Geiger Counter

My sister-in-law doesn’t like hobbits, she informed us at dinner last week.  “Why not?” my wife asked. “Their feet,” she replied bluntly. “And their optimism.” She still loves the stories and worlds they inhabit, of course, but she thinks their naivety is annoying. The fact that she has such strong feelings about them makes them feel even more real, though. She has never tried to argue that they don’t exist; only that she thinks they need to stop being such idiots (and maybe shave their feet).  The thing is, hobbits live in stories. So do countless dragons and heroes. And living in a story is more important than anything else. It is a bastion of immortality and a reservoir of meaning. People can live in stories even if they never set foot in the “real” world, and if we are very lucky and try very hard, we, too, can live on in stories long after our bodies decay and rot.  My seven-year-old daughter came home from school the other day and relayed some important news about a whole list of creatures: “One of my friends doesn’t believe in Santa, or the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.”  “Dad,” she continued, growing gravely serious. “She doesn’t even believe in trolls!” The others could be explained away, but to not believe in trolls? That was a difficult one to swallow.  “What does she believe in?” I asked.  “She said she doesn’t believe in anything.” Hadley has finally encountered nihilism. The philosophical definition of a nihilist is someone who stands on the sidelines of life and makes snarky, reductive comments about all the meaningful things other people are experiencing. Beautiful music is merely noise. Great holiday feasts are only calories. Paintings are colors and nothing more. Stories are just words on paper, and worse yet, they are “made up.” “You know, that’s just a bunch of pigments and oils mashed up and smeared on hemp,” they say while scoffing at “The Birth of Venus.” (On a side note, did you know the word “canvas” comes from “cannabis,” because so many early artists painted on hemp?) “That’s just oxytocin – a chemical - you are feeling,” they say while you hold your child for the first time, or your parent for the last. “Love is just chemicals. It isn’t real.” “That’s only the uncontrolled self-sustaining chain reaction in which isotopes of hydrogen combine under extremely high temperatures to form helium,” they say as millions of innocent people die in a hydrogen bomb explosion. “So what?” They are hardly ever wrong, technically, but they are so willfully unimaginative and painfully reductive, so incapable of understanding the depth of people’s many passions and fears, that they add little to the complex tapestry of life, which I’m sure they would point out is merely a bunch of atoms woven together. One of my favorite movie scenes is the one in which The Dude in The Big Lebowski meets a purported nihilist, and he observes: “That must be exhausting.” If we believe only in the things we see, we are giving away our greatest power. If we believe only in the things we understand, we make most of the world around us inaccessible.   Even modern science is based primarily on beautiful, invisible mysteries. Not long ago, science was called “Natural Philosophy,” because it is an attempt by us to decipher the majestic, ponderous mysteries of the world around us. Science can never be done or finished any more than art can; there will always be more to learn. The offerings of these things are infinite.  Often, whether in the realms of science or art or magic, or in the many places they intersect, we find ourselves believing in things not because we see them, but because we see their effects on ourselves and the world around us. I have never seen hatred. In fact, the very idea of hate is a purely human invention, but I know it is real because I see it in the maddening world around me. I have also never seen love, yet if you told me it does not exist, a thing that I feel in every simple interaction with those I care about, I would know the fault was in your eyes, not in the world.   Thanks to a couple mysterious illnesses more than 20 years apart, I cannot hear out of my right ear. But when people with better ears than me say they heard something, I don’t doubt them. I try not to disbelieve that something is real simply because I did not personally experience it. The most common way to try to discredit someone’s beliefs, values and desires today seems to be to claim they see things, and believe in things, that are “made up.” Some people claim that modern science is merely a human invention, which it actually is, but they fail to see that it is also very real because of the impact it has on people. Science has cured countless diseases and also fueled the horrors of modern warfare. Its effects are real enough. They do it with something as simple as human identity, too, alleging that people are “making up” their own identities, which I think misses the point of what being a person is. ALL identities are made up. So what? Others are just as guilty, and they love to say that religion and mythology are “made up,” but I would ask them to explain all the cathedrals, food pantries, holy wars, novels – the good and bad things - that those inventions have nurtured. Ask someone who now has access to clean water, thanks to a missionary, if they think the new well is “made up.” Ask someone who sees all the beauty in the world thanks to a great book if it is “real” or not.  When studying philosophy and religion, you quickly learn all about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Basically, people who believe in God point out (correctly) that since you can’t disprove a Deity’s existence (because you can’t really disprove anything’s existence), it is rational to believe in one. Atheists counter (also correctly) that by this same logic, there is a Flying Spaghetti Monster living in the sky, because you can’t really disprove its existence. When you study religion, the debates sometimes descend into arguments over whether certain things actually happened. Did a small amount of oil light a set of candles for longer than physically possible? Did a prince flee from his life of privilege and find enlightenment? Did a peasant die and rise from the dead to save the world?  I’m not particularly interested in whether or not any particular God or Monster “exists” in the limited, modern sense of the word, but I do want to hear their stories. Because our species has a remarkable gift; the ability to imagine things and dream them into existence. Math is invented, not discovered, and so are language and art and ice cream. Life is sort of like the “Velveteen Rabbit,” because the things we believe in can BECOME real, if we believe hard enough, so we should believe with care, and also listen with an open heart when other people tell us the remarkable stories of the magical things that sustain them through the long day and dark night. Chairs are “made up” – they are a thing that didn’t exist then was dreamed into the world by people. A collection of atoms that made a tree that was then reinvented as something imagined by people. I’m sitting on one right now. It doesn’t matter whether I believe in it or not; I am staying off the floor, either way. Perhaps that’s the oddest thing about nihilists; the fact that they benefit from all the made up things people believe in – from science and medicine and religion and art and identity – without believing in any of it. They take medicines that would not exist if not for the great thinkers of the Muslim and Christian world, and they use words that are merely invented sounds with made up meanings to express their disdain and their disbelief.  People keep arguing about what we should, or should not, believe in. But I want to know what the things we believe in are doing to us, and to those we love. I want to know what people believe about their own identities, because believing those things can make them real. I’m acutely aware of the way people love to squabble over what is, and is not, real. After inventing the genres of “fiction” and “non-fiction” people proceed to spend much of their time accusing non-fiction books of containing lies. Conversely, they love to shake their fists and accuse authors of having the audacity of putting “real” people and incidents into their novels. Both are considered sins, but it is a modern sin. It is, I think, an invented sin, too. The Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard exposed this strange false dichotomy when he wrote a six-part autobiography, containing only accounts of real people and events, using their real names, and simply labeled the whole thing “Fiction” when it was published. This is even true of a small town newspaper. Every story we publish is true and factual, in the most honest sense of those words, but the things the people in our stories believe in and do stem from stories vast and varied. We publish facts, but those facts are an outgrowth of the beliefs of thousands of people. When people line up to speak at a local government meeting, or run for office, or open a new shop or art studio, it is because of the stories they believe in.  Perhaps, rather than dismissing the things people believe in, it would be better – and easier, even – to simply listen to their stories, and to ponder them, and to feel them. The lives and testimonies of human beings deserve to be told, and to be listened to - and felt in our hearts throughout the year.