicking myself for having swallowed all the 1970s hype about gold soaring to fabulous heights. Finally, when gold fell to under $200 an ounce, I swore to sell the Eagles as soon as they got anywhere near where I'd bought them and in 2002, seven years after retiring, dumped them for $368 apiece. Today they'd be worth five times that much -- if I still had them.
The cardinal rule I broke when I bought and sold the Eagles was the oldest and best in investing -- buy low, sell high. Pre-atheism, I acknowledged the rule but often ignored it, flitting in and out of stocks, bonds, and REITs like a moth around a light bulb. Post-atheism, I resolved to set my financial house in order. I began by investing only in mutual funds and not in individual stocks or bonds.
This meant switching all my pension, 401k and IRA stock holdings to indexed, broadly-diversified stock mutual funds. It also meant maximizing my annual contributions to these tax-free, deferred-compensation programs. And since I was approaching retirement and lived in Maryland, a high income-tax state with a triple-A bond rating, I started putting the rest of my money in a diversified Maryland municipal bond fund.
When I retired in 1995, I initiated my TIAA-CREF pension not as a defined benefit but as a defined contribution, in which the money I and my employers had contributed to my TIAA-CREF account over the years remained under my and my heirs' control -- except, of course, for the annual minimum distributions required by the IRS.
The tech bubble of 2000, the 9/11/01 attack, and the ensuing market volatility made me aware of a reality that I might well have missed in my pre-atheism days. It was that the stock market doctrine I'd always followed -- buy and hold -- was no longer working. So in 2004 I chose cautious market timing instead. Before, I'd been putting fixed amounts in my TIAA, IRA, and 401k accounts over the years and thus averaging market ups and downs. But since retiring in 1995, I'd only been taking out, not putting in, and I didn't want to expose my nest egg unnecessarily to the volatility of the post-2000 markets.
So I began timing the market in the most risk-averse way I could. In early 2004, having 100% of my deferred-compensation accounts in stock, I got nervous about the equity markets and began shifting my stock funds into money market funds (i.e., cash), which I could do without paying any fees or capital gains tax -- a huge advantage of the deferred-tax system that all investors should try to exploit. By late 2005 I was 100% in cash and, feeling the stock market was stabilizing, once again began moving back into stocks. By late 2006 I was again 100% in stocks, having dragged the transfer process out over months so as to cost-average. Luckily, my stock funds rose some 7% during the next eight months.
Then I really started getting nervous. For years I'd been watching the real estate market with disbelief, as shacky dumps and McMansions soared in price. Investment banks leveraged 30 to 1 were buying and selling the no-money-down mortgages of these shacky dumps and McMansions as exotic financial derivatives that no one seemed to understand. I certainly didn't, and when in early 2007 I started seeing reports that banks didn't even have these derivatives on their balance sheets, I concluded the bubble was ready to burst. So on May 18, 2007, I switched the 100% I had in stock 100% back into cash.
It was the best financial move of my life. Though it involved a lot of my own hard-earned bucks, it struck me then and now as all but risk-free. On one hand, everything pointed to a looming debacle in the housing and stock markets. On the other, my money-market funds were paying 5% interest -- a no-brainer of a choice. Sure enough, by March 2009 the markets had plunged by half, and I'd already begun inching back into stocks, a switch completed in late 2009. For a year, I watched the stock funds rise more than 10%, at which point I reversed again and began switching back into cash. Currently, I'm once more 100% in cash, where I'll stay till the current roller-coaster market settles down, hopefully to where I can again buy low.
In short, this old atheist dog did learn new tricks, not from atheist handbooks on how to invest, which don't exist, but from atheism's realistic, rational, and moderate turn of mind, which does. Behind all my financial moves in recent years has been an atheistic skepticism towards every kind of religious or economic panacea. I pay no more attention to the prophets of a new economic heaven or hell than to the old religious prophets. Above all, atheism's given me a flexible, broad-minded view of macro-economic reality I didn't used to have. Basing financial decisions more on national and international facts than on ups and downs in the markets, I now do my best to anticipate these ups and downs. And I always move slowly to smooth out market fluctuation. Though recently market-timing has worked far better than buy-and-hold, I'm open to changing the strategy at any time. The key, as all atheists know, is first to recognize and then to deal rationally with proveable realities.
Maybe I give atheism too much credit. Maybe sooner or later I'd have changed from buy and hold to market timing anyway. Yet I do feel that atheism's realism, rationality, and moderation helped me here. They made me a more disciplined and cautious investor and sharpened my sense both of the world's overall riskiness and of the vulnerability of my own life savings. They've made me better understand how careless and accident-prone many of my earlier maneuvers were and how careful money-wise I must now be.
In any case, since I began timing the markets in 2004, my deferred-compensation accounts have increased in value by 27%, despite extreme market volatility and the worst economic recession since the 1930s. My Maryland muni fund, which I 've steadily added savings to, has grown by 33%. All the while, I've been siphoning off a comfortable retirement income from both. In other words, I feel I've taken great economic comfort and consolation from atheism in these hard and dangerous times.
************
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
CONSOLATION EIGHT: DOES ATHEISM HELP YOU MANAGE MONEY?
I think it does. Of course, not every atheist is a good money manager, nor is every good money manager an atheist. But atheism's edge over competing worldviews in encouraging realistic, reasonable, and moderate economic behavior seems undeniable to me.
The whole thrust of atheism is realistic. Putting a premium on empirical proof, it always seeks factual confirmation from nature for its foundational concepts. For example, it bases its view that the cosmos is a random concatenation of unsupervised natural laws on everything factually known about the Big Bang and subsequent cosmic history, including the evolution of intelligent life from inorganic matter. In other words, atheism seeks to anchor itself in the proveably real, even when it speculates about what lies beyond the known, in which case it infers the unknown entirely from what is known.
This realistic thrust is fueled by atheism's belief that reason is humanity's best instrument for understanding and coping with the facts of life and death. Atheism and rationality have become virtually synonymous, for which many theists who prefer irrational kinds of faith fault atheism. While few atheists see the universe as a whole or our own cosmos in particular as ultimately rational -- after all, the capacity to reason complexly has till now been confirmed only in a single species on a single planet --, all atheists regard complex reasoning, as opposed to, say, immortality or divine afflatus, as humanity's defining trait.
Realism and rationality blend together in a moderation found in every nook and cranny of atheism's worldview. For instance, atheism never claims to know that supernatural being don't exist. Instead, it makes the moderate claim that the best available evidence points enough in that direction to convince most realistic and reasonable people. But if hordes of unmistakably supernatural angels or demons with miraculous powers started showing up everywhere on earth, atheists would change their minds. They approach all human concerns, including morality, politics, and of course finance, in a similarly moderate, open-minded way.
Financial success is of course largely a matter of luck. Being the daughter of subsistence farmers in Somalia is a less promising financial launch pad than being the son of highly-paid professionals in Switzerland. Yet given enough luck, the Somali girl could end up richer than the Swiss boy, though the initial luck of their wealth at birth would most likely determine their economic destinies. And good luck can turn bad in the twinkling of an eye. Kevin can lose his well-paying job as a skilled machinist to robots. Megan can lose her well-paying job as an account executive to downsizing.
Granting that luck plays a large role in inheriting or building wealth, managing well whatever wealth you have nonetheless requires skills and attitudes that atheism fosters at least as well as, and in many ways better than, other worldviews. In the first place, atheism discourages debt and encourages saving. Secondly, it contents itself with modest financial goals and pursues them prudently. Finally, it resists panic in financial downturns and euphoria in upturns. Its realism, rationality, and moderateness serves its followers well in all three respects.
First, as far as debt and savings go, atheism's basic premise -- all human beings are responsible for themselves and are in no way controlled or helped by supernatural powers -- makes atheists not only very mindful of what they do but proud of their freedom and independence from meddling, imprisoning deities. It also makes them hate being trapped in prisons of their own making. Debt can, and in America often does, become such a prison, and the best way to avoid it is to spend frugally and save exorbitantly. I have no hard evidence on how well atheists don't borrow or do save, but I suspect they're better at both than humankind as a whole.
Second, modest goals prudently sought are an almost inevitable atereffect of atheism's sober view of the human condition. Atheists know that while human intelligence allows its bearers to comprehend, appreciate, and exploit the cosmos as nothing else yet discovered can, its ephemeral splendor ends irreversibly in death and the oblivion of inorganic matter. Life's one-way journey from consciousness to unconsciousness prompts atheists to see all human goals as transitory and conditional and hence achieving them as insignificant in the long run. Hence the general un-grandiosity of the goals most atheists set for themselves and their un-feverishness in pursuing them -- a mindset I see as well-suited to earning a modest living and to saving for a modest retirement. Again, I have no idea how many atheists try to get rich quick and end up scamming, being scammed, or broke, but I suspect the number's small.
Finally, atheism helps its followers resist financial panics and euphorias, a virtue implied in much of what's already been said. It stems from the atheistic belief that every event in nature is a baffling mix of random chance and rigid natural law. Unlike theists, atheists accept this disorderly orderliness as the core reality of all material being (to a materialist like me, the only kind there is) and never try to deny or change it by praying to higher powers for supernatural favors or allowing themselves to fancy they've been divinely rewarded if they're lucky or punished if they're not.
In short, atheists find no message or meaning in financial highs and lows other than nature's own puzzling aimlessness. Though they of course try to understand and anticipate economic rises and falls, in the final analysis they view such phenomena as no more comprehensible than nature itself and so avoid betting too much of their money either way. It takes someone like an atheist, who feels the blind chanciness of existence in her bones, to resist the fear and greed of financial excess. Understanding and managing risk is the meat and potatoes of money management, especially in extreme markets. Atheists thrive on meat and potatoes.
In this blog I've offered some reasons why I think atheism generally encourages sound money management and, in economic crises, calms and reassures its adherents. In my next blog I'll review my own financial adventures during the past four years of economic mayhem and explain how atheism has helped me survive money-wise.
**************
The whole thrust of atheism is realistic. Putting a premium on empirical proof, it always seeks factual confirmation from nature for its foundational concepts. For example, it bases its view that the cosmos is a random concatenation of unsupervised natural laws on everything factually known about the Big Bang and subsequent cosmic history, including the evolution of intelligent life from inorganic matter. In other words, atheism seeks to anchor itself in the proveably real, even when it speculates about what lies beyond the known, in which case it infers the unknown entirely from what is known.
This realistic thrust is fueled by atheism's belief that reason is humanity's best instrument for understanding and coping with the facts of life and death. Atheism and rationality have become virtually synonymous, for which many theists who prefer irrational kinds of faith fault atheism. While few atheists see the universe as a whole or our own cosmos in particular as ultimately rational -- after all, the capacity to reason complexly has till now been confirmed only in a single species on a single planet --, all atheists regard complex reasoning, as opposed to, say, immortality or divine afflatus, as humanity's defining trait.
Realism and rationality blend together in a moderation found in every nook and cranny of atheism's worldview. For instance, atheism never claims to know that supernatural being don't exist. Instead, it makes the moderate claim that the best available evidence points enough in that direction to convince most realistic and reasonable people. But if hordes of unmistakably supernatural angels or demons with miraculous powers started showing up everywhere on earth, atheists would change their minds. They approach all human concerns, including morality, politics, and of course finance, in a similarly moderate, open-minded way.
Financial success is of course largely a matter of luck. Being the daughter of subsistence farmers in Somalia is a less promising financial launch pad than being the son of highly-paid professionals in Switzerland. Yet given enough luck, the Somali girl could end up richer than the Swiss boy, though the initial luck of their wealth at birth would most likely determine their economic destinies. And good luck can turn bad in the twinkling of an eye. Kevin can lose his well-paying job as a skilled machinist to robots. Megan can lose her well-paying job as an account executive to downsizing.
Granting that luck plays a large role in inheriting or building wealth, managing well whatever wealth you have nonetheless requires skills and attitudes that atheism fosters at least as well as, and in many ways better than, other worldviews. In the first place, atheism discourages debt and encourages saving. Secondly, it contents itself with modest financial goals and pursues them prudently. Finally, it resists panic in financial downturns and euphoria in upturns. Its realism, rationality, and moderateness serves its followers well in all three respects.
First, as far as debt and savings go, atheism's basic premise -- all human beings are responsible for themselves and are in no way controlled or helped by supernatural powers -- makes atheists not only very mindful of what they do but proud of their freedom and independence from meddling, imprisoning deities. It also makes them hate being trapped in prisons of their own making. Debt can, and in America often does, become such a prison, and the best way to avoid it is to spend frugally and save exorbitantly. I have no hard evidence on how well atheists don't borrow or do save, but I suspect they're better at both than humankind as a whole.
Second, modest goals prudently sought are an almost inevitable atereffect of atheism's sober view of the human condition. Atheists know that while human intelligence allows its bearers to comprehend, appreciate, and exploit the cosmos as nothing else yet discovered can, its ephemeral splendor ends irreversibly in death and the oblivion of inorganic matter. Life's one-way journey from consciousness to unconsciousness prompts atheists to see all human goals as transitory and conditional and hence achieving them as insignificant in the long run. Hence the general un-grandiosity of the goals most atheists set for themselves and their un-feverishness in pursuing them -- a mindset I see as well-suited to earning a modest living and to saving for a modest retirement. Again, I have no idea how many atheists try to get rich quick and end up scamming, being scammed, or broke, but I suspect the number's small.
Finally, atheism helps its followers resist financial panics and euphorias, a virtue implied in much of what's already been said. It stems from the atheistic belief that every event in nature is a baffling mix of random chance and rigid natural law. Unlike theists, atheists accept this disorderly orderliness as the core reality of all material being (to a materialist like me, the only kind there is) and never try to deny or change it by praying to higher powers for supernatural favors or allowing themselves to fancy they've been divinely rewarded if they're lucky or punished if they're not.
In short, atheists find no message or meaning in financial highs and lows other than nature's own puzzling aimlessness. Though they of course try to understand and anticipate economic rises and falls, in the final analysis they view such phenomena as no more comprehensible than nature itself and so avoid betting too much of their money either way. It takes someone like an atheist, who feels the blind chanciness of existence in her bones, to resist the fear and greed of financial excess. Understanding and managing risk is the meat and potatoes of money management, especially in extreme markets. Atheists thrive on meat and potatoes.
In this blog I've offered some reasons why I think atheism generally encourages sound money management and, in economic crises, calms and reassures its adherents. In my next blog I'll review my own financial adventures during the past four years of economic mayhem and explain how atheism has helped me survive money-wise.
**************
Friday, July 15, 2011
CONSOLATION SEVEN: THREE ATHEIST-FRIENDLY FILMS
One of my greatest pleasures during the last seven decades has been movie-going. Since I first joined the other rapt boys and girls at the local Paramount's Saturday morning specials in the 1940s, I've loved the cool darkness of big movie theaters and their screens flashing with adventure. Long before I knew what an atheist was, I knew what Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Superman, Batman, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges were: -- more fun and excitement than just about anything in my Vermont boyhood.
Now that I not only know what an atheist is but am one, my pleasure in movie-going continues. Though choosier now than I was then, I still like watching good movies, especially if they have atheistic undertones undetected by most viewers. I found three recent, widely-known films especially enjoyable in this respect. Unforgiven starred and was directed by Clint Eastwood. No Country for Old Men was made by the Coen brothers. Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain, is currently showing nationwide. While hardly atheist manifestos, all three films are certainly atheist-friendly.
The title of Eastwood's Unforgiven announces the film's central, non-Christian theme. Nobody in it forgives or turns the cheek to anyone. The lead character, played by Eastwood, wants to fulfill a pledge he's made to his dead wife to renounce his earlier career of drunken mayhem and raise their children respectably. He does this, amorally enough, by killing two cowboys for a revenge bounty raised by a brothel of whores. When his former outlaw friend, played by Morgan Freeman, whom he's recruited to help kill the two cowboys, is caught, tortured, and killed by the local sheriff, himself a former outlaw played by Gene Hackman, the Eastwood character avenges his murdered friend by getting drunk enough to kill the sheriff, all the sheriff's deputies, and the brothel owner in a spectacularly bloody shootout.
Although Unforgiven treats the Eastwood and Freeman characters and a mutilated whore somewhat sympathetically, it portrays them and everyone else as amoralists in a bleak, merciless world. The Christian rhetoric like hell or angel they sometimes use counts for nothing. The film's key lines, spoken by Eastwood, deny personal immortality. "It's a hell of a thing killing a man," he says. "You're taking from him all he has and all he's ever going to have."
Everyone's moral decisions are random, expedient, brutal. A cowboy slashes a whore's face because she laughs. The other whores punish him with a draconian bounty. The sheriff counters by sadistically beating a bounty hunter named English Bob (Richard Harris) and Eastwood and then by torturing the Freeman character to death, all because of his own careless judgment in the slashing case. Eastwood kills eight men and threatens many more because his friend gets killed for helping him kill for bounty money.
The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men transfers Unforgiven's grim, 19th century western frontier to an even grimmer 21st century drug war on the Texas-Mexican border. No Country is bleaker and more ironic than Unforgiven. None of its criminals evokes even the muted sympathy we feel for the Eastwood and Freeman characters. Although an aging sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones and a retired sheriff he visits are hints of decency in the moral chaos of the drug wars, they see the wars as inhuman and opt out of them.
Borrowed from the first line of the Yeats sonnet "Sailing to Byzantium," ("That is no country for old men"), the title ironically underscores the fact that few of the film's male characters survive the action. A further irony is that the Yeats poem identifies "that country" as the natural order, in contrast to a heaven of immutable beauty that awaits the poem's old men. No such heaven ever existed or will exist in the godless, inhuman universe of No Country.
What does exist is one of the most sinister characters in cinematic history, played by Javier Bardem. He's introduced strangling a jail guard and escaping with a pneumatic hammer for slaughtering cattle, which he then uses to slaughter human beings. Ironically, he precipitates the movie's main action in reaction to its only compassionate gesture. A trailer-park cowboy hunting in the west Texas desert discovers a drug deal gone bad. Bullet-riddled bodies of men and dogs are strewn among several trucks, one of which contains a mortally wounded Latino who begs the cowboy for water, which he refuses. The cowboy then discovers a dead Latino a mile away under a tree with a satchel of hundred-dollar bills at his feet.
After stealing the money and hiding it that night under his house-trailer without telling his wife, on an idiotic whim he brings water back to the dying Latino but finds him dead. Suddenly the Bardem character, originator-enforcer of the blown drug deal, arrives to investigate and discovers the cowboy's truck. The rest of the movie narrates his implacable hunt for the money and the cowboy.
So murderous is this hunt that Bardem emerges as the embodiment of death itself. He kills everyone involved without seeming to himself be killable or even findable. He badgers a bewildered gas station owner into calling a coin toss for unexplained stakes that are obviously life or death. This traditional image of Death the Gambler deepens the film's atheistic gloom. Bardem explains that he kills as "a matter of principle," like the Grim Reaper himself tirelessly harvesting his crop. Atheists can also appreciate the dark humor of the Coens' suggestion that death ends life with the finality and randomness of a coin toss.
Unforgiven and No Country utilize some of the harsher aspects of atheism primarily for dramatic effect, which I found interesting and entertaining. But Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life evokes atheism's softer and gentler side and makes it central to the story. While Eastwood and the Coen brothers portray a world void of love and ruled by greed, vengeance, and inhumanity, Malik portrays a suburban family in mid-twentieth-century Texas that for most of the movie suffers nothing worse than a modest income, having to move because the father loses his job, and normal family problems. The house move in fact turns out well for them. Ten years later, when catastrophe does strike, the mother and father own a much more lavish home.
The catastrophe is the accidental death, apparently from a hiking or climbing fall somewhere in the red sandstone of the Colorado basin, of the family's nineteen-year-old second son. The mother, played by Jessica Chastain, is shown wandering bereft through the new house and nearby woods after hearing the news, while the father, Brad Pitt, follows speechlessly. The entire film consists of the thoughts, memories, and imaginings of the now middle-aged eldest son, played by Sean Penn, who's looking back on his drab boyhood from colossal modern buildings he now designs. He too has grown far from his Texas roots.
Yet his feelings about those roots are still so intense that he often sits or walks by himself pondering them inside his gleaming buildings. The movie's mysterious images of primal light, the voiceovers, the cosmic panoramas, the tremendous floods of fire on the sun and of falling or curling water, the fantasies of prehistoric reptiles and of him rejoining his still-young brothers and parents, and other people, next to symbolic deserts or oceans, his mother impossibly floating upwards or being caressed by young women -- all these and everything else in the film are his own middle-aged daydreams and meditations on the meaning of his life.
I think the key to what Malik is saying is revealed in an early voiceover by the mother. In it, she recommends "the way of grace" over "the way of nature" as the dutiful catholic mother Malik portrays her as being would. This is the only thing she says or does in the movie that her adoring firstborn has come in middle age to see as wrong. He -- and Malik -- have concluded that "the way of nature," contrary to Chruch teaching, is in fact "the way of grace." That is, the titular Tree of Life is Malik's metaphor for the natural evolution of inorganic matter into organisms capable of this family's love, a love affirmed in Sean Penn's moving voiceover as the family reunites, he in middle age and they still young, and in his vision of their and all humanity's return through death to calm and beautiful oceans and deserts of insentient nature. I found this affirmative atheism convincing and consoling.
The Tree of Life depicts love as entirely human, natural, and evanescent, showing the boys' gradual awakening to the reality of existential loss and disappointment. After they see another boy drown, one of them blames God in stunned voiceover. All three stare speechlessly at a deformed man and at a struggling convict being hauled off to jail. The oldest brother intentionally shoots his trusting, soon-to-die brother with a BB gun, steals, vandalizes, and opposes his unpredticable father who, disappointed by not being the musician he wanted to be, by not getting patents for twenty-seven inventions, and by lack of wealth, often tyrannizes his sons and at one point his wife.
Malik constantly links the family's interactions to primordial scenes of nature recalled or imagined by Sean Penn. Some of these scenes are violent -- volcanoes, floods of water, solar conflagration --, while others are merely threatening -- swarms of sharks, giant jellyfish, and sting rays. Though beautiful, all suggest the vulnerability and impermanence of sentient life, as do two striking vignettes of prehistoric reptiles. In one, a wounded, dinosaur-like creature groans in pain on a seashore; in the other, a large reptile on hind feet spots a smaller, wounded reptile lying in shallow water, walks over, and pins its head as though to kill it. As the terrified animal writhes, the other releases it, pins it again, then walks off indifferently. It isn't hungry.
In other words, Sean Penn has come to understand that "the way of nature" is the only "way" there is and that the Tree of Life and its human fruit is solely the product of unplanned natural processes. His Catholic indoctrination in "the way of grace" falsely taught him that his love for his family, for the bride-like girl he follows through the sandstone desert doorframe (a compensatory love replacing his dead brother?), for humanity dying back into the ocean of nature, and above all, for nature itself, comes from a supernatural being called God. Now he knows better. He knows he can love everyone in his family for what they truly are and despite their transience -- even his father and especially his mother.
The Tree of Life is more systematically atheistic than Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men. It might be called atheist-centered, while they seem merely atheist-influenced. But all three are unquestionably atheist-friendly, to me an encouraging -- and comforting -- sign of intellectual growth in the still overwhelmingly atheist-unfriendly mass culture of America.
**************
Now that I not only know what an atheist is but am one, my pleasure in movie-going continues. Though choosier now than I was then, I still like watching good movies, especially if they have atheistic undertones undetected by most viewers. I found three recent, widely-known films especially enjoyable in this respect. Unforgiven starred and was directed by Clint Eastwood. No Country for Old Men was made by the Coen brothers. Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain, is currently showing nationwide. While hardly atheist manifestos, all three films are certainly atheist-friendly.
The title of Eastwood's Unforgiven announces the film's central, non-Christian theme. Nobody in it forgives or turns the cheek to anyone. The lead character, played by Eastwood, wants to fulfill a pledge he's made to his dead wife to renounce his earlier career of drunken mayhem and raise their children respectably. He does this, amorally enough, by killing two cowboys for a revenge bounty raised by a brothel of whores. When his former outlaw friend, played by Morgan Freeman, whom he's recruited to help kill the two cowboys, is caught, tortured, and killed by the local sheriff, himself a former outlaw played by Gene Hackman, the Eastwood character avenges his murdered friend by getting drunk enough to kill the sheriff, all the sheriff's deputies, and the brothel owner in a spectacularly bloody shootout.
Although Unforgiven treats the Eastwood and Freeman characters and a mutilated whore somewhat sympathetically, it portrays them and everyone else as amoralists in a bleak, merciless world. The Christian rhetoric like hell or angel they sometimes use counts for nothing. The film's key lines, spoken by Eastwood, deny personal immortality. "It's a hell of a thing killing a man," he says. "You're taking from him all he has and all he's ever going to have."
Everyone's moral decisions are random, expedient, brutal. A cowboy slashes a whore's face because she laughs. The other whores punish him with a draconian bounty. The sheriff counters by sadistically beating a bounty hunter named English Bob (Richard Harris) and Eastwood and then by torturing the Freeman character to death, all because of his own careless judgment in the slashing case. Eastwood kills eight men and threatens many more because his friend gets killed for helping him kill for bounty money.
The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men transfers Unforgiven's grim, 19th century western frontier to an even grimmer 21st century drug war on the Texas-Mexican border. No Country is bleaker and more ironic than Unforgiven. None of its criminals evokes even the muted sympathy we feel for the Eastwood and Freeman characters. Although an aging sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones and a retired sheriff he visits are hints of decency in the moral chaos of the drug wars, they see the wars as inhuman and opt out of them.
Borrowed from the first line of the Yeats sonnet "Sailing to Byzantium," ("That is no country for old men"), the title ironically underscores the fact that few of the film's male characters survive the action. A further irony is that the Yeats poem identifies "that country" as the natural order, in contrast to a heaven of immutable beauty that awaits the poem's old men. No such heaven ever existed or will exist in the godless, inhuman universe of No Country.
What does exist is one of the most sinister characters in cinematic history, played by Javier Bardem. He's introduced strangling a jail guard and escaping with a pneumatic hammer for slaughtering cattle, which he then uses to slaughter human beings. Ironically, he precipitates the movie's main action in reaction to its only compassionate gesture. A trailer-park cowboy hunting in the west Texas desert discovers a drug deal gone bad. Bullet-riddled bodies of men and dogs are strewn among several trucks, one of which contains a mortally wounded Latino who begs the cowboy for water, which he refuses. The cowboy then discovers a dead Latino a mile away under a tree with a satchel of hundred-dollar bills at his feet.
After stealing the money and hiding it that night under his house-trailer without telling his wife, on an idiotic whim he brings water back to the dying Latino but finds him dead. Suddenly the Bardem character, originator-enforcer of the blown drug deal, arrives to investigate and discovers the cowboy's truck. The rest of the movie narrates his implacable hunt for the money and the cowboy.
So murderous is this hunt that Bardem emerges as the embodiment of death itself. He kills everyone involved without seeming to himself be killable or even findable. He badgers a bewildered gas station owner into calling a coin toss for unexplained stakes that are obviously life or death. This traditional image of Death the Gambler deepens the film's atheistic gloom. Bardem explains that he kills as "a matter of principle," like the Grim Reaper himself tirelessly harvesting his crop. Atheists can also appreciate the dark humor of the Coens' suggestion that death ends life with the finality and randomness of a coin toss.
Unforgiven and No Country utilize some of the harsher aspects of atheism primarily for dramatic effect, which I found interesting and entertaining. But Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life evokes atheism's softer and gentler side and makes it central to the story. While Eastwood and the Coen brothers portray a world void of love and ruled by greed, vengeance, and inhumanity, Malik portrays a suburban family in mid-twentieth-century Texas that for most of the movie suffers nothing worse than a modest income, having to move because the father loses his job, and normal family problems. The house move in fact turns out well for them. Ten years later, when catastrophe does strike, the mother and father own a much more lavish home.
The catastrophe is the accidental death, apparently from a hiking or climbing fall somewhere in the red sandstone of the Colorado basin, of the family's nineteen-year-old second son. The mother, played by Jessica Chastain, is shown wandering bereft through the new house and nearby woods after hearing the news, while the father, Brad Pitt, follows speechlessly. The entire film consists of the thoughts, memories, and imaginings of the now middle-aged eldest son, played by Sean Penn, who's looking back on his drab boyhood from colossal modern buildings he now designs. He too has grown far from his Texas roots.
Yet his feelings about those roots are still so intense that he often sits or walks by himself pondering them inside his gleaming buildings. The movie's mysterious images of primal light, the voiceovers, the cosmic panoramas, the tremendous floods of fire on the sun and of falling or curling water, the fantasies of prehistoric reptiles and of him rejoining his still-young brothers and parents, and other people, next to symbolic deserts or oceans, his mother impossibly floating upwards or being caressed by young women -- all these and everything else in the film are his own middle-aged daydreams and meditations on the meaning of his life.
I think the key to what Malik is saying is revealed in an early voiceover by the mother. In it, she recommends "the way of grace" over "the way of nature" as the dutiful catholic mother Malik portrays her as being would. This is the only thing she says or does in the movie that her adoring firstborn has come in middle age to see as wrong. He -- and Malik -- have concluded that "the way of nature," contrary to Chruch teaching, is in fact "the way of grace." That is, the titular Tree of Life is Malik's metaphor for the natural evolution of inorganic matter into organisms capable of this family's love, a love affirmed in Sean Penn's moving voiceover as the family reunites, he in middle age and they still young, and in his vision of their and all humanity's return through death to calm and beautiful oceans and deserts of insentient nature. I found this affirmative atheism convincing and consoling.
The Tree of Life depicts love as entirely human, natural, and evanescent, showing the boys' gradual awakening to the reality of existential loss and disappointment. After they see another boy drown, one of them blames God in stunned voiceover. All three stare speechlessly at a deformed man and at a struggling convict being hauled off to jail. The oldest brother intentionally shoots his trusting, soon-to-die brother with a BB gun, steals, vandalizes, and opposes his unpredticable father who, disappointed by not being the musician he wanted to be, by not getting patents for twenty-seven inventions, and by lack of wealth, often tyrannizes his sons and at one point his wife.
Malik constantly links the family's interactions to primordial scenes of nature recalled or imagined by Sean Penn. Some of these scenes are violent -- volcanoes, floods of water, solar conflagration --, while others are merely threatening -- swarms of sharks, giant jellyfish, and sting rays. Though beautiful, all suggest the vulnerability and impermanence of sentient life, as do two striking vignettes of prehistoric reptiles. In one, a wounded, dinosaur-like creature groans in pain on a seashore; in the other, a large reptile on hind feet spots a smaller, wounded reptile lying in shallow water, walks over, and pins its head as though to kill it. As the terrified animal writhes, the other releases it, pins it again, then walks off indifferently. It isn't hungry.
In other words, Sean Penn has come to understand that "the way of nature" is the only "way" there is and that the Tree of Life and its human fruit is solely the product of unplanned natural processes. His Catholic indoctrination in "the way of grace" falsely taught him that his love for his family, for the bride-like girl he follows through the sandstone desert doorframe (a compensatory love replacing his dead brother?), for humanity dying back into the ocean of nature, and above all, for nature itself, comes from a supernatural being called God. Now he knows better. He knows he can love everyone in his family for what they truly are and despite their transience -- even his father and especially his mother.
The Tree of Life is more systematically atheistic than Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men. It might be called atheist-centered, while they seem merely atheist-influenced. But all three are unquestionably atheist-friendly, to me an encouraging -- and comforting -- sign of intellectual growth in the still overwhelmingly atheist-unfriendly mass culture of America.
**************
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