On Not Being Resigned
As an atheist, a great many theological concepts have at best for me the richness of a powerful image in fantasy. I say “at best”, but I do not mean this to be dismissive: I do not need to believe in John Crowley’s fairies, Gene Wolfe’s alzabos, Robert Charles Wilson’s hypotheticals nor Ada Palmer’s J.E.D.D. Mason to find them moving, stirring, enriching, even useful tools for thinking about life: the fact that none of them are (as best as can be known) even remotely possible doesn’t diminish that. So, too, with all sorts of theological concepts: their power is in the shape they give to imagination, not in any correspondence with the things of reality. Many such ideas are essential to us as our breath and bone. But still I say “at best” because they are also at a certain remove: essential, but not quite actual. Shapers of imagination, but not containers of fact. And that matters, too.
Yet there is one theological concept that I do find to have reference to the muck and mire of real existence: and it is not even my tradition’s theology. But truth can be discovered by anyone, and probably anywhere: and the walling off of ideas into silos is one of the least useful inheritances of the historical fact of differeing demoniations and faiths. So whatever the concept’s origin I take it with eager hands.
The concept I refer to is that of original sin. This is a Christian idea; despite our sharing of the myth, it is not a Jewish one.1 Now like any central Christian idea, believed by so many so fervently for so long, it has had a great many different interpretations and variations over its history, and I certainly don’t believe in all of them, or even most of them. One might even say that I don’t believe in the idea at all, since I don’t believe that sin (a concept I have little use for, at least outside of fantasy, save as a synonym for wrong or evil) has anything to do with what I see in the world, nor that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being set up a test that he (ex hypothesi) knew we would fail and then punished us for it.2 I most certainly don’t believe that an apple nor a talking snake had anything to do with it.3 Fundamentally, I don’t believe, contrary to the Christian belief, that this is something that happened. (And for that reason among many I don’t believe that there is any sense in which the wrongness of which I am speaking has been undone or conquered or nullified, as Christians believe.)
But nonetheless there is still a lot in the idea that speaks to me. I am not talking about that aspect which the brilliant writer Francis Spufford refers to as “the human propensity to fuck things up”, which I take as roughly synonymous (as an interpretation of original sin) to the notion about which theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is (apparently erronously4) thought to have said that "the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian Faith." I do, in fact, think that this idea has a great deal of truth to it (and, indeed, that is empirically verifiable, as is reaffirmed every day in the morning’s paper). But it’s not the sense about which I am speaking here. Nor am I talking about the degree to which original sin serves (at least) as a superb metaphor and the grounding of previous investigation into the all-too-familiar fact that we cannot trust our own minds, that the depravity of our natures tends to pervert and bias our reasoning, and that we thus need to be suspicious even of what we ourselves think. That, too, is true, and is part of the richeness of the idea of original sin, whose power derives in no small part from its polyvalent singifications.
Rather, I am talking about the idea, which some Christians have understood through the lens of original sin, that there is a deep wrongness about the world, woven into its most fundamental particles and pieces, inextricable from the whole. That things are not as they ought to be. That things are simply off. This, I think, is true—and true in deep and important ways.'
When I speak of original sin in the remainder of this essay, this is what I am referring to.
It is always tempting to speak of evolution as having purposes and intentions and designs and even plans; even biologists do it. But it is also, of course, wrong: evolution is just this process that produces design-like things. It does not do things for reasons in the sense that the word ordinarily has. It is not that genes want to propigate themselves (as is far too often said); it’s that genes that are such that they did propogate themselves are the ones that happen to be around now.
Thus when evolution, through its algorithmic workings, produced first death, and then pain, and then consciousness of death, it wasn’t for some purpose. It wasn’t because it was natural, or fitting, or right, or deserved, or anything. It just was. It had all the intentionality of the moon orbiting the Earth, or fusion burning in the heart of the sun.
But arguably as soon as death and pain came into the world,5 wrongness came into the world, even though there was as yet no sentience to think things wrong. It is hard to know what “wrong” means if the fact of pain is not central to it. Once there is something that might be called experience, once there is a being which can feel, then there is wrongness, since what is felt is so often pain. It is hard to imagine that anything else was felt first, or as often. Nature is, as always, a devil’s chaplain, and is indeed well called “horribly cruel”: all the crueler, somehow, for having in fact no intentionality at all.
And once a consciousness of these facts—a self-awareness of feeling pain and that we might not feel it, and (above all) an awareness of death and the fact that we will, some day, meet it—then our knowledge of the wrongness of the world was, presumably, solidified. We look at all the splendor and grandeur of what is, and thought of how short it fell of what ought to be.
Descartes famously argued that we could not get the idea of perfection save from its reality, and thus God (the only perfection) had to exist.6 With all due fear and trembling at disagreeing with the great René,7 I think this exactly backwards. The idea of perfection is the most straightforward extrapolation we can imagine. Oh, perhaps one might say it is not a true imagining of it: we think we imagine perfection, but are vague on the details, and thus do not really imagine it, only pretend or fool ourselves into thinking we do. (But if so, how much more so would this apply to God? Surely we know no details there!)
Personally I think as soon as human beings (and perhaps earlier beings too) understand something like the inevitability of death, it is the easiest thing in the world to imagine it being otherwise. You simply see life and extrapolate straight on. It is even easier than to imagine flight, which anyone who has ever seen a bird soar through a blue sky on a fine day has done.
Evolution, which has no intentionality, created intentionality; similarly evolution, a mechanical process in a material world which has no room for value, gave rise to the fact of wrongness. Whether with the first twitch that could be called pain, or not until the first recognition that death was some day due: at some point the consciousness lept, and what is was shown to have always been wrong. To have wrongness woven into its the deepest fragments of its being.
To be fallen, although it never fell.
Not everyone will agree, of course. Some people will argue that death is right, natural, proper: they will deny that they fear it, and perhaps even invent reasons why it is a good thing. If you want to read a contemporary philosopher making a good version of such a case, I recommend This Life by Martin Hägglund. He’s almost convincing (and is well worth reading).
Another line of argument is that to even mention that death is wrong is childish, silly, even narcissistic: we ought to all grow up. Life ends. You’re not that important. Why are you whining?
But overall I think that both of these arguments are rationalizations: people talking themselves into accepting what they know to be inevitable. It’s a hard thing to see something as unavoidable and still declare that it is wrong. So we make up reasons why it is right. Thus all the words about how brevity makes meaning, about how it’s all part of the circle of life, about how the wheel of life is suffering and what one wants is to get off it, about how the immortal Elves tell themselves tales of death, and on and on. And also the stern commands to “grow up”, and the assurances that “that’s life”: as if being a grown-up did not include as an essential part the recognition of the utter shit that life so often is.
Note that there is a similar sounding set of claims, ones standing just next to those in rhetorical space, which I think are (of course) true: that we need to accept the fact of our death. “We must endure our going hence even as our coming hither”: of course. To blind ourselves to the inevitable is to fail to see the single most basic fact in the world. It can’t help but be a mistake.
And so of course there is an opposite mistake to the one described above. Just as some people hearing that something is both unavoidable and wrong deny it is wrong, or deny at importance to that fact, so others turn around and declare that it is, in fact, avoidable after all. The most common way to do this is to invent an afterlife. This is the approach of most religions (Buddhism being, as I implied above, an interesting exception). Certainly the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have followed this route. I shan’t convince anyone in a brief essay, let alone a brief aside, that this is untrue; but it seems obviously so to me.
Another way which, while very new, is apparently common among some very influential and powerful people in our society, is to imagine that death is something which might some day be overcome. Again, this is quite close in conceptual space to something I do believe (or at least hope): that life might be extended beyond the brief flicker currently allotted to even the longest-lived among us. I for one will take any amount that human ingenuity can wrest from the forces of indifference and ignorance, from a single hour to ten thousand years or more, and be deeply grateful for it. But even a thousand ages is like an evening gone, measured against the universe. Exactly how believers in technological immortality expect their medically-made-immortal bodies or their uploaded minds to survive the heat death of the universe, or the big crunch, or whatever turns out to be the final act, I can’t imagine. I suspect that they are conflating “ten thousand years” with “immortal”, and very large number with infinity, but perhaps this is ungenerous. But I can’t imagine how else they could sincerely mean it.
So yes: death is inevitable; death is wrong. — Now what?
Finding religion inadequate to the task, and philosophy too busy counting how many Gettier problems can dance on the head of an analytic distinction, I think the best resource I know of for answering this question is poetry. And, indeed, when I think of the inevitability and wrongness of death, what I think of is two poems.8
The first is the famous villanelle by Dylan Thomas, which I suspect most of my readers know. Certainly the last two lines (which are also the first and third lines, and many other lines: they are refrains, and recur regularly) are extremely famous, probably even among many who don’t know who wrote them:
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
But this is less about how to think (in general) about the wrongness of death and more about how to approach it. And I mostly agree with it, although I do think there may be a time for “glad did I live and gladly die” too, certainly in some cases. But it doesn’t get at the general issue.
Here’s another poem, written by the sublime poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950):
Dirge Without Music I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,— They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. — Edna St. Vincent Millay
This, I think, is the attitude that we really ought to have here. This accepts reality—”I know” she says, and does not undercut it; also, “So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind”. It accepts: but it does not accept it as right.
But it does press the question of what it means to be “not resigned”. Upon which, I suppose, everything I have been saying here hinges.
One friend of mine to whom I recently introduced this poem read “not resigned” as aligned with the contemporary seekers after immortality: those who think that knowledge and technology will conquer death. I don’t think this is true: and I don’t think it’s an attitude we ought to adapt. Again, I distinguish here the hope (which seems so extreme that I would doubt it is really held, had I not read many people sincerely express it) for immortality from the desire for a longer (ideally much longer) life. There are animals that do not age, and only die by violence or mischance; if we could make this true of humans, all the better. But time and chance, in the end, comes for them: and will come for us too. Even if only at the very end of everything, this universe will end like a Shakespearean tragedy, with bodies all over the floor.
So what does it mean, then, not to be resigned?
I think it means something like: I still think it’s wrong. I still call it wrong and refuse to say it is anything else. I still will it to be otherwise.9 Why does Millay say it in addition, then, to “I do not approve”? What is added by lack of resignation that lack of approval does not cover? Partly, I suppose, she says it because this is poetry, and repetition with variation is a part of its power, just as is true of music. But I think it’s also more than that: “I do not approve” sounds too passive, too weak: it sounds like a tut-tutting that is inadequate to the scale of wrongness. Whereas “I am not resigned” is an act of defiance—hopeless defiance, defiance that knows it is hopeless, but still will not cease from its defiance. It will still shout, helplessly, at the void.
And what is the point of such defiance, if it is indeed hopeless?
For one thing, it is’s true that death and pain are still wrong: and only truth can in the end settle us. Lies that death is either right or temporary or avoidable will let us down like a rotten floorboard giving way at the last moment. However hard to bear it is to say simultaneously this will happen and this is wrong, at least it will never be mistaken. At least we can stand there, as long as we can stand.
But I think the other thing is the insight which J. R. R. Tolkien described10 thus:
…the Northern courage: the theory of courage, which is the great contribution of early Northern literature.… I refer… to the central position the creed of unyielding will holds in the North.… ‘The Northern Gods’, Ker said, ‘have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason’—mythologically, the monsters—'‘but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat is no refutation.’ And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this ‘absolute resistance, perfect because without hope.’
“Defeat is no refutation”: that, I think, is the key. We will lose a battle against death: but we are still right. It is still wrong.
We are all fighting a hopeless battle; and, in the end, we all lose. But defeat is no refutation.
I am not sure, in the end, what this means. I don’t think it means that assisted suicide for terminally ill patients is wrong, nor that every single life must be stretched out on the rack of the most vicious, heroic life-saving measures that modern medicine, in all its desperate, well-intentioned cruelty, has devized.11 Cruelty and pain are almost as wrong as death: and to teach those things would be cruel, and bring pain.
Perhaps all I mean is to say something about how we see the universe around us. It is cold and without intention or purpose, devoid in itself of value: but it is also wrong. It is wrong, since we can imagine something better, something greater, something different. And it will remain forever wrong even if (though) we can never reach it.
So yes, dear reader: I will die, and you will die, and everyone we each know and love and hate will die, and the human race will die, and all life, and the stars themselves, and everything you have ever thought of or imagined or hoped: all will die.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
And defeat is no refutation.
I always remember at this point hearing a drash (interpretive talk) about the first parsha (section) of Genesis, in which the famous story about the apple and the talking snake occurs, and having a (fairly observant) Jewish friend of mine lean over and whisper to me “the Christians do such a better job with this story than we do”. I think he’s right.
At the very least, such a being could hardly be said to be “omnibenevolent” in any sense that humans would recognize.
As David Bazan puts it, it’s hard to “ponder the weight of an apple/Compared to the trouble we’re in” and continue to do anything other than doubt the story (even were there evidence worthy of the name to support it).
I had long attributed that marvelous (and true) liine to Niebuhr, and if you go looking for the quote online you’ll see it often attributed to him. But researching this essay, I found that it is—I think!—wrong. As far as I can tell, Neibuhr rather than writing it merely quoted it. In Man’s Nature and His Communities (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), Niebuhr writes:
I still think the “London Times Literary Supplement” was substantially correct when it wrote some years ago: “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”
So while it is by no means wrong to attribute the belief to Niebuhr, it seems like someone else authored the phrase. (If anyone has any idea who, please say in the comments!
We need not detain ourselves here with a discussion of when, precisely, in evolutionary history this happened; everyone will agree it took place at some point, whether they place that point among the earliest archaea or among fairly recent ancestors of homo sapiens; andd that’s all that’s needed for my purposes.
And he a famous doubter and skeptic!—This argument reminds me of Anselm’s famous proof: it has in common this, that reading it always leaves one feeling that your pocket has been picked.
A phrase that, of course, leaves open the question of precisely how much is due.
Poetry does not quite speak with one voice, here: there are poems on the other side, too. For instance, one gorgeous poem, an old favorite of mine, argues for the “not wrong actually” take on the matter; as with Hägglund, I find it almost convincing:
Requiem
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
— Robert Louis StevensonDante: “che sanza speme vivemo in disio." Alan Mandlebaum translates this as: “we have no hope and yet we live in longing." — And, yes, this is infernal punishment. So yes, it’s wrong and unfair that we are subjected to it. What did you expect? Such is the world. Haven’t you been listening? Not to me, even: just your whole life?
In his classic essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, collected in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Allen & Unwin, 1983).