A response to PragerU's "If There is No God, Murder Isn't Wrong"

With a little under two weeks to go before Best American Short Stories 2019 drops, I thought I'd use my blog to indulge in a non-literary but still-important-to-me topic. If you follow this blog for literary reasons and aren't really into God and moral philosophy, I'll see you on October 1st. This is a response to a video that some friends of mine were talking about the other day, and I thought I'd collect all my thoughts in one place to aid our conversation. You, the reader, are welcome to join in.

Prager "U" and the video in question

If you're not familiar with PragerU, the quick version is that they're more of a conservative media company than a university, whatever their name might imply. They create videos with relatively simplistic versions of Christian or politically conservative arguments, done in such a way to get millions of people who agree with those ideas to re-post the videos on social media. A friend of mine posted one the other day, mostly to say how stupid he thought it was. This was the video:

Another friend, who is deeply trained in classical philosophy, saw that post and asked what the external basis was for morality without a god. He wasn't so much agreeing with the video as asking what, if my other friend found it objectionable, we might substitute for God-given morality. It's a reasonable question, and one I've been chewing on for 25 years since I left Christianity behind me. I think I've got three responses, and not just because three is always the number people pick when they want to support a thesis.

Synopsis of Prager's arguments

Denis Prager, the "dean" of PragerU, basically argues that without God to dictate what morality is, all views about morality, even when it comes to nearly universally accepted premises like "it's wrong to murder," are just opinions. You can say that nearly everyone agrees with the idea, but that's not the same as being able to point to empirical data for why you believe in something like gravity or that the Earth is round. There's no firm foundation. Morals are relative, and if society began to reject the notion that murder is wrong, we'd be unable to make a grounded argument for why that was evil.

When I raised this with Mrs. Heretic, she had the same reaction I'd guess a lot of people do. She thought it was a stupid thing to say and that plain, old "common sense" ought to tell us it's wrong to murder even if we don't believe in God. I'm not entirely sure she didn't suspect I was concocting some kind of sophistry to convince her there is no such thing as morality, since she knows I don't believe in God. It took me a while to get across that the argument is simply that without reference to an objective criteria we all agree on, you can't say "murder is wrong" like you can say 2+2=4. You'd lose the "self-evident" nature of moral arguments the founders were so fond of. You couldn't argue about more advanced moral issues either, like abortion or immigration or welfare, because you'd have no postulates to build a proof from.

I'm sympathetic to Prager's argument, because it has a lot of intuitive appeal. C.S. Lewis and Christian apologists after him have used an offshoot of this argument to argue for the converse. Rather than arguing that we need God to have morality, they have argued that the near universal existence in human society of morality is proof of God as the giver of that moral code within our consciences. I used to really buy into that belief, and it took me a long time, even after I no longer accepted it, to be able to explain why. So here I go.

Argument #1: Christians are in the same shaky boat

If Christians want to argue that without God, we have no moral absolutes, that's fine, but this overlooks that they're in a very similar logical quandary themselves. They have to face a question about the nature of good and evil and its relationship to God that has plagued Christian theologians for centuries. The video sort of glossed over it by saying that murder is evil because God says it is (and then showing a cartoon depiction of the Ten Commandments).

But here's the conundrum: is murder wrong because God says it's wrong, or is it wrong because it's objectively and independently wrong, and God merely happens to have the right moral beliefs, beliefs He chooses to share with us? Some hard-core Calvinists have held that morality is whatever God says it is, and that if God had chosen to say murder and rape were good, they would be good. Most theologians balk at that, because that would seem to mean that God didn't choose moral precepts out of his own character. But if we say that God commands us to do what is good because it is objectively good, then that means there is a good and an evil that predates and "outranks," if I may use that term, even God. It means murder is wrong because it's wrong, not because God says it is.

There's really no good way out of this dichotomy for Christians. If we go through door number one, then morality isn't really "moral," it's still relative or "opinion" as PragerU puts it. The only thing different about this opinion is that the supreme ruler of the universe holds this opinion. It's an extreme example of "might makes right," the kind of thing we see at the end of the Book of Job when God's answer to Job's question of why bad things happen to good people is essentially, "Shut up and be glad I didn't make it worse, because I am strong and wise and you are not."

Door number two feels right to most people, I believe, but it also makes God's rightness on moral matters contingent. God did not create good and evil. God did not tell us to murder because he happens not to like it, but because murder is wrong. It was wrong before God said anything about it. It was wrong for all 60,000 years when homo sapiens was developing the ability to record its moral precepts. If that's the case, then doesn't it really make no difference whether we believe in God or not? Shouldn't our proper interest be in the good and evil that existed before the Ten Commandments? Are we not capable of being our own priests, communicating in some sense with moral rights and wrongs that are independent of God?

You could argue that even though right and wrong are what they are without God saying anything, He is, by his completely good nature, the only being capable of revealing their nature to us. That kind of ruins Lewis's argument for morality proving the existence of God, then, because that is essentially saying we don't understand right and wrong without God, when Lewis would like to say that God plants an understanding of morality in all of us and uses that to help us find our way to Him. If Lewis's argument is true, then we will maintain a conscience whether we believe in God or not.

And lo and behold, we find cultures all over the Earth who have developed morality independently of Judeo-Christian values. Those moral codes do what moral codes are supposed to do--regulate the behavior of individuals in such a way that society becomes possible. If only God's edicts can create reliable morality, whence all these other long-standing societies?

Argument #2: So what if morality is just opinion?

I agree that murder isn't "Evil" with a capital "E." There is no Platonic perfect morality, of which our Earthly morality is just a shadow, and on which all our best moral ideas are modeled. Murder is only "evil," which is to say that society regards it as such. It's an opinion, even if it's one held by nearly everyone. For me, it's evil because it does not lead to the kind of world I want to live in, which is my main rule for deciding whether I find something moral. But others may have different reasons for thinking it wrong, and a few stragglers out there might not find it immoral at all. So why don't I find this a threat to the good of mankind, if I can't prove those who think murder isn't evil are wrong?

Consider for a moment the 1988 movie "Mac and Me." (If life has been good to you, this will be the first and only time you will ever consider it.) I cannot "prove" that it is a bad movie. There is no formula that proves it, no empirical data. But 100% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes agree that it is bad. How did we arrive at such a unanimous consensus if there is no ultimate, unshakable basis for stating what is good and bad in a movie?

I guarantee this is the only time this movie has been cited in a moral argument. 

I would contend that moral reasoning works something like aesthetic reasoning. In aesthetics, we may not be able to come to scientific statements about what is good or bad or beautiful or ugly, but we still have some hazy understanding of  what we mean, and this hazy understanding actually helps produce consensus a lot more than you'd think. Yes, 38% of the audience said they liked the movie (I would be willing to bet at least half of those are trolls pretending they loved it). We won't get total unanimity. But we can get close. Murder is the Mac and Me of the moral world. Nearly everyone who isn't just trying to troll others happens to have the same opinion. If the goal of morality is to help people know what they should and should not do, then isn't the "right ballpark" of morality good enough, even if we don't have a map to show us exactly where we are?

Prager argued that utilitarian ideas of morality fail, that they are "wishful thinking." We can't argue that people will do what is moral because they either fear punishment or wish to live in a pleasant world. Mao, Hitler, and Stalin killed, and no utilitarian argument stopped them. Here, I don't think Prager is being entirely honest. He just admitted that plenty of Christians have done evil things, even done them in God's name. But then he talked right past that and spoke of how there is a reason that the rejection of Judeo-Christian beliefs has coincided with an increase in murder. He claimed that Judeo-Chrisitan societies were the first to accomplish a host of social goods, implying that without Judeo-Christian beliefs, we can't really hope to advance the social good.

I don't deny the many good things Christians have accomplished. But they sure took their sweet time getting there for many of them. Before some Christians began opposing slavery, people arguing from the same Judeo-Christian beliefs also expanded it on a scale that had never been dreamed of before. Prior to expanding the vote to women, Christians excluded them from the vote. Why did it take so long? Maybe because for all his belief in how clear God makes morality, there aren't that many things that are really terribly clear from the Bible. Should we outlaw slavery? Christians made arguments both ways, both quoting from the same book. Should women be allowed to vote? Same thing. If God is the source of all morality, He's done a lousy job of making it clear what we ought to do and not do. Even today in America, there are liberal Christians arguing from Jesus's concern for the poor for more state welfare and conservative ones quoting Saint Paul's "if a man will not work, he will not eat," arguing for far less.

God doesn't make morality any clearer. Morality is inherently difficult, and more of a general grid on a map than a specific dot. It's a region of a graph, not one coordinate. But the map isn't really any foggier without God than with Him. Instead, we have to try to figure out what a person we cannot know and certainly cannot create proofs for wants, rather than trying to figure out what we want ourselves.

Reason #3: We already made morality without God once

Like all agnostics, I believe humanity evolved without supernatural intervention. Therefore, as unlikely as it sounds, that means human beings evolved as moral creatures. There was likely an evolutionary reason for this. Most mammals seem to show some signs of empathy, and I think empathy may help explain some of our success over the last 65 million years. If you're looking for a bedrock on which to build your moral principles, empathy might be as close to one as you've got. (Of course, this still doesn't make anything simple. If you try to go through life operating on the "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" heuristic, you'll soon find yourself in a morally difficult position of having to decide which "other" you should be doing unto when there are competing camps of "others" who want things.)

Evolved morality is not the same as God-given. This is more along the lines of behaviors that have worked in the past to help us propagate as a species than it is an unassailable principle upon which arguments can be built. We don't understand exactly how it evolved or why, but it's not too great a stretch to see how it can be evolutionarily useful as a species for one person to risk his or her life for another. Within bodies, it happens all the time, with some cells sacrificing for others. In insects, it happens at the organism level. It would not require supernatural interference for humanity to evolve selfless behavior, even to desire to behave selflessly. And nearly all mammals almost HAVE to have empathy at some point, because as milk-eaters in our infancy, we all rely on a mother who is willing, for a time, to put her interests aside for those of her children. Without this selflessness, nearly all mammals would die before having a chance to pass on genes.

Even non-mammals evolve behaviors of how to behave. Insects have incredibly sophisticated social lives. They know what is expected of them and how to act without God. And although some theists insist that "instinct" is just a word for what we don't understand and that God may have been the one to put the moral instinct there, I would respond that while I accept and enjoy the existence of beautiful mysteries, that is not the same as accepting God as an explanation for them.

It's really not very hard to imagine an evolutionary basis for morality. There are much more difficult questions for a non-theist than this one, actually. Humanity saw what was good (little "g"), did it, and when it evolved to a point where it could codify its already-existing practices, thought it important enough to put moral codes in the mouth of God. We invented right and wrong, not God.

Summary

Prager claimed that every non-theist he has ever debated admitted that without God, morality is "just an opinion." I don't know that all philosophers would agree to his dismissive characterization, but I certainly don't object to the claim that morality isn't certain. At least, it's not certain if your aim is to construct philosophical dialogues that proceed by getting someone to accept one point and then building from there, one abstract brick at a time. But maybe that's not really how moral philosophy ought to work. People are living beings. Moral philosophy ought to be about how to live as a human among humans, not how to turn morality into a geometry problem. I think it's actually a good thing that we can't always reduce moral problems to math. As C.S. Lewis once put it when explaining that the complexity of the Bible was a good thing, because it kept believers from reducing its truths too much, "No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish."

Why I think abortion should be legal: an open letter to my evangelical friends

Hello. Thanks for reading this. A lot of people in America think evangelicals are so closed-minded, it's useless to try to reason with them. To reason with you, that is, the evangelicals I hope are reading this. I don't believe that's true. My own history with evangelicals is complicated. I was raised as something of a half-committed Catholic. A friend invited me to his evangelical church when I was sixteen and just beginning to wonder about the big questions in life in a serious way. Because that church had a lot of answers to the questions I was asking, I took to it pretty readily. I hit all the Christian milestones evangelicals look for: genuinely asking Christ to be my lord and savior, then baptism, then regular church attendance and "witnessing" to others. I carried a Bible around high school my junior and senior years. I married a girl from my high school group at a young age, like a lot of evangelicals, because it was "better to marry than to burn."

After seven years, I had more questions about how parts of what I'd believed could be true than I could answer, and I walked away from it. It's not important for this discussion why. I'm always happy to talk about that and explain it as best I can, but for now, I just want to make the point that I've been inside evangelical communities and inside an evangelical psychology myself. That's why I don't accept what a lot of people would have me believe about you--that you are filled with hate, that you are uneducated, that you ignore Christ's commands to care about the poor and sick and argue for restrictions to abortion and freedom to own guns. Believing something fundamentally different from the majority need not mean you are monstrous.  For example, I now disagree with you when you say that homosexuality is a sin, but I don't accept that just because you believe it to be sinful, that means you hate homosexuals. I hope you'll afford me the same latitude as you read this, because I'm going to be arguing that something you fundamentally find to be monstrous should be legal.  

I'm not out to change your mind about the big stuff, and I think we can coexist in society without agreeing on those fundamental questions much more readily than some would have us believe. The point of this post isn't to get you to believe that abortion is morally right. You don't need to believe that--even in cases of medical threat to life or rape or incest. It's not important that you change your mind about whether it's right. I only submit to you that there might be good reasons to grudgingly accept it as legal. At the very least, I hope to explain why someone might believe in abortion being legal without being a moral monster. Lately, I've seen some of you asking questions about how anyone could support abortion and not be evil. This has been especially prevalent since New York passed its abortion law allowing for late-term abortions when "there is an absence of fetal viability, or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health." I'd like to try to explain where I'm coming from enough that you can at least consider the possibility that being okay with abortion might not make me psychotic. 

I believe most evangelicals are actually quite literate and reasonable. In a world where reading and reasoning skills are becoming weaker, it's possible evangelicals on the whole reason better than than the average American. So come, let us reason together about this one issue.

Precedent for accepting what is immoral as legal

Accepting the legality of what you view as sin might seem to violate the evangelical principle of not "compromising" to sin. But I think the notion of "no compromise" is really meant more for Christians in their own lives than what Christians are supposed to expect of the secular governments they are living under. The Christians who wrote the New Testament and the first three centuries of Christians who followed them couldn't have dreamed of being a politically relevant force in government one day. The attitude of Christians to government in the New Testament isn't always negative--Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 both call on Christians to be "subject" to human rulers--but there is an "otherness" when Christians of the first century talked about government. Government was one thing and Christian faith was another. So Christians really had no choice but to accept that the government would put rules in place it did not approve of. If Christianity was to change cultural practices, it would have to use a different form of influence. In fact, this is exactly what Christianity did up until the point when a Christian became emperor, and the nature of Christianity's relationship to the state changed forever in the West.

Even now, after Christianity has been politically significant for centuries, Christians have gradually come to accept that certain precepts important to Christians should not be enforced in laws for everyone. One example are laws prohibiting certain kinds of activities on Sundays. These used to be commonplace, but one hardly sees them now except in echoes, like liquor stores not being able to open until noon one day a week. A more telling example is the legal de-criminalization of homosexual acts. Until very recently, it was illegal for two grown people of the same sex to engage in consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes. We have changed this, and although a majority of evangelicals still believe homosexuality is a sin, a much smaller number believe there is cause to outlaw it. That's because Western evangelicals understand the difference between what God wants and what is needed to live in an imperfect world alongside non-believers. It's something ardent believers in other parts of the world are still struggling to learn. 

I can already hear evangelicals objecting to comparing what the law should be on liquor on Sundays or homosexual sex to abortion. Since abortion means murder to most evangelicals, they would see a reason to make a law for abortion where one isn't needed for other acts. There are some actions that Christians believe are sinful that they nevertheless think it alright to leave up to individual freedom to chose to do or not do. Abortion isn't one of them. That's fine at this point. If we leave this part of the discussion with just accepting the notion that some acts Christianity views as immoral ought to still be legal, then we can at least have a discussion.

So why should we accept abortion under the law?

If there's one thing those seven years as an evangelical instilled in me, it's an appreciation for the three-point sermon. So I'll follow suit and give three reasons why I think abortion should be legal. There is no hymn at the end to summarize the points, though, so feel free to leave immediately after and go get coffee or barbeque, depending on which kind of evangelical you are. 

1. The Bible doesn't overtly outlaw abortion, but you see it there. The Constitution doesn't overtly guarantee the right to privacy, but it's there, too. 

I'm not going to make the argument that the Bible isn't really anti-abortion. You've all read the Bible. You can make your own minds up about what it says and doesn't say. But one thing that would be pretty hard to argue it does say is that abortion is a sin. At least, it doesn't say that overtly. There's some stuff in Psalms where a poet speaks in the voice of God and says He knew the listener in the womb. There are punishments for harming a pregnant woman. From these and other passages, most evangelicals argue that even if the Bible doesn't say "Thou shalt not commit abortion," it's a pretty obvious implication of what is there. 

Some have argued the opposite and said that the Bible doesn't prohibit abortion. The argument comes down to three things: 1) The Bible never mentions abortion, even though it existed, at least in rough fashion, when the Bible was being written; 2) A passage in Numbers 5:11-31 forces wives suspected by their husbands of having become pregnant with another man to submit to a "purity test"; if they failed the test, God would kill the baby, suggesting God did not believe infants had an unalienable right to life; 3) The general way in which Old Testament law treats children as property for which the parents should be compensated rather than as having their own self-worth. (See Exodus 21:22-25).

You don't have to side with those who think the Bible isn't anti-abortion. The early Christian church was condemning abortion fairly early in its history, so I'm fine with the assertion that it's a traditional Christian stance, whether it's overt in the Bible or no. But then, in accepting that something could be more implied than stated in the Bible but still be mandatory to follow for Christians, you are accepting the principle that some things can be an obvious implication of a text without being explicitly stated in the text.

This matters, because a big argument against the right to abortion is that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to an abortion, nor the right to privacy upon which earlier decisions established that right (update: this was what the majority argued in its decision today, June 24th 2022). But if you're the sort of reader who feels that even if something isn't explicitly stated, it ought to be treated the same as an explicit statement if you can't follow the explicit statements without the follow-on implication, then you have to take the right to privacy more seriously that that. Many of the guaranteed rights in the Constitution don't make sense without a corollary right to privacy. That means that the government has to have an overwhelming and compelling reason to interfere with your right to do whatever the hell you want to do. 

Many of the societies that were either mentioned in the Bible or that came into contact with those societies practiced infanticide. I'm not talking about the ritual sacrifice of children to appease gods, although that also happened; I'm talking about communities deciding not to put resources into a child they thought to be too weak to thrive. The first society Christianity lived in, that of the Roman Empire, practiced infanticide of the weak. Scholars differ on how widespread the practice was, but it's clear it wasn't unknown. The very myth the Romans told themselves about how Rome came about involved a pair of children who were abandoned at birth.

Why has no one ever thought of a wolf dairy farm? 

Christians--to their everlasting credit--helped to outlaw the practice when they came to power in Rome. There are also many examples of Christians rescuing babies. But still, although the practice was probably well-known, there is no clear condemnation of it in Christian literature until the Didache in the 2nd Century. 

Does that mean, then, that the Bible doesn't condemn infanticide, just because it isn't in the New Testament? (There is one famous mention of it in Psalms, one that approves of infanticide of one's enemies, but let's lay that to the side for now.) Of course it doesn't mean that. Christians opposed infanticide from very early on because they couldn't make sense of what was explicit in their faith unless infanticide was also an explicit sin. 

So when people argue now for things like a separation of church and state or a right to privacy, you can't just say those things aren't actually in the Constitution and so we don't have to consider them. Not unless you want to also get rid of many of the things you consider to be critical to your faith as well. 

2. A right to an abortion helps protect your right to reproductive freedom as well

There's a guy I know--I won't say I know him well, but I worked with him once, and for some reason, he's kept me on as a Facebook friend in spite of my frequent posts about Korean pop music. He's had four children. When he and his wife had their first, they realized they both had a recessive gene for spinal muscular atrophy. It was just bad luck. They both needed to pass on that recessive gene for their kids to get it--meaning there was a one-in-four chance each child would get the disease, but their first child had it.

I want to say that from what I know, I think they're both amazing parents. They put all they had into their first child until she died. After their first child, they had a choice to make. Should they have more kids and risk passing on the disease to someone else?

They had three more kids, one of whom also got the disease. Again, they've put an amazing amount of effort into caring for her. I've seen people question his choices when he's posted about his life before; they feel that because he knew the risks with subsequent children, he should be blamed for bringing the second affected child into the world. They also feel that he bears some blame for knowingly causing high costs to society (presumably passed on to his insurance company and from there to everyone who subscribes to that insurance).

I don't agree. I think this person has a right to have as many kids as he wants. He certainly has proved that whatever happens, he'll do right by the kids he has. (He recently ran fifty miles as a fund-raiser to buy her a trail-capable wheelchair).

I feel nothing but admiration for them. I also never would have made that choice. This is one of those weird places in ethics where one cannot prescribe an action that is right for everyone. For me, I could not have knowingly had a child with the risks that high. I had a cousin with Klippel-Feil syndrome. Her life seemed miserable to me, in spite of the saintly efforts of dozens of people in her life. Over the course of her life, I'm sure society spent millions of dollars to keep her alive. In order, in other words, to keep the agony of her life going. I don't think I could knowingly create a life if I thought the odds were high I might cause that kind of pain for another human being. More than cause it--that I would create it ex nihilo.

I think it is wrong to have a child when there is a high risk of severe birth defects. That's why Mrs. Heretic and I aren't trying anymore, although we both wanted more. We're too old, and the odds of all kinds of things are elevated beyond what seems responsible.

But I also don't think it's wrong for my friend. That's because having those kids is an essential part of who my friend is. He proves this by how much love he shows all of his kids. To tell him he couldn't have kids because of the risks would be to keep him from being himself. It would be a crushing blow to his unalienable right to pursue his own happiness.

In a society like ours that has resource abundance, there doesn't seem to be any compelling social interest that would prohibit his right to have kids. But what if we were struggling to feed ourselves? In some ancient societies that practiced infanticide, concerns about being able to feed the society played a big part in the practice. In one case, the laws required fathers to bring newborns before the elders (not mothers, who would beg for the lives of their children and make the elders feel awkward). The elders had to rule whether the child was worthy of taking resources from the community based on the health of the child.

What if our society were to face resource scarcity again? Would there be a push to institute laws that restricted reproductive freedom? I'm not talking about forced abortions here. It could be much less overt than that. What if my friend and his wife had been required to have medical screenings for spinal muscular atrophy and other diseases and, when their link was discovered, had been legally prohibited from having children?

Society could, in fact, make a compelling case that it has an interest, enough of an interest to restrict reproductive autonomy. This is especially true when society all shares the costs of medical care.

The only way to protect against this kind of an argument is to say that the Constitution guarantees an inordinate amount of reproductive freedom. A right to abortions would invoke a fairly "inordinate" amount of freedom, which means it would also protect your right to have children society might deem unwise or unwanted. The more society grants reproductive autonomy, including broad protections for abortion, the more your rights to make different decisions are protected.

3. Taken to its logical conclusion, the notion that the state can compel women to carry children to term has some alarming side-effects

Let's say you agree with point number two. People should be in charge of their reproductive health you say, and in 2019, they've got all kinds of choices about what kinds of contraceptives to use. But once they're pregnant, then the state has a right to compel them to have a baby. Freedom ends at conception, because nobody can really argue they didn't know the risks that came with sex. (I mean, you'd be surprised. A lot of people get surprised by their pregnancies. But let's accept the premise anyway.) 

Okay, let's grant your wish. Reproductive freedom now ends at conception, because life begins at conception, and that fetus has an absolute right to life that is more important than the wishes of the mother.

Let us assume that the mother will not be terribly happy about having this child she doesn't want. Unhappiness has an effect on pregnancy. Can the state, out of concern for the health of the child, try to force happiness upon the mother? Can it force the mother to go to classes on how great it is to have a baby?

Can society force the mother to avoid cigarettes? How about alcohol? There have been a lot of cases discussed in the news recently about drug-addicted mothers with stillborn babies being charged with murder, but we need not go that far to see what implications might come from making abortion illegal.
What about coffee? Can society tell a mother not to drink coffee? What about making her take pre-natal vitamins and eat healthy? Can society, like most parents in the world I grew up in, make her eat all her vegetables before she has dessert? Can society make her go to a pre-natal yoga class?

How about this...say abortion is now illegal in the United States. A bustling abortion tourism to Europe begins. Does the U.S. start giving women mandatory pregnancy tests as they leave the country, and only allow them to go to countries where abortion is also illegal?

It gets a little scary once you decide that the life inside the womb has claims that are stronger than the life that possesses the womb. One can always make too much of a slippery slope argument, but in this case, I do think that once the state asserts control over a woman's body and what she can do to the things that reside within her own body, it can be very, very tricky to figure out where the state should stop. The state should be very slow indeed to interfere with the principle that people have a right to autonomy over their own bodies.

The uncomfortable compromise should continue

I think what maybe perplexes Christians the most about people like me who favor the legality of abortion is this:  How I can support killing a living human being? Isn't it obvious that a fetus is alive?

My answer is that yes, a fetus is alive, following any biological definition of what life means. But it's a unique form of life, one that cannot live except through an exceptionally parasitic relationship with its host. It's a life whose right to live is necessarily in conflict with the right of another life to her own autonomy. This is one of those cases in society where we have two rights in conflict with one another.

For several decades now, our society has tried to find a compromise between those two principles that are in conflict with one another. We've said that women can have abortions, but for the most part, they need to be carried out by a certain point in the pregnancy. At six weeks, a fetus is not recognizably human. At twelve weeks, you might be able to tell it was human if you knew what you were looking for. At 24 weeks, anyone can tell it's a little human. More importantly, at 24 weeks, structures in the neocortex have formed, the ones that give us functions we tend to think of as uniquely human. I don't really accept that at six weeks, just because a fetus has human DNA, it's really "human" with all the rights a human possesses. But I accept that at 24 weeks, a baby is human.

Where in between should the cut-off be? And what about this new law in New York, the one that several people in my Facebook feed insist means being allowed to kill a baby moments before delivery?

I will admit that the New York law gives me pause. Like a lot of people who support abortion, I don't support abortion without limits. Christians are right that we have to cherish human life. I believe that includes mothers, and that cherishing the mother's life means not asserting control over her body without overwhelming necessity. But just as I don't think a fetus' right to life is absolute, I also don't think a woman's right to her own body is absolute. The New York law might not really say that a woman can kill the baby right before it's born, but figuring out what it really allows and doesn't allow will be tough work for judges.

If your concern is primarily with late-term abortions, you could at least rest easy knowing that 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester. Only slightly more than 1% are performed past 21 weeks. Much like anti-abortion activists point out that only a small number of abortions involve cases of rape or incest, I think I can make a case that late-stage abortions are rare. They ought to remain that way.

But returning to the question of parents who know their children will be born with extraordinary health issues, I think parents do deserve the right to make extraordinary decisions. I often hear the objection that parents should not play God, but parents already play God when they decide to create life. They have god-like power over their children for years. There is a reason Graham Greene called childhood "life under a dictatorship." With god-like power should come god-like ability to make decisions.

I know people who have had late-term abortions. The decision was devastating. They wanted kids badly. But the prognosis was grim. To them, they loved their children enough to make a painful decision. They loved the kids enough to take that responsibility on themselves. They made a hard choice in order to prevent almost certain and profound suffering. The only way I can even imagine making that decision is to try to multiply the experience of putting a dog down by...I don't know, some number I can't calculate. In one case, the couple was financially ruined by the surgery, which was not covered. They'd have been financially much better off having a baby that would have needed to live in an institute for most of its life. They had the spine to make another decision. I respect that as much as I respect my friend's decision to have his kids and live with the consequences.

Christians, I respect your choices. I respect your beliefs. But there are more people to respect in the world than Christians. I have seen too many posts about how anyone who favors a late-term abortion is a murderer. This represents an inability to put yourself in the position of someone else. There is more than one way to respect life. As a Christian, you probably believe that God intended every human life to exist, and even the most painful and medically challenging existence can glorify God. You have to accept that absent a belief in God, it's hard to accept that view of life. So those of us who don't believe in God but still want to cling to some belief in the sanctity of life have hard work to do figuring out what that means. We might come to different answers than you. But a difficult choice made with reflection is not the same as an amoral choice.

In political reality, we may see some swings in what is legal and not legal in America as far as abortion goes. We have a conservative court now, partly because many of you looked past your other misgivings about President Trump and decided picking the justices who decide on abortion cases was the most important issue in America. These justices might change the law. But it will eventually change back. While the law swings back and forth, we the people have to figure out some way of living with each other in spite of serious disagreements over this stuff.

To me, the tenuous compromise of the last few decades is about as good as we're going to get. Women should be able to get abortions in the first 16 weeks without question. Abortion opponents should be allowed to stand a safe distance away from a clinic and say that "all babies want to get borned." It is not too traumatic for women to hear opposing views as long as they are not physically threatened if they do not listen to the alternate views.

After 16 or 18 or 20 weeks or whatever, I'm okay with states limiting it, as long as they leave it open to the exceptions Roe v. Wade provided for. What those restrictions mean will be something we won't agree about. But I think the benefit of the doubt should always go to the principle of autonomy over one's own body, and the right of parents to make decisions for their kids, even if those decisions involve a late-term abortion. If our society is going to be tolerant of parents who refuse vaccinations, a decision that has life-and-death implications for the already-born, I think we can also give a benefit of doubt to parents making decisions that only affect their own unborn children.

Whenever I point out that it's hard for me to accept the notion of a loving God who is also all-powerful but allows unspeakable evil to exist on the Earth, Christians often propose to me the notion that God had to allow evil in order to grant people free will. Christians will sometimes say that it was more beautiful for God to allow evil to exist, because that meant those who worship him and obey him did it freely. God didn't want robots, so he created people who can either love one another or commit genocide against each other. If you accept that, then I wonder whether you can't also accept that parents ought to have the free will to make choices you think are wrong. What makes the choice of my friend to have kids in spite of the risks and costs beautiful is that he chose it. What makes the decision of my aunt--whose wonderful life we just celebrated on Friday when she passed away just a few years after the daughter she spent her life taking care of went first--so beautiful is that she chose it. But their choice could not be beautiful in a world where there wasn't also a choice to have a late-term abortion for a child with severe birth defects. If there was no choice to do the wrong thing, as you would see it.

I don't expect I've changed all your minds about everything, and maybe not about much at all. But I also hope I made it clear that I respect you and that I value having you in our society. America doesn't always value human life as it should, or at least we don't value all life equally. I'm happy to have a voice that seeks to right that, even if I don't agree with all the reasons you have for valuing it.

There are many areas in which we have a common interest. We have a ton of problems in America, and we won't fix any of them if we're constantly in conflict. I think the compromise that's been in place is the best we can do to manage conflict. It preserves protections for your own practices should they become unpopular, it makes the life of a fetus gradually more protected the further along in a pregnancy it goes, and it also preserves a reasonable level of autonomy over one's own body for women while also acknowledging other rights. I won't say it's as good as we can get, but it is about as not-bad as we can get.

Checkmate, theists: "Midwinter" by D. Nurkse

When a story is only one page long, like "Midwinter" by D. Nurkse, you'd think the author wouldn't have time to start off with what seems like a digression: a Sunday School teacher asks her children a religious trick question. But "Midwinter" is, in fact, entirely about God, and the opening is no digression, but leading us right into the main point. It's nice to have a story that's about the big stuff. I think most people, even if we don't like to admit it, even if we're pretty determined agnostics or atheists and unlikely to change, still think about God fairly often. It doesn't make sense to never write stories that clearly tackle subjects including God.

In "Midwinter," we start with a question from a religious teacher, "Could you love God in a world without death?" This question belongs to a school of reasoning in Christianity called theodicy, or the attempt to explain how evil can exist in a world governed by a God who is both all-loving and all-powerful. This question from the teacher is kind of a weak offering in this school. It's akin to the "if there were no evil, we wouldn't appreciate good" line of argument. A better argument for those who try to reconcile God and suffering is to appeal to free will, stating that God did not want moral slaves, because He wanted creatures capable of loving Him and obeying Him freely. Such freedom HAS to allow evil to exist, Christians argue, but the ability to love freely also means the ability to choose not to love. If nobody can hurt other people, then love is meaningless. There are downsides, like ALL THE SUFFERING EVER IN HUMAN HISTORY, but freely given love from an agent with free will is enough of a good that it outweighs all the bad that exists. (I'm intentionally kind of mangling the argument there, but even expressed well, it's not much more convincing, at least to me.)

I've always thought this made God seem like kind of a negligent parent. As human parents, we also want to allow our kids to grow up to make their own decisions, but we also understand we can't let them knock the bloody hell out of other kids "or else they will never really be free." I don't understand why free will has to be an absolute, such that God really could not occasionally stop talking and having wine with the other deities long enough to come back to the playground and break up a fight or two. Why can't God have the same sense a human parent does? Why do we have to allow for the fullness of human depravity in order for love to mean anything?

As Shakespeare put it, "There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently." No matter how strong your philosophical argument for why suffering is possible with a loving God who has the ability to end it, it will never satisfy the existential feeling of suffering. Even those who don't directly experience suffering on this scale ought to have enough empathy to realize the universe doesn't make sense.  

"Midwinter" works as a fictional short argument against theodicy. The children are unable to answer the question their teacher poses to them. They are thinking of their uncles, away in Korea in "the winter after Inchon." That is to say, in the winter of 1950, the winter that would make David Halberstam call his brilliant history of the Korean war The Coldest Winter. Their uncles are carrying things: "a bazooka, canned peas, pictures of us." (And here, the callback to "The Things They Carried" was almost so hammy it broke the spell, but not quite.) Those "pictures of us" bring us an ironic parallelism. The uncles are away in a war that makes no sense, a war that challenges theodicy. But they attempt to hold onto their beliefs by thinking of their loved ones back home. Meanwhile, those loved ones back home are having the very beliefs the uncles need to hold onto challenged by thinking of what the uncles are enduring.

In spite of attempts to skirt around the question, such as the response of one class clown, "probably for half an hour," there is no getting around the fact that there just isn't a good answer to it. The students can feel this more than they can reason it out. That's the real problem with theodicy arguments, I think--they might have some power in an abstract sense, but they really do nothing to assuage the sense one gets while enduring suffering that this just isn't right. The story ends with the students wondering why nobody has fixed the squeaking heating system, which reminds them all of hamsters going around on endless wheels. We end with a mini-allegory of man and God:

Oil it!  We said under our breath. Who knows why it never happened--who skipped a day on the task chart, who was distracted, why that small trapped creature is still advancing, there in the darkest month, in the cage of a circular journey.

God is the negligent maintenance man, and all humanity is the hamster stuck on the wheel, uselessly going around in the middle of bleakest winter.

How not to argue with evangelicals: Clay Cane's editorial on Mike Pence

Nothing reinforces the stereotype evangelicals have of liberals as Bible illiterates as much as when some liberal acts surprised to learn what the Bible actually says.

Evangelical: I believe the Bible.
Liberal: Cool, bro.
Evangelical: No, like, I actually believe it's the words of God and stuff, and that you should take it in a literal sense in most parts.
Liberal. Whatever.
Evangelical: So, like, where Romans 1 says that homosexuality is "unnatural" and "shameful," I think that's like, true.
Liberal: Whuuut? How could you possibly believe such a thing? Don't you know it's 2019?

This is essentially how much of Clay Cane's editorial that showed up on CNN's website this week reads. There is, I admit, a decent argument buried in his scatter-brained broadside somewhere. The hidden, good argument goes something like this: Mike Pence says he believes in sexual morality the way the Bible describes it, but while he opposes LGBTQ rights on the one hand, he's more than willing to work with a guy who is a known serial philanderer when it suits his political purposes. So Pence is a hypocrite.

That's not a bad argument, but Cane spends more than half the article running around trying to make a quite different point. What he wants is not to achieve some sort of political point of agreement with Pence and other evangelicals, but to demand they repent and change their beliefs. This is where Cane starts his editorial, unimaginatively comparing a Christian school where Karen Pence works to the dystopian world of The Handmaid's Tale. What is it about this school that makes him compare it to Margaret Atwood's world where women have lost all political agency? That the school requires its students to sign a document pledging to "live a life or moral purity." If there is a Christian going back to Peter and Paul who didn't believe in living a life or moral purity, I'd be very surprised to hear about it. If this school is to be condemned for advocating "moral purity," then Augustine, Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Saint John of the Cross, Sor Juana Ines, and millions of others in history should be condemned along with them. There is nothing unique or novel about this belief. It was also something Quakers who fought to get rid of slavery believed in.

Cane continues to attack the school's pledge document by pointing out that it defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman, and also defines homosexual acts as the type of immoral behavior that would disqualify someone from working at the school. Three paragraphs in, Cane is nowhere near starting his argument that Pence's easy cohabitation with Trump equates to hypocrisy. Instead, he is attacking what Pence and millions of other evangelicals believe about homosexuality. He claims their belief, as expressed in the pledge's language, is "disgusting and insults millions of taxpaying American citizens, many who have served their country. That it is acceptable to the wife of the man who is a heartbeat away from the presidency should horrify and alarm all Americans."

I don't know if the language from the school's pledge document is "disgusting." I know I believe it's wrong. I don't believe the Bible is the word of God. Absent that, it's hard for me to find a moral reason to object to sex between two consenting adults of the same sex. It would be like objecting to someone liking Thai food.

But let's accept that there are people who are obligated to believe homosexuality is wrong, because they believe the Bible is the word of God. You can't shame them into changing their beliefs by saying those beliefs are "un-American" or out of date. For evangelicals, the fact that their beliefs are no longer in fashion means nothing. Jesus is "the same yesterday, today, and forever" to them, so if their beliefs are now anachronistic according to the weather of the world, that troubles them not at all. You cannot shame an evangelical by calling his beliefs "homophobic," because an evangelical does not recognize the thing you are calling a sin as sin. It's like a Jehovah's Witness trying to shame me for accepting a blood transfusion. When it comes to what "sin" is, we're speaking two different languages. When Cane says Pence is morally wrong because he does not recognize LGBTQ people's identity, it will come across to Pence as circular reasoning: It is wrong to deny who LGBTQ people are because that's who they are. Pence's belief, though, is that this isn't who they are, and you'd have to undermine his entire belief in his Bible to convince him otherwise.

Cane and other liberals aren't going to be able to change the minds of evangelicals, at least not overnight. To convince an evangelical he's wrong about homosexuality, you'd almost have to convince him his whole faith is wrong. That's a long, multi-faceted conversation, and the most important parts of it probably will happen off the public stage. There are much more fundamental issues to deal with than whether homosexuality is right or wrong that have to be confronted before an evangelical is going to budge. I'm not saying it's impossible to change an evangelical's mind. I was an evangelical once, and now I'm not. I'm saying that when we're talking about politics and the effects of politics, we should limit our discussions with evangelicals to right political choices, not morally correct ones. 

In the 90s, when arguments in favor of same-sex marriages were first picking up some steam in the public arena, those arguing for the change used to emphasize that accepting same-sex marriages didn't mean evangelicals had to agree with those unions. They simply had to accept that whatever marriage means in a legal and secular sense could apply to same-sex couples. They could draw a division in their minds between what was legal and what was moral. They could accept that while sharing a life with someone of the same sex seemed wrong to them, it was a greater wrong to not give someone the legal means to pursue his own happiness in whatever way seemed right to him. This is similar to how sodomy laws against gays were overturned. The argument wasn't, "Gay sex is moral, too," but "Gay sex is not such a threat to the state that the state can make a compelling case to outlaw the actions of free adults in this case." This led some states to change their anti-sodomy laws. Those that didn't were finally forced to change when the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that such laws were unconstitutional. Gay rights moved forward by setting realistic political goals, not unreachable cultural ones.

It might be a minute before you can get some people to even make it to political equality. Let's start there before we go demanding they change their minds about the bigger stuff. 

But now, liberals seems unsatisfied with just arguing for political equality. Cane's editorial is a good example. It ignores its own best point for half the article, because it just can't miss a change to shame Pence for believing something Cane doesn't believe.

This is a bad argument, partly because it's just ineffective. People who believed homosexuality was wrong before the article still will, and those who think homosexual acts are as moral as heterosexual ones will still believe that. Nobody will be convinced by this kind of argument.

But it's more than just ineffectiveness. Liberals ought to be people who believe in sound reasoning. We ought to believe in it like evangelicals believe the Bible. Part of sound reasoning is knowing how much of an argument you actually have to win. If a cop is about to give you a speeding ticket, it's enough to say that the sign you just passed said 50, not 40. You don't have to convince the officer that writing speeding tickets is a bad use of police time and taxpayer dollars.

Cane seems to understand the difference between private and political beliefs. He admits that the Pences "have every right" to believe what they believe about God and sexuality, and that the school has a legal right to believe what it believes. But he no sooner allows for this than he frets over the meaning of these beliefs for a man in his position of power. "The school where Karen Pence will work — and indeed she has taught there in the past, for 12 years -- does have a legal right to its brand of hate. But it is deplorable for the wife of the vice president to work in this space. (One wonders, for example, how the sexuality of the kids there will be investigated?)" . 

This is absurd. It smacks of frustration. "We liberals won this war years ago. What right do the Pences have to go on believing something we've decided people shouldn't believe any more?" There have been private Christian schools teaching this idea for as long as there have been schools in America. But because they have refused to change when others did, this means that America should not elect someone who continues to teach those ideas?

This lacks any kind of pragmatism, which ought to be a liberal hallmark. We ought to be able to distinguish disagreeing with someone over private matters--even deep disagreement, like we have (and ought to have) over homosexuality--and the ability to find political common ground. If you argue that while Christians have a right to teach sexuality how they want in their schools, funding for it shouldn't come from the government, you'll find some evangelicals willing to accept that argument. But to accept Cane's views would mean that no evangelical could be president, even a president willing to separate private views on morality from public policy views of personal liberty. What evangelical will go along with that?

It's true that not every evangelical makes these distinctions. Some really do want their moral precepts enshrined in laws for everyone. But demanding that nobody who holds the views on homosexuality nearly every evangelical holds ever be able to hold public office is exactly what makes evangelicals feel threatened and want to elect more evangelicals.

Evangelicals think homosexuals are sinners. They also think everyone who doesn't believe in the fundamentals of their beliefs is headed for an eternity of torment and suffering in Hell. They believe this punishment will be handed out by a God they call just and loving, one whom they worship. I think the second belief is so much more troubling than the first, the first is almost not even worth thinking about. It's definitely something liberals have to stop acting shocked about and demanding evangelicals change before we can have some kind of political common ground with them. Giving evangelicals no space to cooperate politically gives them no place to go but exactly where they've gone. And where does that get any of us?

What to do with a novel I can't publish?

Obviously, I'm not doing much with writing these days. I'm not blogging much, and it's not because I'm furiously writing my next batch of short stories. I've moved on.

But I still have this novel I wrote. I really like it. I pitched it to thirty-some agents and got only a few responses. They were all no responses, even if some claimed they really liked it.

A few weeks ago, I got a delayed response from someone else I sent it to. This would be another "no, but I like it" kind of response. Here it is:

I'm afraid this one isn't for me. But, I have to say, your writing is tight and very accomplished. And - most important of all for a writer who is trying to be funny -- the voice IS funny! When the narrator breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience, I think most writers make a mess of it. But you accomplished this task 100%. Congrats on that. So, so difficult to do.

I would suggest that you focus a bit more on leading the reader into the story. Right now, it feels like we're all over the place. There's a lot going on in the first few pages and, while the narrator does an excellent job at telling the story, it still feels like we're jumping around - one moment you're talking about the job, then your son, then (the country) and its history. Overwhelming the reader early on doesn't give the reader a chance to really sink into the story. I want to know the point early on, and then get hooked and dragged along to the end. 

It's difficult to know what to do with a response like this. The main reason he wrote it, probably, was just to be nice and let me down easy. He thought what I wrote was decent, but not what he was looking for, so he very kindly decided to add a little encouragement with the rejection. He also tried to give some reason for why he didn't pick it. But he probably spent very little time considering either the positives or the negatives of what he wrote. His main goal was to get the message out that he was saying no but to make me feel not too terrible about it.

Which is why the critique doesn't really make much sense. How can the writing be both "tight" and also "all over the place"? I think what he means is simply that each of the first three chapters have completely different settings, and I keep on rotating the setting of the chapters throughout, although not always with each new chapter. That is an intentional, conscious decision, one that hundreds of novels use each year. Rather than confusing the reader, I feel like it keeps the novel from seeming dull from right out of the starting line. If there is anything that leaves you confused, I'm hoping the humor and observations are enough for you to trust I'm taking you somewhere. It's possible I used that technique poorly, but this feedback seems to be criticizing the novel just for the technique itself. That's a strange response to a standard literary technique for a publisher that leans toward the literary-fiction side of things.

I'm in no way complaining. It was nice of him to write anything. The fact he tried at all means he might have thought it was better than most of what comes across his slush pile. But I've seen these kinds of explanations for a no answer all the time when working on the Baltimore Review--the editor feels the need to justify the no, but doesn't have a lot of time for it, so he relies on vague statements like "it didn't take me anywhere" or "the characters didn't come to life for me." It's meant to make the point that you tried to explain your response without really having to put too much work into really explaining it. It's what he had time for. I appreciate it, but it doesn't tell me anything about what to do with the novel.

What to do now

I'm out of patience with trying to get it published. At the same time, I like the novel, it's about an important subject, and I have more personal insight into that subject than most almost anyone who's  written about it. That doesn't mean it's a good novel. Even if this particular criticism isn't that on-the-money, the story might just not be that good. Still, I just can't escape the notion that I'm supposed to put this novel out there, even if it's a complete failure commercially and critically. I could do that by self-publishing it. It wouldn't be what I'd want, but I'd feel that I'd fulfilled whatever obligation it is in my head to put this out in the world.

That's a ridiculous way of thinking, flawed by magical thinking. People do not have destinies they were meant to fulfill. They have things they are good at, and they should try to use those abilities to fill voids in the world and be useful. I ought to keep moving on with other things. Trying to publish a novel now would just be a distraction.

I was thinking I'd take the summer to edit the novel, which is now two years old since I wrote it in a blur in late spring and early summer 2016. I thought I'd see how I felt after editing it. But even an edit now seems like a lot of time to invest in something that's a bit of a fool's errand.

Several years ago, I had no reason to think anything I wrote would ever be published, no reason to think I was writing for any purpose beyond having done it. But I had limitless energy to write back then. Now, I've had a little taste of success and nearly saw the novel get to an agent who wanted it, but I feel like writing is pointless. The reasons why aren't unique--I wonder if writing is useful and if mine says anything worth saying. But they're reasons I feel pretty strongly. Writing seems like an incredible act of faith, such that I can't even find the will to bring to completion work that I've mostly finished already.

Asking the right kinds of questions of literature

There are two things about my life I've beat to death on this blog: that I used to be a rather devout evangelical Christian, and that when I stopped believing, literature partly filled the gap in my life where Christianity used to be. I ask a lot of literature. So I was intrigued by an essay that appeared on Lithub last week by Rachel Vorona Cote, who confessed to a similar habit. As she put it in her essay ""The Complicated Comforts of Marilynne Robinson,": "I have a nasty habit of asking too much from books."

Her essay is a personal look at her own pain and an attempt to use literature to overcome it. In late 2017, she was discouraged by the first year of Trump's presidency and personally undone by her mother's death. She was in a place where people often turn to religion, but knowing ahead of time from personal experience that heading to church would end up fruitless, she was looking around for something religion-like to fill the void. 

Gilead

She tried Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It is a very well-regarded novel about an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames. I read it last year. Almost nothing happens in it in the present. There is some action that takes place in flashback, but much of the action in the novel gets sidetracked by Ames' own theological musings. Still, it's not like being preached to for the length of the novel. Ames, in fact, is a bit too introspective to be a fire-and-brimstone preacher. In one of the few passages I highlighted from the book, he says of himself that "...there is tendency in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less....If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible." 

But Ames never really quite succeeds in achieving his resolution. The conflict of the book, if it can even be called that, is that Ames is concerned that the ne'er-do-well son of his lifelong best friend is going to try to move in and marry his much younger wife when Ames dies. But the conflict more or less takes care of itself. 

Cote found comfort in reading the book. She had hoped that Robinson could be her Virgil, "a woman of faith to guide me through her theological web--and who could believe in my stead what I feared couldn't possibly be true. That I would find my mother again. That she had not been obliterated by death. That our shattered country might stumble onto a path of progress, however slow and aching." 

Although Ames asserts that the "purpose of a prophet" is to "find meaning in trouble," you won't find that meaning explicitly stated in Gilead. I found reading it to be akin to looking at a painting for an extended period of time. I was left more with a continuous mood or feeling than with what you might call a discursive kind of impression. 

This was enough for Cote, at least mostly:

 "Gilead could not entirely soothe my despondence: it couldn’t assure me that Mom was peeping into my apartment’s darkened windows, or directing her love-filled gaze at Dad while he slept. It couldn’t even convince me that her soul awaited mine in some obscure afterlife. But John Ames would have believed this to be the case, and somehow, that was enough for me." 

She found that simply vicariously huffing off the faith fumes of someone else was close enough to the experience itself to bring comfort. She read another Robinson novel, Housekeeping, which I have not read. But then, she did something I find telling: she read a book of essays by Robinson. As Cote put it, she was hungering "for a more explicit manifesto." She had been comforted by living in Ames' head for a bit, but she was looking for something that offered a less poetic sense of meaning here in the modern world. 

But Robinson's refusal to be more certain of herself in her non-fiction is a double-edged sword for Cote. Robinson is not an agitator; she is too circumspect about her own conclusions for that. On the one hand, this is the hallmark of a rational thinker, but on the other hand, too much self-circumspection can lead to inaction. 

It's a familiar conundrum for liberals. Cote nicely sums up this conundrum in the concluding paragraphs:

If Robinson’s nonfiction feels insufficient in the face of a political crisis, it’s because certitude seems foolhardy, and a bit smug. The agnosticism that plagues me in mourning strikes me as productive, even necessary in the political sphere. We do not have the luxury of always being sure, especially when we are a solitary voice within a purportedly democratic cacophony. To achieve anything worthwhile we must writhe and grapple like blind animals in a net, stumbling upon deliverance without the satisfaction of knowing it’s within our reach.

          Still, too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy...

Truth and Comfort

"Too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy?" Tell me about it. Agnosticism seems to me to be the most intellectually honest position to take, but the thing about agnosticism is that its adherents are, well, agnostic. Which doesn't mean, of course, that they are "indifferent," as many people are now starting to use the word. It means they just don't know what's right. An agnostic can look at the faith of a true believer and be genuinely jealous. Look how that person seems filled with certainty. Look how much she accomplishes. I wish I could believe like she does. 

I don't think it was wrong of Cote to expect a lot from a book. I keep reading because I am constantly hoping I will find something that can help me resolve my honest uncertainty with my desire to be more certain. But I'm not sure Gilead is the right place to look. Musicians and prophets may both have been inspired by the gods, but they bring different things. Musicians--and Gilead is more like music than a sermon--bring comfort. Prophets bring truth that demands action. 

There's nothing wrong with comfort, but even an agnostic like me can see the wisdom in C.S. Lewis's warning: "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." That's the reason Cote found herself wanting to read non-fiction: she wanted truth. 

In fact, I'd say that it's only because Cote was steadfast in wanting truth that she found any comfort in Robinson at all. It wasn't a deep and satisfying comfort, but it was a small comfort. It was enough to keep going on. And maybe that's the most an intellectually honest person will ever get. The most you can hope for is to string together enough moments of hard-won comfort until you reach a point, like John Ames did, where you live long enough "to outlast any sense of grievance you may acquire."