Believing In

C. S. Lewis was a glib son of a bitch, but he nailed it when he spoke of how disastrous it is to embark upon believing something "not because it is true, but for some other reason." The existentialist project as conceived by Camus strikes me as simply impossible. Certainly impossible for me. "I'll just decide that all people are important, and then they'll be important because I have decided they are important, and their importance will sustain my devotion to them --" No. No, the whole thing collapses under the slightest pressure. (for example, what the hell is important about some of these individuals? Not much that meets the eye.) For exactly the same reason, I am not going to be a Christian without a good reason, no matter how much a life of service and devotion appeals to me. (And I have always recognized that I am a servant, by temperament and inclination.) I would become a Christian simply and only because I thought it was true that Jesus was the unique human incarnation of the one God. Full stop. I'm not going to believe it because it's pleasant (and anyway, it's terrifying, if you take it seriously) or because it will make me mentally healthy. I don't know how other people are built, but I'm simply not built for that: I couldn't do it if I wanted to. I believe things that I think are true. 

Once upon a time I believed in the metaphysics of reductionist materialism. What's real are subatomic particles, and they bang into each other in deterministic ways, determining what the atoms do, and that determines what the molecules do, and that determines what cells do, and that determines what creatures such as us do, including -- somehow -- generating subjective experience and a sense of self, at some arbitrary threshold of neural complexity. Okay, well, maybe. Maybe free will is a delusion. Maybe subjective experience is a delusion: some people argue that, though it's a rather desperate move. I think it's more likely that what seems obvious is actually true: that we have intentions and make decisions. I suspect that even cells have intentions and make decisions: that mind and life are coterminous. This is I guess some kind of pantheism. It doesn't particularly leave me "believing in" God, which is a formulation that I suspect is self-subverting in precisely the same way as the Existentialist project. A God you have to "believe in" is not much of a God.

Nevertheless, my intuition is that there is Something to which one can orient, that you can know "where" it is as a blind man knows where the sun is, and turn towards it. (This is a METAPHOR, people. If you don't know what a metaphor is, look it up.) And that intuition is based partly on the surprising intelligibility of the world. It's weirdly explicable. It has rules it plays by, and we can figure some of them out. And, as the Stoics maintain, you can line yourself up with it, and swim with its current, in which case you will be happy (in an ultimate sense, not to be confused with gratified), or you can struggle against it, in which case you will be unhappy, unlucky, clumsy, and conflicted. This being so, the most fruitful thing to practice is orienting to this Sun. Listening for it.

This will distress those who insist that you must know what something is before you investigate it, which is to say most modern people most of the time. How do we know, ahead of time, that what we are orienting to is The Good (a.k.a God?) Well, we don't. But if you agree that we are not now exactly where and what we want to be, then you have to give yourself permission to look for where to go and what you would want to be, in places that are presently unknown. (Once again, this is a metaphor, Deal with it.) And it is actually not that hard to tell, most of the time, whether you are orienting yourself more properly. Are you more unified, more graceful, more at ease, more effective? Someone who is oriented more properly ought to be all of those things.