I’d
like to thank my girlfriend’s cat
for convincing
me to write this
essay. My
girlfriend is at her
mom’s for the
weekend,
which means I slept in this morning, as I tend to do when I have the
whole bed to myself. So
there I was,
technically
awake but with no plans to get up.
And
then around 11:00, the cat became very interested in my face. I
asked the cat whether it had become interested
in my face because it thought I should get out of bed and finally
write
another good, full-length 1585
essay, and in its way it answered yes.
And
so I did, and here we are.
I
suppose, if you’re
going to be technical about it, there’s an outside chance
that this wasn’t what the cat actually wanted. Even-handed
guy
that I am, I’ll admit it is within the realm of possibility
that the cat came
and got me out of bed because it wanted food, just like every other
time that a cat has ever come and gotten me out of bed in the past. Of
course, this would mean that deep down I
knew I should get up and write today, but was having trouble making
myself do
so, and that, somehow, imbuing the blank slate of this cat with the
aspects of a
human interlocutor assisted me in the process of doing what I knew I
should be
doing. But you
can’t
prove that, so I
choose not to see it that way.
In
other words,
my girlfriend’s cat is God.
Much
has been
written, here and elsewhere, about what exactly the idea of God does
for
believers. Religious
types say it
is the
only way of knowing how to live correctly.
John
Lennon famously
sang that it is a concept by which we measure our
pain. Many
psychologists and
evolutionary biologists, and many of the so-called “New
Atheists” inspired by
them, suggest that the origins and appeal of religion lie in two
properties: it
(increasingly less so as science advances) provides explanations for
aspects of
the external world that we don’t understand, and it (as much
now as ever)
ameliorates the uniquely human curse of comprehending futurity by
allowing
belief in one version or another of life after death.
Indeed,
these
qualities are basically what religious people themselves would say (in
significantly
different language) that religion does for them, in addition to the
supposed “moral
guidance” part. (Though we could probably lump that in with
the “workings of the
external world” part, since many religious people see certain
moral maxims as
so immutable that they seem indistinguishable from properties
of the universe like gravity or electricity, and the
apparent
inability on the parts of many religious people to distinguish between
scientific description and ethical prescription [“If you
think we’re related to
chimps, you must also think it’s okay for us to kill each
other like chimps do”]
is probably an outgrowth of this propensity.)
But
there is another
property of the God-concept that gets talked about
far less, by both believers and the scientifically-minded who analyze
them: God
is a great audience.
And
I don’t mean audience
in the sense of a hearer or
prayers or a judge of morality. I
mean
audience for
the sake of audience,
someone who is watching in the same way that you wanted mommy to watch
you dive
when you were at the pool as a kid.
We
normally think this is about approval,
but I don’t see approval as the whole of it: even a kid who
is not terribly
bright knows that mommy is going to say the dive was good no matter
what, and
so assessment of skill is not really the issue.
We
just want people to
observe and be aware of us, for the sake of
observation and awareness themselves, and demonstrations of skill (real
or
imagined) merely provide excuses.
The
analyses that
chalk religion up to fear of death and explanations for earthquakes
are, I
think, biased towards the Western religions we know about, namely Judeo-Christianity
and the most prominent forms of ancient European Paganism (and often
the latter
disguised as the former: there’s nothing in the Bible about
Jehovah throwing
lightning bolts or causing earthquakes, so belief in that shit is
straight-up
Zeus and Poseidon with a Biblical sheen).
It
is not the case that
every religion has posited a life after death,
or spent a lot of time and energy trying to compete with chemistry and
physics. What every
religion
ever, to
the best of my knowledge, has had in common is the suggestion that we
are being observed
by something. How
sentient or
humanlike the observer is can
vary: the karmic force of Buddhism is not self-aware, but it still
dictates
future payoffs or penalties for present actions, and so it is still the
case
that record-keeping is going on, and record-keeping implies
observation — i.e.,
an audience.
It
is not the
case that every religion has been particularly concerned with moral
guidance. The Olympian Gods of
Greece (and
later, Rome) were Gods in the sense that they were extremely powerful,
but they were
all just as morally fallible as mortals. Zeus was in charge
because he was the strongest, but ethically speaking
he may have been the biggest asshole: you had “moral
obligations” to him like
sacrifices and rituals, but it wasn’t always the case that
what he wanted was
necessarily the right thing. Even if
your record was spotless, there was still a pretty good chance that he
was
going to turn into an animal and rape you just because he felt like
it.
“Never
bend over in the presence of a
mysteriously glowing swan” is not a moral maxim so much as a
pragmatic one. “Good”
outcomes happened when, despite their
foibles, all the Gods managed to agree on something, which mirrors
humanity
much more closely than do modern deities. The idea of a
single
god who was always right would have been utterly
foreign to those societies — but it was still the case that you
were being watched. Hell, there
were gods everywhere;
you couldn’t take a shit without at least a tree nymph or two
watching you wipe
your ass.
The
decline of
religion has not, as religious types always warned, resulted in an
increase of
violence and lawlessness and general evildoing. It has,
however,
coincided with a drastic increase in people who have a
pathological need for attention. The
concept of fame itself was originally closely aligned with religion: if
you
were exceptionally awesome, then the Gods made you into a constellation
when
you died. Your story was
important, and
the point of people like poets and painters was that they were good at preserving
your story. Then the human race
discovered aesthetic pleasure, and began to celebrate the artists
themselves. Then Christianity took
over
and decided artistic talent was bad and for about a thousand years we
didn’t do
that anymore. Then we did again and
called it the Renaissance. Then in the
late ’90s someone decided talent was bad again and invented
reality shows. Fame
is
absolutely a replacement for God. Now,
out
of the mouth of someone who believes in God, this would be a criticism
of
fame. But I’m not
criticizing fame or
the desire to be famous, just stating a fact. Fame at least
verifiably exists, and I suppose you might as well want to
be famous as want anything else, as long as you’re not
hurting anyone. Fame is not important
in the grand scheme of
things, but then, neither is anything else, so if you’re
looking for something
that is
“important in the grand
scheme of things” then I advise strongly against holding your
breath.
Like
most people
who post their own writing on the internet, I check the stats on visits
to this
site regularly. When
there are a lot of
hits, I’m happy, and when there aren’t,
I’m pissed. I don’t
know
the people who are reading the
stuff, or whether they like or even understand my work, and whether they
do or don't read it does not affect my real life in any way, but for
some
reason, I need to know they’re out there.
In
fact, their being
“out there” seems to be an essential property of
the audience I require, since for some reason I feel like the hits from
people
who are my friends in real life “don’t
count.”
And
in case I
haven’t mentioned it before, I don’t believe in God.
Would
I care so much about the number of hits
this website gets if I did? Maybe
not. Maybe I would
feel
totally
justified by the fact that God reads my essays (and likes them,
obviously)
and not care whether people
did. Or maybe,
since God
after all can
read my thoughts,
I
wouldn’t even deem it necessary to bother writing them down
and posting them to
the internet, and I would be perfectly satisfied by just sitting around
thinking all
day (which would mean the Rastafarians have a point about God being
like
marijuana).
Now,
I certainly can’t
say that no religious people have ever been motivated to accomplish
prodigious
work. While I am
certainly
skeptical of
whether many ostensibly religiously motivated works were actually
religiously
motivated — the private beliefs of Michelangelo or Mozart being
very much an open
question — I admit that I cannot dismiss every great
mind’s piety as a socially
convenient mask. Isaac
Newton, for
example, was as prodigious a genius as any mind in history, and was
also by all
accounts religious to the point of derangement.
Even
in modern times,
there are any number of people who are both religious
believers and
highly motivated to
seek fame.
Another
promising theory ruined by Bono
But
one
advantage
that religious fame-seekers have over nonbelieving fame seekers is
God-as-audience. If
God thinks
you’re great (which he does, obviously),
then other people should
too, and if they don’t, then fuck ’em.
Religion
supposedly teaches humility, but I don’t see how this can
possibly be the
case. If you think
that an
all-knowing,
all-powerful entity whose magnificence encompasses all of existence
agrees with
you about everything (which religious people must all think, because if
they
had any opinions they thought God disagreed with, then they would
change them),
how could you possibly value anyone else’s viewpoint at
all,
much less value it over
your own (which is “really” God’s)?
More
than
anything else, the idea that religion “shows people the
way” is how the
religious defend it. But
logically,
religion can’t possibly do this: if you’re
religious, then you already think
that you think what God thinks, so the only way you could ever change
your mind
is if deep down what you used to think wasn’t really what you
thought. And
luckily, in the
case of a great many
assholes, it is in fact the case that what they think isn’t
really what they
think.
Unfortunately,
in
the cases of the very biggest assholes, what they think really
is
what they think. In
my case, the cat was
able to “convince me” to get out of bed and
write an essay because I really wanted to and the presence of the cat simply helped me articulate this to
myself. But when
Hitler’s cat came to get him out of
bed, it was telling him to hurry up and kill more Jews.
There
was no way that the cat (i.e., Hitler's fucked-up idea of God) could
have suggested that maybe he rethink the whole Jew-killing thing,
because
Hitler was so evil that no part of his psyche doubted that this was the
way to
go. In short: if
you are a
little bit
bad, then “God” can make you better, but if you are
evil then “God” makes you even
worse.
I
think the fact that
I have chosen to live my life without religion has made me a better
person in
some ways, but has also made my life a lot harder.
(Still,
all things considered, it is probably
for the best that I didn’t, since, considering how high an
opinion of myself I
have now,
I cannot fathom how big an
asshole I would be if I also
believed
I had God on my side.) As
a nonbeliever,
I have no objective correlative to (pretend to) check in with: humanity
is all
there is, and so I am whatever other people decide to tell me I am,
because there
is no standard by which I could logically believe myself to be anything
else.
Accordingly,
I
care more about what other people think, regardless of who they are,
than does anyone
else I have ever known (which, for someone who spends his time arguing
on the
internet, you can imagine is hell).
And
not just about me, but about anything.
I
have more than once been out with a group of friends on a Saturday
night and
left them to debate a crazy religious person holding up a sign on a
street corner,
and even Billy Joel knows that you should never argue with a crazy
ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-man.
Speaking
of which, it
has also always
bothered me that the line I just quoted doesn’t end with
“maniac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac,”
since it is a three-syllable word with the stress in the right place
that means
“crazy man” and ends in “-ac”
like the terms that appear in the same place in
the two preceding verses. Seriously,
was
he sitting there trying to think of a dactyl that ends in
“-ac” and means “crazy
man,” but couldn’t, and finally said “fuck
it, I’m just putting crazy
ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-man?”
Anyway,
Billy
Joel aside, you can see I’ve got problems.
Like
most smart people
in America, as a child I was tortured by other
children. And like
many smart
people in
America, I therefore have a troubled relationship with the fact that I
am no
longer a child. For
a lot of years now,
I have been trying to develop a post-highschool worldview and failing,
and
I still genuinely expect active persecution from total strangers in just
about
every social situation (and living in New York City, where
omnipresent
hipsters mean that many social situations actually
are like high school, has not
helped).
The
problem of
the American Smart Person on this front is twofold: firstly, though not
every
smart person is an atheist, at the very least smart people are
significantly more likely to have God-concepts advanced beyond
one of an
anthropomorphic
sky-parent, and secondly, upon the completion of school smart people
are
suddenly and confusingly ejected from a world where virtually everyone
is
obsessed with them — obsessed with making them miserable, yes,
but obsession is
obsession. As a
tiny, meaningless
being
in a vast, meaningless universe, why the hell would I ever let go of
the
identity that got me the most attention?
I
would need to replace
it with something, and the only thing I could
possibly replace it with is fame, and I’m not famous.
I
realize on some
level that, as someone who has continued to see himself as a
“nerd” and expect
destruction at the hands of strangers on the street well into his
thirties, I
am ascribing to the beings around me powers they do not actually
possess and a
preoccupation with me that they do not actually have.
Why
do I, and others like me, do this?
Because
it is better to be observed with
negative results than not to be observed at all.
Fame
phrases this as “there’s no such thing
as bad press,” and religion phrases it as “God
sends you to Hell because he
loves you.”
Being
observed is so important that at the most basic levels it even
determines how
matter behaves (speaking of which, since no-one else was in the room
this
morning to see it, maybe the cat was simultaneously
waking me up to get me to write an essay and
because it wanted food). Socrates
was on
the right track when he said that the unexamined life is not worth
living — the only
problem was, he foolishly meant you were supposed to examine it
yourself. That’s
all
well and good, but the simple
truth is, if no-one else is examining it too, you go
nuts. That’s what
God is for, and that’s what I
meant by the opening lines of the first poem in my
awesome book:
Ever
since I stopped
believing in God
I’ve
been
pretending I was in a movie.
—from "God As a
Thing, or Whatever It Is"
The
life of the
nonbelieving self-examiner is rough.
We
resent
other people more than anyone, but we need them more than anyone as well. Just
look at how obsessed Nietzsche was with
the opinions and judgments of the herd he despised.
The
Nietzschean thinker is a Cassandra, and
the cursed prophet is essentially a crippled God: knowing everything,
but
powerless to make people believe it (which is, of course, worse in
terms of
happiness than being a normal stupid person or a semi-smart person with
enough
clout to back up the few things you do know).
The
irresolvable
paradox of Nietzsche’s life was, why bother with the
truth when no-one stupider than you can understand it, no-one smarter
than you
exists, and everyone as smart as you already knows it?
(I
think he bothered with the truth because
he was a good person, but sadly this term would have made no sense to
him.)
Friends
have
advised me that, in order to overcome my fear of social persecution, I
need to decide
whose opinions I care about and whose opinions I don’t care
about. But I feel
reluctant to
do this because, if
everyone did that, then nothing would ever get better: everyone would
simply decide
that they only care about the opinions of people who already agree with
them,
thereby making it impossible for anyone to ever change (which needs to
happen,
because most people suck). I
constantly
make fun of people I don’t like because I want them to
realize they suck and
change their minds, which means that I must also pay attention to
people who
make fun of me. Otherwise,
it
wouldn’t
be fair. I’m not
sure
why I care that it
wouldn’t be fair, since no-one would know but me.
I
guess it’s because I want to do the right
thing. Except that,
since I am
also
equally aware that I am actually the one who is right, the right thing
would be
for other people to care about what I say but for me not to care about
what
they say, which means that I am not in fact trying to do the right
thing but
instead the fair thing, which in this case would be wrong, and hence
not fair,
since by definition nothing can be simultaneously fair and wrong, so
maybe what
I actually need to do is just make this issue complicated enough that
the
people who oppose me can’t understand it anymore, thereby
eliminating them as observers
and leaving me as the only possible version of myself, in which case, I
suppose, mission accomplished.
So
there you have
it: a new full-length essay, and all because I listened to my
girlfriend’s
cat. This must be
why those
pick-up guys
who advise abusing your girlfriend’s cat are such shitty
writers.