If I Had Superhuman Powers
There is a moment in the early serializations, when the new super hero (Superman) is challenged: “Why don’t you stop wars from happening?” And the answer that is given is — peace to endure — cannot be imposed from without, it must come from within. It is the same answer that almost 100 years later, is offered by apologists for the conundrums of traditional biblical teachings. It is also an attempt to address what is considered to be the greatest challenge to people of faith: If God is all powerful, all knowing, and all loving — how can there be such evil and cruelty in the world?
This is the so-called problem of theodicy: that the answers given, over the course of 2 thousand years, continue to be profoundly dissatisfying and frustratingly irrriational- example:
We can see why, in a thousand ways small and large, it is contradicted by the worlds we live in. If there is free will of the evil doers to be protected so that divine justice can be fairly administered, and in the afterlife then why the existence of hell? Can there be a greater deterrent than the certain knowledge (taught to believers at the earliest possible age that if specific prohibited acts were committed and the perpetrators were to die unrepentant — they would be condemned to eternal damnation? How could it be fair for some evil doers to find the time to repent (as they certainly do) while others do not? If Free Will, above all, is to be protected, why are there jails in courts of justice — the point of which unwanted behavior? Why are there (sometimes Draconian laws) allowed to enforce them? “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?”, as Rabbi Kushner famously asked. Where is the justice in that?
A frequent answer is that there is a redemptive value in even the most prolonged, seemingly meaningless suffering. Shortly, before this past Easter Sunday, there appeared in The NY Times, a painfully honest, touching story by a young priest who suffered unbearably as he helplessly watched his eight year old niece gradually succumb to a horrible disease. Was it possible that a merciful, all-loving God could simply stand by and do nothing? But then, slowly, one mourning friend, then another, then another, then a virtual river of mourners, rallied to the side of the bereft family. And it dawned on the young priest that this was God’s way of showing how real love could heal heart broken, despairing mourners. In his heart, the young priest leapt with joy, with his faith restored.
It was a simple and beautifully written essay and I wanted it to be true. Can this really be -if not the answer — to the soul numbing problem of theodicy — than at least an answer?
And sadly, after a moment’s thought, the answer, with crushing force, came back: how could it? How could it? First — well, yes it is wonderful to be the beneficiary of wave after compassionate wave of deeply felt, unadulterated nurturing consolation. But how does that help the child? And why was it necessary in the first place for an innocent 8 year old to suffer an excruciating death (a surefire means to rally the compassion of often overly self involved friends?) Would it have been far more wonderful and merciful if he had shielded the innocent girl in the first place from the tormenting ordeal? What would we think of someone or some being who would expect/ demand gratitude for saving someone from a horrible fate, which he himself had deliberately orchestrated? Even more difficult to condone, are the unmarked, unsung sufferings of literally millions of lonely, abandoned souls. Who speaks for them? In real life, we get to choose, but we don’t get to cherry pick. Only apologists get to cherry pick. Which is why they tend to be regarded skeptically. Yet we live in a time of seemingly unparalleled suffering, two national wars, two super powers committing nonstopo genocide against innocent civilians: including thousands of innocent children. Crimes against humanity. Occurring on a greater scale than anything within memories since the Second World War. The technology of sophisticated war time weaponry is proceeding at an unprecedented rate. The intensity of open internecine political combat reaching toxic levels threatening to permanently poson the national spirit.
Nothing is easier therefore than to rail against a real but incredibly fallible world in a millennium old theological warfare that is hopelessly out of touch.
This is not, however, meant as one more tirade of how a tone-deaf contemporary Christian Apologist — faced with an unexpected feeding frenzy of jingoistic, territorially obsessed, tribalistic, and Eastern Nation States- can be. Instead, it is a sober, hard look — not on a God (whom so far as we know, does not exist) — but on a secular, contemporary, self-coddling culture, which is all too meaningful. Instead of tilting Don Quixoteish against a windmill/golem, how about considering our own secular culture, up close, with a single twist (making all the difference in the world). So, here’s a thought experiment (never before undertaken so far as I know):
Imagine a visit from an extraterrestrial from a civilization far in advance of ours. This is a being who’s a million times more intelligent (from the standpoint of technology) than the most intelligent person on earth (that is, given Moore’s Law) that computing power doubles every two years); there can be little doubt that technology in the hands of hypothetical beings of comparable cognitive intellect as we currently possess — would be astronomically superior to our own (see Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence).
In no way, however, does that mean that our hypothetical extraterrestrial is one million times more intelligent emotionally than we are. In point of fact, current evidence points in the opposite direction, i.e. since the development of the first computer in the early 1950’s, computer power has certainly increased of times, but of emotional intelligence has if anything gone backwards (i.e. we have gone from an almost global human rights consensus in 1945, that nuclear weapons of war must be completely banned, to, as Joe Biden recently proclaimed, “we are closer to a nuclear holocaust today than at any time since the Cuban blockade of incoming Russian missiles.”
Furthermore, according to Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, a world expert in existential risk management, such superintelligent extraterrestrials undoubtedly exist in the multiverse and they have already been hiding among us.)
Now, remembering this is a thought experiment, which by definition has almost limitless degrees of freedom so we can easily imagine the following twist: (the key premise of the proposed thought experiment).
Imagine this hypothetical extraterrestrial (with access to millions of times more computing power than we have) however has no desire to control us in any way; on the contrary, is psychologically very similar to us, biologically would like to help us, and is eager to share whatever benefits their comparatively super-human computing power can afford us.
Further, imagine a dedicated coalition of philanthropically minded human beings (i.e. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, coming together to better our planet. The goal being to come up with, and then actualize, a better vision: a humanistic vision for the planet earth.
Every person will (and should, to a certain degree) have their own idea of what a secular utopia might be like.
Here’s mine: The Cosmic Flush. If you put your mind to it, as I have tried to do (in my amateurish way) you will quickly realize its daunting, dizzying complexity. So, I start with only a fundamental idea, what if, instead of trying to scale ever ascending levels of technological ingenuity, we started at the bottom — beginning with low hanging fruit, or trash, in this case. I am suggesting a radical, bottoms-up approach:
Let’s Start With the Rats
In ten years, growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, I may’ve seen, out of multitudes, only a few rats. Moving to the Bronx, New York, with my parents, at age 15; in just a few years I caught sight of more than 1000, in the streets, coming out of sewers, or building basements, on subway platforms, especially on subway tracks. You could hear them in the walls if you listened, especially at night. And if you were very unlucky you might glimpse one exploring your apartment, Almost everyone I know has their personal rat horror story. If you are a New York psychotherapist (as I am) it is only a matter of time before someone tells you a story grisly enough and real enough to become a meme, what I call a psychic rat (See Alper — To Build A Better Mousetrap). Spoiler alert: here’s my personal meme:
A patient I know, a computer expert, who was hired by the New York City Transit System to upgrade, help sanitize, and do damage control on a growing problem of rodent infestation in our overcrowded city subways. A story was told of a young woman wearing sandals, on a muggy summer afternoon, standing on a platform. Suddenly, a rat, lured by the summer smell of her exposed feet (which I am told attracts them) climbed up from the tracks — scurried across the platform and began biting her bare feet. Unable to walk, bleeding profusely, screaming hysterically, she had to be carried up flights of subway steps and rushed to the nearest emergency room.
Incidents such as this, macabre though true, would drive me as a teenager to reconsider Voltaire’s sardonic question, “How could this be the best of all possible worlds?” The more I thought about it the more surreal, the more intractable loomed the deistic conundrum of theodicy.
Granted, rodents and vermin rank high on evolution’s litmus test of survivability — who lives and who dies (recently I read that the Nile Crocodile, whose crushing bite power is unsurpassed by any terrestrial creature, has survived virtually unchanged over the past billion years.) We immediately see a crucial difference: biological survivability means breeding superiority, while hominid evolution (in addition to necessary reproductive advantages) entails the transmission of cultural values. Hence the coining of the phrase a politics of meaning (popularized a generation ago, but now outdated.)
From this perspective, the problem of theodicy- how could there be a God who is all-good, all just, all-powerful, all-loving — in the world? And, suddenly, the pieces fall into place; the horrors of Urban Life (of which infestation of rodents is just one of many problems) is simply a garing, egregious illustration of an irresolvable theological paradox. How could a supreme being — all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing; a being purportedly with limitless empathy for any kind of human suffering, tolerate a single rat bite — without immediately intervening? How could such a purportedly virtual God bear witness to the parade of genocidal pogroms throughout history and not intervene? And, the answer, hiding in plain sight for millennia is — there are only two possibilities; one, in what we might call the Fallible God; propounded by Rabbi Harold Kushner: God is almighty, God is Great, how could he not be as the Bible tells us. He is the sole architect of Genesis, but God is not perfect. He is fallible. God, Rabbi Kushner tells us, has an achilles heel. Even he cannot resolve the cosmic uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. In other words, even God must suffer the vicissitudes of Cosmic randomness. So, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, when the rat bites the baby, or the foot — it is not because a benign, all loving God wanted it.
When the adorable niece of the grieving priest dies tragically, (who wrote that the divine meaning and purpose of such heartbreaking laws, not because God intended these tragedies to happen). It’s because God clearly intended for these tragedies not to happen but was powerless to prevent them. So Kushner’s gone, no less than Kushner grieves such miscarriages of divine mercy. Thus Rabbi Kushner resolves the millennial- old paradox — how could a compassionate, all powerful God not Intervene? And Rabbi Kushner’s answer, radical though it is, is spelled out in his memorable bestseller When Bad Things Happen to Good People, but he can’t because of quantum uncertainty.
Take Away
My take away from this is that far from suffering from an inadequacy of technology to keep pace with our changing needs- we suffer from a failure of humanism. In what way? In every way. Humanistic knowledge or wisdom is nothing like technological know-how. It is more like counting or measurement. The main context that is considered in technology is the context of the experiment. There is no such thing as the context of meaning. (what William James famously referred to as The Fringe.)
Meaning is not binary. Meaning tends to bleed, it is polysemous. Its boundaries are not strict and measurable. There were no stop signs, nor traffic cops. No one can say when to stop, or why. By definition, humanistic meanings are variable. They are not infinitesimally that precise. They need to be interpreted. The meaning of what one person says is different from another — in addition to being understood, often requires to be intuited, sensed, felt, to be lived. Is belief, wondered Wittgenstein, an experience? The same could be asked of someone who feels, suddenly, he is for the first time understanding something important that he never understood before. The more we tackle questions of meaning, values, ethics, aesthetics, the relevance of someone, and the place of beauty in our lives, the greater becomes the complexity and mystery of human existence.
Could it be we are asking the wrong questions? Not how can the culture of reading be replaced, but why is the culture of reading being digitized by the culture of the internet? Not how but why is the book being downsized to the text. Why is the printed page becoming more like a footnote? Why are thoughts being reduced to messages? Intersubjectivity, the lynchpin of intimacy, becoming a form of information exchange?
Perhaps, even more importantly- along with a loss of language- there was a loss of meaning. The first time the phrase a politics of meaning (meant to address this) began to be used. In a recent book, the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas (Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment) considers introducing the psychodynamic insights of modern psychoanalysis to the culture of politics. What if the political, cultural unconscious- analogous to the way psychoanalysis tries to raise the unconscious in the individual to the level of consciousness, could be raised to group consciousness. Could that help to humanize the snakepit that contemporary politics has become? Bolas thinks this is at least worth a try.
Disclosure
Christopher Bolas is increasingly regarded as having written some of the greatest essays in the history of psychoanalysis (The Shadow of the Object; Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience). To which I would like to add: Christopher Bolas is one of the few people in the world I would without question call a creative genius. That said, I must (gently) push back- a person may be a group- but a group is not a person. A political party is not a person. A nation-state is not a person.
Disclosure
(I attended a lecture in Manhattan by The New Informants in the 1990's.) In the course of which, Bolas commented — “the shelf-life of a psychoanalytic interpretation is very brief.” (This is even more true if we are talking about a political process.) As Woody Allen famously pointed out, “that even a good film cast, once the movie is over and the crowd hits the street (Crimes and Misdemeanors). It is called a category mistake (as Bolas himself is fond of pointing out in other contexts) to think — that an entrenched social, political, cultural moment can be humanized for more than a brief, magical moment.
No one made this point better than William James in the beginning of his magisterial book: The Principles of Psychology -
If I begin chopping the foot of a tree, its branches are unmoved by my ax and its leaves murmur as peacefully as ever in the wind. If, on the contrary, I do violence to the foot of a fellow man, the rest of his body instantly responds to the aggression by movements of alarm or defence. The reason of this difference is that the man has a nervous system, whilst the tree has none: and the function of the nervous system is to bring his heart into harmonious cooperation with every other.
The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant — be this as gross as the operation of a chopping tree or as subtle as waves of light, convey the excitement which causes the stimulant to the nervous system. The commotion set up in the centers through the efforent nerves, muscles, and glands, exciting movements of the libs, and viscera, or acts of secretion which vary with the animal and with the irritant applied. These acts of response have usually the common character of being of service.
- Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality). His new book is God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).
