Quitting for a good reason

I've said I was quitting a million times, including twice recently. I wouldn't keep doing this fake-out, except I think when I disappear, it merits an answer. I don't mean to be the dramatic guy on your social media who makes a big deal out of leaving. All I want is to leave a marker to explain why I left in case anyone is curious.

Here are two reasons I'm stopping this blog and doubt I'll come back:

1) This doesn't really scratch the itch I want it to scratch. Since I quit my job last year, I've been reading more and more in philosophy of religion and other fields related to the big "Does God exist?" question. I'm getting pulled more and more toward that, and I find it a lot more intellectually satisfying and interesting than reading literary fiction. 

2) I originally shifted from writing whiny pieces about how getting fiction published is hard to trying my best to read fiction carefully and closely partly because I wanted to model what I thought good reading was, and partly because I wanted to become a better writer. I did become a better writer, but I don't think literary fiction wants me. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I didn't work hard enough. Maybe it's both. Or maybe people just don't like me. Whatever the reason, I've gone as far as I can or will go. I can't write better than the last six stories I tried to get published in the more highly regarded journals, and it hasn't been good enough. I can't will myself to write stories anymore, because I have so little belief they'll ever get published, at least by any journals anyone will ever read. And no, I don't want to write just for myself, or because I have to, or whatever other dumb shit writers tell themselves on literary social media circles. I tried and I failed. There's something else I'm more interested in anyway, so I might as well move on. At the very least, maybe it's time to show some self-respect and stop trying to get invited to the party nobody wants me at. 

I'll probably reemerge after I've done enough digging into the God stuff, as a blogger or podcaster on the "Does God exist?" question. But it'll be on a different forum from this one. And of course, I always might change my mind and resurrect myself as a writer/critic, but it would take something that at this point feels like a pretty remote possibility, like getting published by one of the major literary magazines, or the readers of this blog suddenly deciding en masse to all go and buy my book and review it in order to support the work here. Barring those things, and the universe seems to have barred them pretty decisively, I think I'm really out this time. 

BASS drops today, so why aren't I writing about it?

All evidence to the contrary, I don't like to indulge too much in talking about myself on this blog. It started out with it being all about me, but I discovered after not too long that even I didn't find myself that interesting, so I switched to talking about what I was reading. That was a good change, and I've mostly stuck to it. I'm happy to insert my own life into a discussion of what I'm reading if I think it'll make it more relevant, but I try to only make a post all about me when my own life is getting in the way so much of blogging about literature that I can't avoid it.

Now is one of those times. Today is the day Best American Short Stories 2025 comes out. For the last seven years, BASS is the one thing I've been consistent about doing. Even when I've quit on BASS, I've gone back later and finished it. Last month, I started working on the O.Henry Anthology, hoping I could finish it quickly enough to get to BASS today. I didn't. I'm only about halfway through O.Henry, and I'm not moving in any great hurry. I think I owe readers an explanation of what's going on.

Job front

I mentioned last month that I was about to start a new job, and that it was possible this job would keep me from being able to move forward with blogging. That job was as a 911 dispatcher. After more than six months of looking for work after leaving my job at NSA, I wasn't finding anything. For the most part, I wasn't even getting responses. There had been numerous instances of being completely ignored I found especially humiliating. I applied for an admissions counselor job at my alma mater, Walsh University. I was their honor graduate in 2000, and I feel like my resume since that time is nothing to sneeze at, so I thought I might at least get a call, but I didn't. I applied for a Korean language administrative job near Youngstown, about 45 minutes away. I was rejected for that without an interview, even though they're still advertising for it. How many Korean-speaking applicants do they get in Youngstown that made them so sure they didn't even need to interview me?

There have been many more indignities such as these I've had to face. Entry-level open-source intelligence analyst positions I didn't get past the first round with. Others where I've received responses that said, in coded language, that I was overqualified, no matter how much my cover letter and resume tried to account for that by explaining the unexpected change of life I've had and why it meant I was now applying for entry-level jobs. 

So when the 911 job only took into account my score on a civil service exam and my stated willingness to take it, I thought I'd better try, even though I had my doubts I'd be able to do it. I'm not a great multi-tasker, and midnight twelve-hour shifts sounded like they'd be a lot for me. They were. I've already quit that job. It seemed unlikely to me I'd ever become good at listening to four things at the same time, and I go to the bathroom more in 12 hours than all the other dispatchers I was watching did combined. So I'm back to no job, no prospects, and feeling like garbage. I still think I did the only morally permissible thing for me when I left the government, but it's gone even worse than my low expectations anticipated since early March.

Law School

Because I don't think my prospects are great, I've thought of going back to school. I took the LSAT in the beginning of October, and I'll find out the results on Friday. When I was taking practice tests, I wasn't doing that great, but on the actual test, I felt like I did amazing. That also had something to do with my decision to leave the 911 job. That job requires about 4-6 months of training before you're a real dispatcher, and after taking the test, I felt like I would have probably just gotten paid for those months of training before leaving to go to law school. That didn't feel like a fair thing to do to a kind of poor city that needs every dollar it has. 

Maybe I'm overly confident here, and maybe my LSAT score won't be that great, but if it is about where I think it is, I only intend to apply to one school, and I only intend to go if I get a full ride or something very close to it. I don't need more student loans at my age. If I can get this deal, then law school seems like the best bet for me. Even with all the doomsday prophecies about AI taking entry-level law jobs, I think this is a better choice than anything else I can come up with right now. I don't need the top job at the top firm. I just need a job. 

So close to retired and yet not quite there

I'm very lucky, and I know that. I have a pension now. Because the government drawdown included an offer for early retirement, I am now getting paid every month to do nothing. I get paid about as much as a technician at Jiffy Lube has to work 40 hours a week to make. In addition, my parents, who are beyond thrilled to have one of their children living near them, have helped us out financially with the move back. Without them, I wouldn't have been able to absorb all these months without work. I have a lot to be grateful for. 

With all that good fortune, though, I'm still not quite able to really retire, at least not if I want to live more than hand-to-mouth from now until I die. We got a late start on our 401K savings, and shaving off the last five years of my government career when I was making my highest salary really killed any hope I had of making up the ground. I'm going to have to leave what I have saved there for a long time and hope it grows if I want it to help when I really am too old to be able to work. That means I have to find something now.

When I first started looking for work, I wanted a real career like the one I had just before retiring. I was looking for something challenging and interesting. The longer I went without getting something like that, the more I started to think I'd be happy to do anything. Maybe, I thought, it'd be better to have a kind of ordinary job, one that didn't require me to learn anything new, because that would leave me free to blog and read and write. I don't need much in terms of salary. I just need a job of some sort. But when I apply for those jobs, no matter how much I try to dumb down my resume, I don't get calls. 

If I were really retired...

If I were able to really retire, I wouldn't go to law school. Law is interesting, but it's not the most interesting thing I can think of. In fact, I'm not sure I'd even spend any more time than I am spending currently on literature (unless I somehow got paid to do this blog, and that was the thing making it possible for me to stop working, but that is never going to happen). 

When I left my job, the first thing I thought of that I wanted to do with my life was return to studying one question: Does God exist? Since I was sixteen, it's been the question I've been most interested in, although for many decades of my life, I had to put that interest on hold while I did dumb things like join the Marine Corps, go to grad school, get married, have kids, and work to support a family for over twenty years. 

Lately, I've found myself listening to podcasts and looking, at a beginner level, into philosophical discussions about God's existence. If I didn't have any responsibilities with my life, I can easily see that being what I'd do with most of my day every day. 

Of course, the question of whether God exists goes beyond philosophy and requires an understanding of science, math, history, linguistics, and literature, all of which I could dig into as much as my old brain could handle if I didn't have to worry about working. And maybe my current background in literature and even literary theory might be useful in thinking about the God question. Since most prominent thinkers involved in the discussion surrounding God's existence don't have backgrounds in literature, I might even be useful to such a discussion. So if I were really retired, I probably would continue to read literature critically, but all the other stuff I'd be reading would definitely change my output. 

"Isn't the ontological argument just a modus ponens argument that can be undercut using a modus tollens argument in response?"

Put it all together

To sum up everything I'm thinking in one run-on, stream-of-consciousness sentence, which is, it so happens, more or less how I actually think about my life at least once an hour, it would run thus:

I don't want to work anymore but I still need to work but I can't find much of anything so I should go do something that will help me find a job but that will require a lot of work and even thought I might enjoy that work I wouldn't enjoy it as much as other things and for the time being since I have some time maybe I should keep blogging about literature since I've been doing that for a long time but also maybe I should be getting ready for law school or maybe I should be studying the philosophy of religion since that's really the thing I'm most interested in in all the world but then again that's a pretty big subject and I'm new to it and probably too old to ever become an expert in it so maybe I should just read about it on the side and focus mostly on literature since I do sort of know about that already or maybe I'm dumb and I should quit thinking about stuff that doesn't matter and only think about a job and taking care of my family and what's wrong with me that I can't find a job. 

So to sum up, I may or may not be blogging on BASS this year, or ever. 

My rules for half-believing the universe is a simulation without becoming a lunatic

I think I'd been toying with the notion that the universe might be a simulation for a while before I heard it was actually a respectable idea and that some scientists, including Neil DeGrasse Tyson, think there's good evidence for it. It wasn't science that led me to toy with the possibility that the universe was a simulation; for me, it was something that emerged after a lifelong attempt to try to understand how the universe could have been created by a conscious force that wasn't evil, when so much in the universe seemed to be evil. 

Sometime last year, Amazon, probably using some kind of mind-reading algorithm, advertised to me the Kindle version of a book on the subject. It was The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk. I guess I should have figured there was a reason why the book was only $3.99. It wasn't edited very well, and a lot of it was somewhat tiresome reiterations of material written by others, likely to pad the book into something long enough to be published. (The publisher, Bayview Books, seems to exist only to publish Virk's work so far.) Still, I don't think the author is lying about being an MIT computer scientist, and for me, who had never really read any of the scientific rationale behind the plausibility of a simulated universe, it was a decent introduction. I didn't really care for his paper-thin explanations of how the various religions of the world might have actually been talking about a simulated universe all along. That felt like hooey. But he presented the main arguments being put forward by scientists to support a simulation idea. The best two are:

1. Even as primitive as we humans still fundamentally are in our scientific advancement, we're not that far away from being able to create alternate realities that humans can't tell from the real world. And if we can do it, that means others can, too. It's an ability that would be ubiquitous, which suggests that it's very likely, just from a probability standpoint, that we are in a simulation. So are the programmers who created our simulation, and so on.
2. The universe displays properties that we would expect it to if it had been programmed, such as limits to how small (or "pixelated") space can be, as well as limits to how small a unit of time can exist. These limits help explain the answers to Zeno's paradoxes, but they also are what we'd expect if the universe had been set with parameters by a programmer. 

It's universes created solely to provide power for the spaceship battery of their creator all the way down. 

My own moral reasons

I'm glad to know that science doesn't think I'm an idiot for the things I more or less came up with on my own, but those aren't the main reasons I find a simulation-type understanding of existence to be appealing. Both the DeGrasse Tyson interview I linked above and the article from Scientific American concluded by saying that if we are living in simulation, there's nothing we can do about it, so it "might not make much difference." But to me, it makes a whole world of difference.

Unlike a lot of non-theists, I'm not certain there is no god. I'm about exactly 50/50 split on this. That 50/50 split changes day-to-day, but I think on the whole, its balancing point is at just about 51% no and 49% yes. Why not just no, like so many non-theists? Because it's just weird to me that anything exists at all. It's weird that we're here. It's weird that we know that we're here and that we are aware of the weirdness of it. And it's weird to think this weirdness just happens and that it might always have been happening. I understand that believing in God doesn't remove these problems. In fact, believing in God just makes the problem more confounding, because you've gone from the notion that the universe, which we know something about, has always been in a constant cycle of creation and destruction, to thinking that an unknown and unknowable being has always existed. That's why I'm an agnostic. It's a simpler kind of weirdness. 

It's not an altogether satisfying weirdness, though. A universe that just happens isn't especially satisfying. There's no reason to it, no point. An entity with a mind who made the universe, on the other hand, might indicate a point to all of this. The problem with believing in a god who made this universe, though, is that the universe is a fairly brutal place. Everything on our planet lives by killing and eating some other living thing. With plants, that's not an issue, because the plants are generally designed to be eaten, and many even need to be eaten in order to propagate. But everything else would probably prefer not to be eaten. Generally, the strong dominate the weak. Human history is full of a lot more people who lived unhappy and difficult lives than ones who've lived lives of ease and pleasure. So if I am to believe that someone designed this universe with a purpose in mind, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that this someone is kind of an asshole. 

If the universe is a simulation, though, it might allow some wiggle room that would leave the creator(s) some slack. I say might, because it's still entirely possible that our simulation designer is either sadistic or merely indifferent to our plight, and that's why the universe is the way it is. There are, however, some possibilities about why this simulation exists that might make the suffering seem less cruel. I hasten to emphasize that these are all just possibilities, and I don't exactly hold to any of these things as a belief. These are ideas that make it easier for me to think both that the universe might have a purpose and that the ones who built it for that purpose might not be simply sitting back and paring their nails while the universe suffers. These possibilities are, in no particular order:

1) There is some higher plane of existence that has problems of its own, and this universe was necessary as research to help them solve that problem. Maybe a conflict-riddled universe, under specific conditions, helps others to observe the dynamics of conflict-riddled worlds in order to help solve their own conflicts. We'd be laboratory rats in this situation, of course, but at least if we knew we were lab rats who were helping cure the ills of some other plane, it might help make sense of our suffering. 

2) The creators have a sense of ethics about this experiment, and every sentient being who is in it was actually part of the design team, or at least they are members of the world in which the simulation was created. They have all agreed that, for the greater good of their world and what it might learn from this simulation, they will enter it and play the parts of sentient beings in our world. They either chose roles based on some criteria we can't guess at or the roles are given out randomly. Their memories of having existed outside the game are wiped when they come inside. Everyone knows when they enter the game that there is a chance of suffering, but they believe that when they come back out of the game, it will have produced some result that makes it worth it. This would help solve one of the things that has always seemed the most unfair to me--the fact that nobody who is here asked to be here. Possibly, once we are done with our roles, our memories will be uploaded to the servers of the designers to help analyze the data. 

3) Perhaps--very much modeling some religions--the creators have prepared some region of bliss for those who were part of the simulation. They recognized that the parameters they created for the world made it possible that sentient beings who suffer might arise, and to make up for this, they have prepared a place where everyone can go and enjoy an eternity of joy to compensate them for having participated in the simulation. Less appealingly, perhaps they, like the creators of Westworld, think that merely wiping the memories of participants at the end of the game is enough to satisfy their ethical requirements. 

What a simulation hypothesis does and doesn't change

As I mentioned above, there are some versions of a simulation theory that might not, in effect, be much different from what some religions have been telling us for a long time. Moreover, we're really not in a very different position from where we are with religion, because we're equally unable to know with certainty what the nature and goals of the creators are. We're equally stuck figuring out on our own what we should do with our time here.

When I was an evangelical, someone asked me once how I knew that the universe wasn't the dream of a god, like in Hinduism. I said that if this was true, we'd never be able to know it, so the only thing to do was to make the best choices we could based on what seemed to be real. That might still be the wisest advice when confronted with the simulation theory. 

Because we don't know what the purpose of the simulation is or what ethical rules, if any, the creators apply to it, we are still stuck with the existence of some of the worst possibilities. The programmers might be sadists. They might be indifferent. There's a very strong possibility we're here for the entertainment of our creators, since humans themselves have been creating stories that are, in a sense, their own little worlds for as long as we've been able to talk. Maybe life creating life that creates life is just what life does, and there's a nearly infinite regress of simulated worlds. Like in Calderon de la Barca's La Vida es Sueño, even the dreams in our world are themselves dreams. The point is that a simulation hypothesis, in some versions, might not be very reassuring. It all depends on what kind of simulation this is, and we don't know the answers to that. 

However, since at least some of the possible versions offer better answers than the ones religion has given to us, or more comforting answers than the ones a world that "just is" provide, I find even this possibility somewhat reassuring. 

My rules for not going crazy half-believing these things

1. Morality still matters. 

One possible difference between this and what most religions tell us is that since everyone who participated in the simulation would have contributed to the goal of its being staged, all would share equally in the reward. The creators needed Hitler as much as Mother Theresa for the experiment to work. Or, in the versions of a simulation that exist for the entertainment of the programmers, they might need villains and well as heroes. They wouldn't fault someone for having played a villain any more than we would fault an actor for having played a particularly wicked role. 

Believing the world is a simulation, then, might tempt some people to think that being good or bad are equally valid choices. Since nothing is real, there is no right or wrong. Those are just part of the illusion. 

To me, though, if the world is a simulation, and the simulation was done with any level of care (which, subjectively, it seems to me to have been), then everything in the simulation is there for a reason. Moral choices seem to be a central element of being a human being in this game. In fact, I more than half think of this simulation as part of a thought-experiment in morality by the programmers. Maybe ethics have always been a central part of human society by design. 

We don't know what view the programmers might ultimately take of ethical behavior, or whether they're likely to punish and reward particular conduct, but since it does seem that morality is a key part of what this whole experiment is about, we at least shouldn't be quick to act like it doesn't matter. 

(I realize that by writing that ethics is the point of the whole theatrical performance, that leaves open the question of why nearly all of the 13.4 billion years of the play that has gone on so far didn't, as far as we know, include beings capable of understanding moral choices. As I've said, none of these things are fully ensconced beliefs for me. They're more ideas that don't sound totally stupid and which maybe make life seem less pointless to me.)

2. Resist the urge to think suffering was done to entertain some god

Writers are often told to "kill their darlings." That is, in order to make a story interesting, something bad has to happen to someone. If we extrapolate this need we seem to have to throw bad things into a plot just to see what happens, we might think that the beings who programmed this world would have a tendency to do the same thing. We could end up thinking that every bad thing that happens to us is being done to further a plot in the very highly advanced Sims game of some coding kid in a higher dimension. 

Maybe it even makes sense of suffering a little bit to think like this, although the reasons for the suffering in this case would be enough to make one literally curse the gods. However, since we don't know the particulars of the simulation, it's equally possible that what's interesting to the designers isn't your individual suffering. At least, it's not interesting enough they'd program in every bad thing that happens to you. Rather, it's possible that what they find interesting is the world they created in which bad things can and often do happen. In that case, your suffering is only generally planned, not specifically. Nearly everyone will have bad things happen, according to the design of the universe, but there is no need to plot the lives of every participant in the machine down to that degree. 

In fact, all the evidence we have suggests that the designers of the universe are happy enough with the broad outline of what they created that they see no need to constantly interfere with it. The laws of physics do not get tinkered with. Early Christianity looked to miracles to prove it was true, but I think the lack of miracles is one reason I tend to think we have a deistic creator, one who set the rules and then left the experiment to run unhindered with. This means you neither need to fetishize your suffering nor feel you've been singled out by the creators. 

3. Treat it like it matters

In Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover goes insane. His insanity is a matter of "bad chemical and bad ideas." The ideas, in Hoover's case, were supplied by the writer Kilgore Trout, who convinced him that everybody on Earth was a robot except Hoover. Hoover became a solipsist, someone who believes that he is the only person who truly exists, the only one with free will. He believed all of the universe was a test set up exclusively for him by the Creator of the Universe.

Hoover eventually started attacking people in his dealership, believing thereby he was obtaining the approval of the Creator of the Universe. He did not care that he had hurt anyone, because he did not believe the people he was attacking were real people like him. 

I just realized there was a Breakfast of Champions movie and that Bruce Willis played Dwayne Hoover in it. 

Hoover's notion is a bit different from someone who believes the universe is a simulation, because in a simulation, we're all equally experiencing the big lie, but in Hoover's case, he believed that the big lie was all for him. The effect, though, might be the same. People who think we are living in a simulation could be tempted to act like Hoover. They might even try to act like Neo in The Matrix, always attempting to see beyond the simulated world into the real one. 

I suppose everyone is free to come to whatever conclusion seems best, but to me, that's not the conclusion I draw. If the universe is like a big video game, then there should be a lot of freedom to treat it how you want. You can spend your time trying to end poverty or you can fiddle-fart around and try to enjoy yourself. But as far as our relationship to the creators of the game goes, I think our time here is best spent more or less playing the game in the more obvious ways. In Minecraft, you're not given any rules or objectives. You appear and then you move around and figure things out. There's an "end" to the game, but that's far from the only objective. Even though the game doesn't guide you in what you're supposed to do overtly, when you start moving around and figuring out how things work, the design and the intent of the game does become somewhat apparent. 

I think that's how we should treat life if we live in a simulation. We're here. Might as well try to play the game the way the designers seem to have intended it to be played. It'll probably be more profitable that way. Eventually, when you learn a few things, you can decide to play in more exotic ways, and maybe some of those will be ways even the designers didn't guess at. That's all possible, but not unless you at least start by playing it the "right" way. 

Simulation and suicide

Far from making me think life is pointless and not worth living, the possibility we live in a simulation gives me at least some small hope there might be a point. It even helps provide an answer to the question I so often ask of why anyone should keep on trying to live instead of giving up and dying by suicide immediately. 

If the universe is a simulation, then at least there is a chance there is a point to it. Of course, that's true in religion, too, but all religions require me to believe a perfect being created this mess of a universe, and I just can't accept that. If, however, the universe was created by beings somewhat like us, although likely more advanced versions of us, then maybe it ultimately will make some sense in a way we can understand. 

I mean, maybe not. The universe as a simulation isn't a completely reassuring thought. If this is all a big live-action play, then I got kind of a shit part, and I wonder if anyone is even noticing. Maybe I really am just an extra to the Dwayne Hoovers of the world, the ones the creators are actually interested in watching. Maybe rather than giving me a reason to keep living, maybe suicide is the right option because it's the only way to protest to the creators of the game about the nature of their experiment. Mostly, though, I don't feel like that's been my natural reaction since I started seriously considering the possibility the universe is a simulation. 

I don't totally come down on any side, just like I don't totally accept that this is really what I believe about the nature of reality. On the whole, though, I think that that if DeGrasse Tyson (and Elon Musk) are right, then that holds at least some possibilities not open in either religions or nihilism, and I find it more reassuring than not. For now, I, a person who half believes the universe is some kind of simulation or experiment, find enough consolation in the idea that I am still pushing through with a life I'm not totally sure I want and still trying to use that life to do some good. 

The responsibility to live happily for others is too much to bear

Since Russia first invaded Ukraine, I've been stuck on the same bad idea: that I should go to Ukraine to help fight against the invaders. This is an inherently stupid idea, for any number of reasons. I've been having foot pain for over a year, pain doctors can't quite figure out the source of and which makes it difficult for me to walk long distances or to run any distance. Now to add to that, I'm getting a test next week to see if I have a hernia. I'm kind of old, and have a lot of miles on me. Even though I was once a Marine, I was a linguist, and don't have any advanced combat training. Even if I did, I'd have forgotten it all by now. I'd likely be in the way. Then, there are all the practical reasons, like how I'm my family's main earner and it would cause hardship if I left. Still, in spite of how terrible I know the idea is, I can't put it out of my head. Russia has invaded a country without cause, and it's now hitting civilian targets without compunction. To act like the world is a normal place right now seems perverse. 

Yet life around me does seem to be going on like normal. The weather turned warm in the last few days, and people were out biking and walking together. A few grills in the neighborhood reemerged, the scent of meat cooked outdoors mixing with the already-prevalent South Asian spices that typically fill the air in the streets around here, flooding my senses with the feeling of being surrounded by people alive and enjoying life. 

And why shouldn't they be enjoying themselves? The United States government has decided it has limited means it can take to help Ukraine without making the situation much worse. If the government is already at the end of its resources, what can any of us do? It won't alleviate suffering if we suffer, too. It reminds me of what Thae Yong Ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to the UK who then defected to South Korea, concluded when his family decided to defect:

"I decided to claim my rights as a human being. I couldn't live as a slave any longer. Having lived my life that long as a slave was enough. I made up my mind to defect. If we defected, it would cause significant problems for our siblings and parents, but we chose to first seek freedom for ourselves. It would suffice if we lived our lives to the full for their sake" (translation mine). 

Thae was lucky, because by extreme good fortune, he was able to defect along with his wife and two children, whereas most North Korean diplomats are not able to take their children abroad with them. Still, he knew he would be making life harder for family members not lucky enough to escape. He made the decision that rather than everyone living as a slave together in North Korea, he would find what happiness he could for himself and his family, and that happiness would justify his decision. It would have to.   

We who are, for the moment, spared from warfare in our streets could choose to suffer in order to honor the suffering of others, but that would only ensure that there is only ever suffering in the world. Moreover, this isn't just something that started a few weeks ago; there was more than enough suffering long before Ukraine that anyone who was paying attention could have felt guilt over enjoying life. As you drink your coffee perusing the internet (I assume for hours and hours, because you've finally ended up bored enough to visit this blog), a child is being abused by her parents. Many children are dying of preventable diseases and malnutrition. Someone was killed by a drunk driver. Somebody who supports a family living paycheck to paycheck just lost their job. Before Ukraine, there was already Yemen. 

There is, in fact, so much suffering going on in the world at any moment, that the quest for those who are temporarily spared from suffering to enjoy themselves on behalf of those who cannot is far too much to take. None of us can possibly love life enough to somehow balance out all that suffering and make life on Earth appear to make sense somehow. 

Some people assert that the suffering of others should make me all the more grateful for what I have. On the one hand, I understand this sentiment. Knowing that innocent people are dying in Yemen or fighting for their lives in Kyiv should provide me with enough sense of proportion to be kind to the server who is running late with my order or to suffer Beltway traffic with grace. In another, deeper sense, though, the notion that because terrible things have happened to others but I personally have been spared I should therefore be grateful is perverse. 

Thankful to whom? To God? I don't have one specific reason why I'm an agnostic now. There are a whole host of reasons. If I had to pick just one, though, I think the existence of suffering might be the one I'd pick. Not just suffering, but suffering that is both broad (abundant and ubiquitous) and deep (profound and acute). Does anyone really believe in thanking God that a meteor struck the house next door and spared you? What kind of capricious lunatic runs creation like that? Not one I'd ever express gratefulness toward. 

There is a difference between acknowledging I live better than ninety percent of the globe and being thankful that ninety percent of humanity doesn't have it very good. The knowledge that human life is such a shabby affair for so many makes it much harder, rather than easier, to enjoy my relative good fortune. Certainly, it makes it hard for me to live life to the fullest on behalf of those who are barely living.  

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.

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."