Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Two Kinds of Narrative
Wittgenstein tells us:
Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. – There is nothing paradoxical about that! (Culture and Value, 1937)
The key word in the passage is andere, different or other: The Bible is contrasted with “anderen historischen Nachtricht” and we are therefore asked to make a “eine ganz andere Stelle” for it in our lives. But are we prepared to do that?
Biblical literalism has taken some interesting turns. In America, we fritter away endless hours debating the wisdom of telling children the earth was created in seven days. There are some for whom it is self-evident: The Bible says so. There are others who are equally sure it was not, and that the children should be tell no such rubbish. Why not? Well, for starters, it’s wrong… But the real problem is… the Bible says so.
I confess to a certain indifference on the question itself. Whether we are descended from monkeys or separately created by God is not important. Where we are and where we go from here is the real issue. And the real issue in the evolutionism-creationism debate, likewise, is not actually about our origins. It’s about how we’re supposed to feel about ourselves.
Creationists want us to believe God made us, our ancestors messed up and now we’re all lousy vessels of spirit whose only hope is divine redemption, but somehow we still have dominion over the earth. Evolutionists want us to believe we come from monkeys, are just like other animals and so shouldn’t get a swelled head about ourselves except that we’re responsible for the earth.
Evolutionism and Creationism both are religious in flavor. Evolutionists seek the holy grail of the missing link in order to show the unbelievers once and for all the truth about something whose truth they haven’t actually proved, only made a good case for considering. Creationists hunt for the site of the original Garden of Eden, splinters of the Ark on a mountain and pieces of the Cross in order to show the unbelievers the truth about something whose truth is… to be lived, not proved.
Curiously, the sort of people who become Creationists because the Bible tells them so rarely stone intemperate youth, though the Bible calls for that too. They also don’t spend much time looking for the Tree of Knowledge, somehow construing that carnality and original sin are bound up, though this metaphoricization of the Tree of Knowledge is highly suspect. They eschew the uglier parts of the Old Testament, saying that the New Testament brought a new law. But then they open up Leviticus when they get a burr in their saddle about the next door neighbor’s latest social experiments.
Curiously, the sort of people who become Evolutionists because “science says so,” are indifferent to science that confuses their understanding of the process. They denigrate man as a mere animal, rather than celebrating him as the most successful product of natural selection. They denounce investigations into differences among ethnologies within the human family while announcing that modern man is the offshoot of a lowlier species. And if one suggests that a species ought to be allowed to die because man, the most successful product of natural selection, has rendered it unsustainable in its current environment, the typical Evolutionist rapidly discovers within man both noble tendencies and superpowers that obligate him to save that species, rather than letting natural selection take its course. They simultaneously denounce frail, cruel, useless and infirm man for ever letting it come to this.
What the Evolutionist and the Creationist have in common is a) belief in a basic narrative from which they are unwilling to stray except that b) they’d rather not deal with the more unpleasant aspects of that narrative.
Wittgenstein tried to develop a philosophical system that explained (away) everything. But he found God in the middle of his writing. This was too much to explain away, so he declared it inexplicable (That of which we cannot speak…). In the 1937 journal entry with which we started, though, he gets to the heart of the matter and philosophy’s biggest dilemma: There are not merely different levels but different kinds of truth. His presentation, though, suggests that in understanding this we have a way out.
When we read a really moving novel, it may drastically affect our worldview. By paring away the honking of car horns, the shouting of schoolchildren in the background and the feel of sand slipping across the sidewalk beneath your feet, the novelist can concentrate on what is actually registering as meaningful in his characters’ lives. The effect is stories that are truer than life, capturing life’s essence on the printed page when attempts to live life’s essence are frustrated by the constant intrusion of banalities that irritate us too much for us to concentrate but without leading to new and different illumination.
Those who teach the Bible as fact, in a way, do it a disservice. It’s more than mere fact. Those who teach it as literature, by contrast, unwittingly elevate it. If you treat the Bible as a historical document, it gets tedious. If you start with a snide remark about it but capture the warp and woof of the motley collection of texts, astute and open-minded readers will not be able to help being moved by the same themes that move the more sure-footed believer. Eventually, there comes a point where the literati’s condescension becomes ridiculous because such condescension is not displayed toward other literary works, nor even other cultures’ creation stories.
Wittgenstein reminds us to approach the Bible sensibly: with an understanding that this isn’t history; it’s the Word of God. The Word of God is a much bigger thing than mere history. Find an extra bullet on the mall in Dallas and the history of JFK’s life and death changes. Obviously, no sincere believer would be so fickle about his belief in the Bible – or the Koran, or the Gita or the Upanishads… The faith that moves mountains should not be susceptible to a small scrap of wood or metal.
While belief in one’s religion shouldn’t be altered by the discovery of seemingly incongruent facts, there comes a second question: should facts be altered by belief in one’s religion? In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams tells us of the electric monk, a device designed to believe in all the ridiculous things you’re supposed to believe in for yourself but couldn’t possibly be expected to. Much of the story centers on one of these that has gone bad, a monk whose faith may not move mountains but that can at least believe them pink when they’re plainly not. Adams had sadly rejected religion, and showed just how silly it looks from the outside. One wishes he had lived to rediscover it; he would have had marvelous observations on the beauty of believing in the nonsensical. But in the meantime, he points us to a bit we have to understand: you can’t reject facts just because they differ from your religion’s narrative.
I could conceive a religion where mankind once knew how to fly. I could posit that anyone holy and pure had within him that divinely granted ability. And if I could sell it well enough, I could push my followers one by one off of cliffs and into oblivion, sadly writing each one off as insufficient in his belief. It sounds ridiculous, but to read the Bible, I ought chide any Jewish parents displeased with their children for their failure to stone them. I could cluck my tongue at any Jew who has failed to marry his widowed sister in law. For that matter, I could question the faith of the Christian who lives in a nice house while his neighbors struggle.
The only thing we could do that we be worse than asking those who claim literal belief in the Bible to actually live like it… would be to celebrate those who claim to believe literally in the Koran and make a serious effort at doing so. Religions are formed in heady times by heady people. Most of them had the good fortune to be formed when populations and weapons technology were insufficient to the provocation of an actual Armageddon. Today, we have to be more careful. We have to recognize that what God hath wrought in the early days is not for us, mere mortals, to replicate today.
In the Bible, in the Koran, in the Gita and in many other works, we are given a narrative. It is a narrative unlike other narratives, truer than history. It is so true, in fact, that we must never mistake it for mere history, must never act as though our small minds could grasp the true purpose of each and ever last detail, however minute. Rather, we must read for the narrative, attempting to capture the feeling that comes when we sense that the perplexing is nonetheless right and just.
Lot’s daughters gave him to drink, and then lay with him, wherefrom issued successful tribes. Does this mean that lonely times call for incest? Or that the race must do what the race must do to survive, even setting aside conventional laws? You won’t find the answer in the passage. You have to read the whole book and see what fits.
Men were called upon to marry their widowed sisters in law. Does this mean that fraternity equals paternity? Or does it require that families help one another even when the original bond between them is lost?
Onan famously spilled his seed on the ground while pretending to consummate marriage to his widowed sister in law. He was struck by lightning. Does this mean that sex without the possibility of children is wrong? Read a few sentences of the passage alone and you’ve got a case against masturbation and birth control. Read it in the context of the whole Bible, though, and you might find that Onan’s crime was to shirk his familial obligations, severing the bonds his brother had sealed by transgressing against the custom that should have reaffirmed them and given his widowed sister in law a second chance for a family.
Wittgenstein does not tell us to believe the individual sentences of the Bible. My poor lot of examples is not a proof that there is one way to read the Bible, but it should hint at what Wittgenstein meant when he said to take the narrative and believe: Our faith is not to be challenged by mere facts, for it does not deal in mere facts. Our faith, rather, should rest on the knowledge that there is a story to be told whose ultimate truth excels what archeologists and geologists tools unearth, showing the relationship man has to nature, to nature’s Creator and to his fellow man, and pointing the way toward the bettering of all these relationships till they approximate that blissful moment when man was but a twinkle in God’s eye and a wish upon His breath.
* * *
We have come far afield of our original nugget, Evolutionism vs. Creationism. It is time to return. We have already seen the utility of believing in something that isn’t, in our literal sense, true. We have hinted at why Creationists believe the world was literally created in seven days and suggested that a) this might be wrong, b) it might be true anyway and c) it doesn’t matter because what the scientist proves has nothing to do with the creation story’s inherent otherly veracity.
The problems Creationists run into are beside the point here. The real issue is whether the Evolutionists aren’t just like them. Both have a broad narrative with implications for the meaning of life and man’s place in it. Both have gaps in their evidence that they swear they will fill. And they both denounce anything that contradicts their Weltanschauung as poorly researched, misunderstood and quite possibly fraudulent.
There are people who think the evolutionary model offers a way of understanding how life came to be the way it is. They look at new research and find it exciting if it furthers their understanding and uninteresting if it doesn’t. If the evidence casts doubt upon the evolutionary model, they wonder whether the result will be the creation of a sharper, more precise model or whether the model will become so contorted by efforts to explain away data that complicate, rather than filling in, the picture that it becomes untenable. If the evidence confirms the model, by contrast, they wonder what new pieces of the puzzle will be fit in and how much more we’ll know about the mechanics of our world as a result.
People who don’t care whether new evidence supports or detracts from the evolutionary theory are not Evolutionists. They are people who think it’s worth working with the evolutionary hypothesis unless or until something better comes along. They know that quantum mechanics upset Newtonian physics just when it looked like Newton’s models, properly refined, contained all the answers within. They know that if evolutionary theory is ultimately to contribute seriously to our understanding of how the world works, it must face more serious challengers than Kansas school boards and must either finish far more complex and wonderful than it even now is or be supplanted by something new created to highlight where it went wrong.
Evolutionists care about the evolutionary model. It isn’t about amino acids then. It’s about what it means to be a man today. Like the Creationists, they have a Weltanschauung that they’re defending. If you get the opportunity to challenge a Creationist and Evolutionist on successive days, I suggest that you try it, even if you’re a partisan of one of the camps. The results are instructive. There is the same passion, the same conviction that contradictory evidence is wrong or a trick of the other side. Knowing the human propensity for error and the human tendency to see what one expects to see, there could be no greater deathblow to the feasibility of the evolutionary theory than for all the data to confirm it. Even if it were right, errors would creep in that messed up the data here and there. Absolute proof of evolution would more likely suggest absolute unconscious commitment to the theory and inadvertent data cooking on the part of the experimenters. Evolutionists don’t account for this because they’re pursuing Truth, not fact.
* * *
I do not write to belittle either Creationists or Evolutionists. In truth, I have sympathies with both camps. In fact, I’m frustrated by both, for both are so hell-bent on pushing their own understanding of the world – an understanding that isn’t really driven by science or proofs on either side – that they shut each other out over nonsense from ages ago instead of meeting to discuss the real issue: What is man, why is man and what should he strive to become?
Wittgenstein’s passage should be gloriously troubling to both camps, suggesting to the Creationists that they don’t fully appreciate the deeper meaning of their sacred texts while suggesting to Evolutionists that they’re awfully worked up over something that’s supposed to be dispassionately scientific. The beauty of the passage, though, is that it shows the way to squaring the circle, getting a grip on how we can go about existing as human beings on both the spiritual plane and within the confines of this sphere where we are all too unquestionably mortal.
posted by gbarto at 5:28 PM