by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Dear Bleaders,
We’re here on this blog together because we don’t believe in Dog, right? Strike that, reverse it, reinstate.
Look. I call my way of seeing things Poetic Atheism. I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I don’t think the universe can think. I don’t believe there is some special being that is separate from the universe and knows about us and cares about us and made us. All of that is the imaginative fantasy of one group of animals on planet Earth.
There is a fungus growing on the third stone from Sol in an outer arm of the Milky Way, a medium-sized galaxy among millions.
Like all matter, this fungus changes, the stuff of the universe is not static, energy and matter are what is the universe and the state of normal is a bubbling cauldron of interactions.
Floating gasses, flowing water, growing crystals, and life (mold, trees, monkeys) are all patterns that fall into self-replicating relationships. The systems are little vortices in the weather of what is. Whatever works keeps working for a while because it works.
It is all explicable in terms of matter and energy, it falls into patterns that generate sameness and that can get really intricate and amazingly fine tuned. It’s amazing, but given infinite time, and the fact that it is true, and there you go, we have to accept that it is possible. The patterns get so fancy that one day they are you. They look up and say, How do you do?
Now that is very strange, but okay, okay fine. Okay, the pattern that is life, that is you, is awakened to itself. It makes friends with other sentient beings. It invents agriculture. It invents writing. It writes Shakespeare’s plays and Bach’s sonatas.
When this being, the fungus that knows itself and makes art, you, when this you lays down for sleep, goes dormant for a third of every daily cycle, it dreams.
It sees pictures in its head while it is unconscious to the world. These pictures are borrowed from the previous day’s sightings and from a whole life of experience, but they are not just pictures. They are stories. And these stories are strange and sometimes horrifying. They waken the fungus, you, us, me, the person awakens in the night, having dreamed of patricide, and is shaken, is quaking.
What is reality? What is real? The universe is real, the speed of light is constant. The universe is big and true.
Also big and true is what is going on in the dark room in the middle of the night awakened by a terrifying vision.
The experience of being human, truthfully rendered, is as much about the feelings in the room as it is about what the universe can be measured to be.
What is truth? What is your truth? Your truth is that you are a life form that knows itself. You are a miracle fungus. You. We have met some smart dolphins and clever whales. If there is life in the universe other than us it is likely to be even weirder than the dolphins and whales.
No one but us is talking, doing, making, trying to get other animal’s attention, like the ant in my first post. It’s just you, fungus. Just us hairless monkeys.
What comes into being when matter and energy fall into such patterns that they look up and say hi and write symphonies? Art happens. It’s very strange and wonderful.
The truth may be real but it is not “matter of fact.” What in fact we have here is a billion fantastically sexy weird interesting stories all going on at once in a great cacophony of experience. How do we make sense of what it is to be human, to be this thing, this sentient matter?
Well I certainly don’t think the magic of consciousness should be considered evidence for something hidden, something else. The magic of consciousness is magic enough. Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are.
But the truth, the what actually is is very strange and overloaded and wondrous indeed.
Poetry uses the precision and dedication to accuracy of science, with the scope of everything (the scope of religion, the scope of art), with the widest scope possible.
What can we say that is not invention, that is all fact, but that takes into account everything at once? That’s what Poetic Atheism is about. Looking at the magic that is real. How can we think about what is absurd and amazing and true, dreams, devotion, generosity, the wonder of everything from ecosystems to echolocation, without making stuff up and getting sloppy and believing nonsense? Very carefully! Is it easy to know the world through poetry? No! But it is possible and it is marvelous and it is ours.
I’ve worked very hard these past several decades to get this down in print, to make sense of it and share out what sense I can make. I wrote five books about it. If you are interested in what I am saying, please read The Happiness Myth, and Doubt: A History, Funny, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology and The Next Ancient World. Thank you very much.
And for the love of Pete, don’t kill yourself. Stay here and suffer with me. It will be fun. We will drink beer and talk about what it all means. It all means.
Love,
Jennifer
PS. The Boston Globe Ideas section picked up on another little act of skepticality of mine — on cultural myths and the gym.
So beautifully captured, Jennifer. Thank you!
Very well put, Jennifer! Not only is the world ours, it’s the only one we’ve got. We need to make sure we celebrate it throughout our everyday lives so it remains marvelously worthy of celebration through poetry.
Poetic Atheism–I love it!
Thank you for your words. I’ve been avidly reading (and blogging about) your book Doubt: A History, and trying, in my layperson’s way, to come to grips with the fascinating history you’ve laid out; and I think your poet’s (and historian’s) perspective yields fascinating insights into the rift between reason and faith. Again, thank you.
If I had read words such as these earlier in my life, I would have become an atheist much, much sooner. I began to doubt the existence of the supernatural long before I left Christianity, but could not leave a religious tradition rich in poetry, metaphor and meaning for an atheism that I mostly saw articulated in cold, dry, uninspiring terms. I chose to use the language of Christianity as a metaphor for my understanding of truth rather than adopt a narrative that, at the time, seemed nihilistic and unable to elevate the human “spirit.” At some point, I happened upon Carl Sagan and then SHAZAAM! I discovered I could have it all! Truth and beauty. Fact and poetry. This post is very Sagan-esque in that regard. Thank you Jennifer for expressing atheism in a way that resonates so marvelously with my experience of life!
I don’t know that much about Sagan but my first impression was that he would be very careful to place a very clear boundary around the use of the term ‘magic’. Maybe because that’s my own reaction when I read Jennifer’s beautiful article above. There’s such a rich array of vocabulary to express awe and bliss that I would rather not use a term so deeply enmeshed in superstition or, if used, do so in a sustained way that re-empowers the word specifically.
I don’t get all goosebumply when I think about the weird/amazing/awesome-ness of nature. It’s more of a sustained curiosity. The bliss emotions kick in for me with certain actions of my children, personal creativity, great music, etc.
I came out of a religious tradition that over emphasized emotional fulfillment at the expense of reason and reality. As part of that coming out process I also practiced a lot of Buddhist meditation which further changed the way I relate to the bliss range.
I do, not all the time, but sometimes the vastness and awesomeness of the universe just hits me – and I get this “whoa” moment, y’know?
I get that sometimes also – the vastness, the greatness, how it all works. A couple years ago started me on a new one. It had snowed a lot and everything looked so weird, and now it gets me every time. I’m on a planet. We’re just so focused on going here and there and it’s covered with roads and stores, and even nature and sky, just taken for granted. I’m in space, I live on a planet. It’s all this weather we’re havin’! You’d think the sun and the moon would have given me some clues, but it’s usually the weather instead.
Another one, when I quit smoking the first time and the oxygen was returning to my brain, I was surprised how amazed I was about evaporation particularly, and how the whole internet comes through such a skinny wire. Little things mean a lot.
For me it was a clear winter night in rural Idaho. I’m from NYC, where light pollution ensures that we don’t see much of anything in the night sky besides the moon. (Thank goodness for the Hayden Planetarium.)
But that night in Idaho, I looked up. And saw the stars.
That moment’s a keeper.
Jennifer, I love your writing, even if the message (manifesto) is essentially hopeless. Cheers.
One more thing I meant to add..
“Well I certainly don’t think the magic of consciousness should be considered evidence for something hidden, something else. The magic of consciousness is magic enough. Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are.”
Even should someone demand a cause for the this magic of consciousness which in itself is fantastic and hints to transcendence? Again, love the writing….
There’s nothing magical about consciousness.
This is just the right tempo for the spring that’s about to be sprung, it’s got me looking right through the gray clouds. Thanks for joining this forum and telling us (your bleaders) about it, Jennifer.
That was so cool! I wish I could write like that.
I appreciate your thoughts, but I have to disagree with you. I don’t understand your conception/definition of art completely, and perhaps that’s the problem. Art, for you, is merely pattern making? In fact, I’m a little confused as to the role of art at all.
You’ve said that no amount of invention can add anything meaningful to what is already present in nature: “Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are.”
I understand that position, although I disagree with it, and I think I understand that it comes from the sort of meta-perspective of all of life — and the byproducts of life, like art — as simply another phenomenon of the universe. That’s all well and good. I don’t agree with it, but whatever.
What doesn’t seem realistic, though, is your inclusion and elevation of art in a system that has removed any special place art might have had. Art is merely a product of the universe and a good deal of time; our ability to appreciate art is similarly coincidental. While that is impressive in a very boring “big numbers” kind of way, art is literally devoid of special meaning without a teleology attached. It is “pattern making,” or even worse, merely reproduction.
But why draw on art, or poetry. You’ve effectively diminished it. Art, under most other systems, is an expression of the human spirit, or a product of genius, or a pathway to the divine, or an expression of the reality behind reality, or all of the above. You’ve made a work of art literally the same thing as a highway system: the product of human industriousness, which is in turn the product of the universe.
So, like I said, you’ve equated art with literally everything else that occurs in the universe, and robbed it of any special place it might have had. After all that, why lean so hard on it? Why rely on poetry to understand the universe? We could rely on any other form of human knowing (which are all likewise created by the “magic” interactions of the universe) and it should be just as useful. You are privileging some kinds of knowing over other kinds of knowing (which is actually fine with me.) The problem is accommodating that privilege with a system in which all systems are fundamentally the same outgrowth of the universe’s complexity. Why should the mold interacting with the universe interact in one way rather than another? There isn’t any reason to emphasize poetry over any other ways of knowing: you’ve specifically done the opposite.
Maybe I’m miles off base. This is entirely possible. But right now, I don’t understand why on earth a poetic atheism is superior to a purely, ascetic empiricism. Or for that matter, why that would be better than a rabid fundamentalist appreciation for the order and complexity of the universe. If the whole point is that the universe is complex, and our reaction to it is part of that complexity, then why is one way of understanding any better than another way? Unless you mean to suggest that the universe *intends* a specific kind of understanding, which I don’t think you do.
I don’t know. This is a long post. Make of it what you will.
“You’ve made a work of art literally the same thing as a highway system: the product of human industriousness, which is in turn the product of the universe.”
By this logic, you could just as well say “everything is just a product of the arrangement of atoms, therefore everything is literally the same as everything else, so why should you treat anything any different from anything else?” Obviously, not everything is the same as everything else – as Carl Sagan said, “the beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into, but the way those atoms are put together.” Despite the fact that everything is “only” an arrangement of atoms, there are clearly reasons for treating certain arrangements of atoms differently than other arrangements of atoms (try treating a lion the same as you treat a bunny on the basis that they’re both just atoms, and see where that gets you).
The same rationale applies to the art vs. highways example. They are both indeed examples of human industriousness and ingenuity, but there are also vast differences. Art elicits feelings of inspiration, and highways, for the most part, don’t. That right there is obvious justification for treating the two differently.
It seems like you’re getting into the realm of ethics toward the end, which I think is too off topic to really get into. Suffice it to say, we consider art beautiful because it elicits certain emotional responses in us. And as for “why rely on poetry to understand the universe?” the obvious answer is simply because it makes us feel good. No one is arguing that everyone must do this, and no one is “privileging” art. Rather, people can observe that using poetry to understand and/or communicate truths about the universe makes us feel good, and, consequently, decide to use poetry as such.
Wonderfully said.
Religion makes me feel good. Perhaps I should use that as a way to understand the universe?
But religion doesn’t WORK as a way to understand the universe. You can utilize science in a way that is both poetic (which makes us feel good) and true. Poetry is important because it gives meaning to facts. Religion gives meaning to make-believe.
But religion doesn’t WORK as a way to understand the universe.
It depends on what you mean by “work”, “understand”, and “universe”. When we atheists talk about something working, we tend to mean it instrumentally: the car works when the engine turns, physics works when the model we use allows us to split atoms, and so on. But “working” can also take on other meanings. There can be an ethical complexion to “working”; something which functions but in so doing causes suffering may be termed in some understandings to not “work”, because it has failed to serve humanity or even the subset who uses it. There can be an aesthetic complexion to “working”, where the result of an instrumentality is judged not just on its efficacy but also its elegance in achieving the objective.
I could go on, and also dissect the notions of “understanding” and “universe”, but the point is that whatever the scientific model is good for, it does not hold the corner market on the complete integration of any of those terms.
FWIW, highways fill me with awe. Have you ever stopped to think about the layers upon layers of systems (physical, psychological, technological, engineering, and legal) that would make such a thing remotely possible? It’s truly staggering and humbling.
FWIW, highways fill me with awe.
You were the person going 35 on the interstate this morning, weren’t you?
Dammit, stop feeling awe and drive!
I should have been more specific in my word choices, it’s true. “Work” is way too ambiguous. I meant primarily that religion fails as a means to discovering the truth and/or facts about the universe. It can be very effective in other ways.
Having just been to the Hoover Dam this past weekend and witnessed work on the bypass freeway and accompanying bridge there, I can completely relate to your highway-related awe.
That’s why I used highways as an example. They are impressive. But are they art? I’m just objecting (in part) that they fall under the definition of art in this “poetic atheism.” More importantly, though, is the idea that “Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are,” and combining this idea with poetry. I don’t see how on earth that works.
More importantly, though, is the idea that “Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are,” and combining this idea with poetry. I don’t see how on earth that works.
I agree, to a point. It is akin to saying that fiction is useless because it is filled with lies (and now let’s everyone write a clever poem about the weak nuclear force…)
On the other hand, to the extent that fiction is not useless, it is so because it is not filled with just lies, and the part that is lies is not believed to be the truth once you stop reading/watching it. The objection to religious text and devotionals as art forms (from the point of view of a concerned atheist) is that they encourage their consumers to treat the whole body as fact. I would say that little (maybe not nothing, but precious little) is gained by that.
If you’re saying that religion isn’t any more poetic than “poetic atheism”… okay I guess. That doesn’t bother me. I like actual poetry. Poetry that isn’t being roped into supporting an entire worldview. Poetic atheism just as poetic as poetic theism? I don’t have anything against that idea in principle (although I think it’s wrong.)
I just don’t understand why we would want to base atheism’s worth, as a worldview, upon its poetic qualities. That… It seems silly. Base it on its accuracy, or its explanatory effectiveness. That seems far more reasonable to me.
I don’t know, like I said I haven’t read the books she mentioned, so maybe there’s some sort of clever background arguments that make this problem go away.
I don’t think the idea is to base the worth of atheism solely on its poetic qualities, but poetry has a way of reaching people and resonating with them where the facts alone cannot. I am not suggesting the facts are unimportant; they are crucial. But poetry is a way of “singing” the facts rather than just reciting them. It’s just a more joyful way of being. Many people need poetry as their preferred form of expression, and having a poetic atheism means that poetry can be based on truth rather than fancy.
I suppose it’s more a reaction than assigning a worth. It’s so very common for atheists to be accused of unimaginative cold people who can’t see the Magic and Beauty of All That Is(tm). It’s all cold and unfeeling facts and science and math and your grandfather was a rock not mystical skydaddy who loves you, really, even as he gently smites you, and thus, religion is necessarily better because it brings magic and beauty and hope and warm fuzzy things atheism couldn’t possibly provide. Or something.
I suppose it is an attempt to accommodate and integrate the brute fact that humans are emotive as well as analytical beings into the atheist “mythos” or “subculture”, if you will, though those terms are very poor. Perhaps “corpus”? Hmm.
My thing is it has already been done, and well, by thinkers such as Epicurus, Nietzsche, and Thoreau. Describing a non-theistic or atheistic emotive world orientation has been done before, and the real problem underneath it all, the reason those answers don’t often satisfy, is that people are looking for etiological and teleological accounts of things, because that’s how humans are generally wired. No matter how an empirical, positivistic philosophy is dressed up, it is always going to come up short when meeting that psychological need to have meaty answers to questions of meaning and purpose.
“My thing is it has already been done, and well, by thinkers such as Epicurus, Nietzsche, and Thoreau.”
Ya, but none of them have a blog.
Ya, but none of them have a blog.
LOL! I tend to think, given Nietzsche’s proclivity for short, punchy aphorisms, he would have been right at home doing a blog.
I bet Nietzsche would have a Twitter, too.
And it’d be awesome.
The Ubermensch cannot be constrained by 140 characters!
I think that would be one of the better blogs out there…
You don’t think the universe can think? What?