Founder’s Day Address, 2009
So, honesty is frightening in a religious sense because honesty so often upsets our sense of meaning. The question isn’t one of having an impact. That’s interdependence. No, what’s disturbing is the way the fact of interdependence and the fact of suffering can combine to shake apart our feeling that our actions obviously make a positive contribution. We drive to work to support our families, which is good, but then we support an oil economy causing wars which destroy other families. We despair.
And this brings us to religious skepticism. Religious skepticism is the feeling no claim about what makes life meaningful, can stand up to an honest look at life’s suffering. To the religious skeptic, religion is a group decision to ignore reality because it just hurts too much otherwise. Freud said this, right, in Civilization and It’s Discontents? Religion is a mass delusion, Freud said, and he understood himself as replacing delusion with honesty.
To the religious skeptic, honesty shows that bad things happen and they don’t contribute to any kind of meaning or worth in the world at all. In fact, for many religious skeptics, the fact that bad things happen proves that religion is nonsense; what’s the point of religion if it can only find meaning in the good things? What’s the point of religion if it always breaks down into shallow aphorisms in the face of pain and suffering?
Here’s a good litmus test. Stand up and say ‘everything happens for a reason’ and you’ll find the religious skeptics in the crowd, scowling. What I want to suggest today is that those religious skeptics in the crowd scowl because they are also religious. I say this because I’m one of them. I can’t stand that line, ‘everything happens for a reason.’ My father in law, whom I love dearly, is dying well before his time, and there isn’t any meaningful reason for it at all.
My thesis today is that religious skeptics scowl when they hear ‘everything happens for a reason’ because religious skeptics are religious, too. The presence of meaningless events in life needn’t mean that life has no meaning. Our founders were skeptical people, especially skeptical of religion, yet they still believed that religion was worth pursuing. So now let me turn to Kurt Vonnegut, because in his work I see a fellow freethinker trying to figure this out, trying to figure out how it can be that life has meaning even though so much of what happens in life is painful, is full of loss, is unloving, is quite frankly meaningless.
When I say that Kurt Vonnegut was a freethinker, I mean it literally. He actually belonged to a freie gemeinde congregation in Indianapolis, where he grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. His grandfather was actually president of this freie gemeinde congregation. So there we are, part of the childhood of perhaps the greatest of modern American writers. Vonnegut is one of us.
Now Vonnegut, in good free thinker fashion, doesn’t accept the standard, inherited answers about life’s meaning. Now one answer to the question of life’s meaning is to say that there are large scale purposes – God’s purposes, civilization’s purposes, America’s purposes - and we can contribute to those purposes and that’s meaningful. Frankly, I admit I’ve always found this answer tempting myself. Well, Vonnegut thinks it’s ridiculous. To decide that your life has meaning because you can contribute to some widespread purpose assumes way too much knowledge about what’s actually going on.
Read 257-258 (SH5)
Don’t kid yourself, Vonnegut says; life is much more random than we can grasp.
Now let’s give the Western religious tradition some credit here, too, and recognize that it has felt the impact of critiques like Vonnegut, critiques to the effect that the random and capricious nature of life can make life look pretty meaningless. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in control, anyone directing things; to what, then, do our lives contribute?
The most influential answer, the one that has really stood the test of time and that greatly influences our common western culture even today, is some version of determinism. Everything that happens has to happen. It’s a bit like the idea that life includes some big purpose, but the purpose is so much in control, that everything always contributes to the purpose, and everything always will so contribute. In fact, since everything that happens is determined to happen from the beginning, you might say that everything has in fact already happened. St. Thomas Aquinas said this. Albert Einstein said this, too. Vonnegut agrees; determinism means that everything has already happened.
Now if everything is determined to happen, if everything has already happened, then our world is the best of all possible worlds because it’s the only possible world. Everything that happens is meaningful because there is no alternative. If you feel that something is meaningless, it’s because you don’t really see reality, you’re still stuck on this illusion of spontaneity. We’ve all heard this kind of talk; it’s ‘God’s will,’ that’s the usual format.
Vonnegut spends most of Slaughterhouse 5 quarreling with this perspective and its impacts. Like others who witnessed the worst horrors of the Second World War, Vonnegut refuses to believe that massacres like Dresden, mass murder like the Holocaust, are meaningful because they had to happen. Vonnegut turns this whole way of thinking on its head. If things happen because they must happen, if the only possible world is a world full of war and massacre, that doesn’t make our world the best possible world, it just makes our world a crappy world with no alternative. Because everything has already happened, because the Dresden massacre had to happen, nothing happens for any reason at all. Everything just is; the Dresden massacre just is. That’s what the aliens tell Billy Pilgrim, the main character, when they capture him; “we are trapped in the amber of each moment; there is no why.” There was no reason for the Dresden massacre; it contributed to nothing, and was a meaningless event in a world full of such meaningless events.
So how do we find meaning in life if Vonnegut is right, if there is no why, if good and evil alike unfold without choice? Well, the aliens who capture Billy Pilgrim the main character in the book, have one solution. They tell Billy…READ 249. But Vonnegut doesn’t buy this clever answer because it isn’t honest. This is the thing I love most about Vonnegut. Billy Pilgrim, all of us, we are human, we have our reason, we can see all of reality; in fact, our reason compels us to look at reality. This honesty, this refusal, in the end, to look away evil and instead to stare right at it, is the essence of our humanity. Here is my favorite passage from Slaughterhouse 5: READ 27-28. Now the Abrahamic tradition teaches that Lot’s wife was bad because she disobeyed God. But we know better; Lot’s wife was a freethinker, and she was honest, and she knew what would happen to her, and she chose honesty anyway.
The problem is, if only we could all get turned into pillars of salt when evil confronts us. But we don’t usually get that escape from the problem. But Vonnegut does warn us against another kind of escapism. READ 253-254. All the time in Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut ends a section with ‘so it goes.’ Everything, good and evil, unfolds without choice, so what else is there to say? Billy Pilgrim staggers through the novel, clumsy, clueness, mostly numb given the horrors he has witnessed. He is a warning of the danger of honesty, of the danger of being fully human. If we let ourselves be human, if we get honest about reality and take it, take all of it, inside ourselves, we will get so badly hurt by the evil and the loss and pain that we will go numb to life and stagger around, able only to say ‘so it goes.’ The grief and pain of life is so awful it just sweeps away every attempt to wrap it into a system of meaning.
So where’s the religion? I said at the beginning that Vonnegut’s relentless commitment to honesty is in fact a way of being religious. So what kind of religion am I talking about here?
READ 274-275.
This passage, at the very end of the book, is also the most honest passage in the book. But honesty before life means noticing the beautiful and the painful; both are true together. The city is bombed to moondust, and the trees leaf out, the birds sing.
To love something means to bring it into ourselves, to let it affect us and change us. The human way of loving is to be completely honest, to love not just some of reality but all of it. Life is beautiful and terribly sad, and we must love both, together. I suspect that in this embracing of life’s beauty and life’s pain, together, there is a religion. It is a religion where the meaning of life is combining the beautiful and the painful into something poignant and giving it back. It is asserting the beautiful given an honest recognition of the evil. We acknowledge the ruined cities, we assert the equal reality of the blossoming trees, we weld both together into some aesthetic whole.
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