36 Arguments for the Existence of God (6 page)

The Goddess of Game Theory had been knocked off her game, and it had been a chastening experience. She had spent the summer doing what someone like Cass might have called searching her soul. The depth of the animosity against her—she had learned of Cuthbert’s treachery— astounded and wounded her. He apparently resented her so much that he was willing to act against the interests of his department just to damage her, for surely it couldn’t be good for Princeton to lose her to Frankfurter.

She had only tried to game the system, and now here she was, within retching distance of the stink of failure, packing up her office in Green Hall and nobody stopping by to help her or offer her even a token word of insincere regret. She didn’t doubt for a moment why this punishment was being inflicted on her. It was the combination of her mother’s beauty with her father’s brains, which he had used to become an extremely successful
doctor-lawyer specializing in malpractice. Caught in the summer’s swampy misery, she almost felt aggrieved with her parents for bequeathing her the singular genetic sum.

Perhaps the nagging sense that her parents had somehow done her wrong explained why she ended up sticking out the summer in Princeton instead of returning to the home in the Philadelphia Main Line that the Mandelbaums had bought from the estate of the late Eugene Ormandy the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. That summer made her hate New Jersey so much that she wondered how she could have lasted in Princeton for the three years she’d been there. Nevertheless, she stayed the summer, though there was no place she would rather have placed herself than supine on a chaise lounge, Tanqueray and tonic in hand, in the middle of the rose garden that lay just outside the french doors of the room that the Mandelbaums called “the conservatory.” Philippa, her mother, had planted the rose garden herself and did much of the tending with her own delicate hands, although Hy Hua, their Vietnamese gardener of twenty years (he’d been a boat person), did the heavy lifting.

Philippa had once used the beloved rose garden as the setting to try to draw her little daughter into a fantasy of the sort that Philippa herself had loved when she was a child of seven. Standing under a folly smothered with Rambling Rector, Paprika, and a few other climbers, she had smiled at her little towheaded daughter in her corduroy Oshkosh and said:

“Someday, you’re going to stand here in your flowing white dress and your white tulle veil, with some strong, good, handsome man beside you, and he’ll be thinking that, of all the beautiful roses in this garden, he has picked the loveliest one of all.”

“Which one did he pick? The Alchymist?”

This was their favorite rose, not only because of its beauty—it changes shade day by day, deepening from cream into orange—but also because Philippa had been able to grow it herself from division, a fascinating process which little Lucinda had avidly followed.

“No, you silly! You! You’ll be the rose he picks.”

“I’m not a flower. And, anyway, picking flowers only makes them wilt,
even if you put sugar in the water to give them energy. Don’t let that man pick me, Mommy.”

But here was a complication: If her father adored her mother so much, as he self-evidently did, then why had he wanted Lucinda to be so different from Philippa? Why had he so extravagantly cultivated Lucinda’s intellectual pride and derived such pleasure from his little baby’s taking on everyone and whupping them upside the head? Why did he continue to tell that punch line, “Don’t let that man pick me, Mommy,” with undiminished relish?

It was the first time she had asked herself such questions, and it made her unsteady. She didn’t know how to describe the feeling, and she didn’t know how to explain it away.

It was a setback, of course, for Lucinda, to take up the post, lucrative as it was, at Frankfurter. The department was a bit of a joke, stocked with all sorts of flakes. Sebastian Held seemed the only one who did what Lucinda considered real science. But, still, the very laid-backness of the place was a welcoming change for the time being. She could regroup and come back stronger than ever.

Lucinda took a rather implacable attitude toward the softer and more addled areas of psychology. She had to. Psychology, like Lucinda herself, couldn’t afford to indulge in softness. In some sense, she and psychology were similar, their fortunes joined, both of them with a lot to prove, with a presumption of softness to overcome. In the case of Lucinda, the presumption was the result simply of her being a woman, especially a woman who looked the way she did. She had had to put up with a lot to get where she was, and the putting up never really stopped. Look how precipitously she had been toppled from her perch at Princeton. A woman who thinks for her living always has to be on her guard, always has to cultivate her implacability.

Deep down, she still thought of herself as shy. She had been pathetically shy as a girl. But at a certain point, while still an undergraduate, she had realized that shyness was a luxury she could ill afford, and had found that the best way of overcoming it was, whenever possible, to go on the attack. She herself had coined the verb “to fang” when she was an undergraduate at Harvard, where she had begun to hone her aggressive style
of questioning. To fang is to pose a question from which the questioned can’t recover. You could see the stun, the realizaton of helplessness setting in.

Lipkin was already quite a bit past the one-hour time limit and was foaming like a mad dog. For all his bombast throughout the talk, he ended rather limply, hurriedly restating his claim that moral reason is a myth. Perhaps his mouth had run dry.

Lucinda’s running patter all through Lipkin’s talk had seemed to indicate that she was listening to Lipkin as superficially as Cass himself had been. But when the call for questions came, hers was the first hand to shoot up—or maybe it was tied with Mona’s—but in any case, Lucinda Mandelbaum was the one who was recognized. Just about everybody in the auditorium had been waiting for this moment. Would they be witness to the first fanging at Frankfurter? She stood up. The gesture itself was uncommon in these parts, and it seemed to raise the proceedings to a new level.

“Thank you, Harold, for that provocative talk. I think I speak for everyone here in saying how much we admire both your erudition and your ability to speak so quickly.”

The laughter was good-natured. Lipkin’s smile was grim.

“You’ve packed so much in that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’m going to restrict myself to the last point you made. I want to challenge your claim that the Milgram experiment shows that there’s no moral reasoning going on. And my objection to your interpretation of the Mil-gram experiment is an objection to your entire thesis that reasoning isn’t functioning in our moral calculations, that it’s all just gut reactions.

“Milgram’s results are astonishing, but no more astonishing than the result we get in game theory in what we call escalation games. What I’d like to suggest is that Milgram’s experiment is an escalation game, and the playing of an escalation game certainly involves reasoning.

“Take the simplest escalation game, the dollar auction. Two or more people can bid on a dollar. Each bid has to be higher than the last, and the highest bid gets the dollar—just like in a regular auction—but, crucially, the lower bidders have to pay whatever their last bid was, even though they get nothing. Given these rules, the bidding will quickly go up to a dollar, with the last bidder having bid ninety-nine cents. Will it stop there?
No, because then the ninety-nine-cent bidder will have to pay ninety-nine cents and get nothing for it. So he rationally bids a dollar and a cent, so he’ll lose only a cent rather than a dollar, which is outbid by a dollar and two cents, and so on. What happens in the dollar auction is that people will bid five dollars, ten, fifteen dollars, just to get a dollar in return. In fact, once you get a dollar auction started, there’s no rational way for it to end, since the cost to either player of bowing out will be high, and the marginal cost of raising his bid is just a penny. So it’s rational to keep bidding, a penny at a time, even though this leads to an irrational result.

“Anyway, the Milgram experiment is an escalation game. Once a participant takes the first step, he’s already paid a certain price—he’s inflicted discomfort, and he’s feeling bad about it—but if he stops he’ll get nothing for his pain. He won’t have successfully completed a psychological experiment and contributed something to science, and that authority figure running the experiment is going to be displeased with him. So, once he’s made his first bid, and the experimenter escalates by telling him he has to give an even stronger shock at the next mistake or he will not have completed the experiment like a good subject, he’s more than likely to escalate by complying. Just like the dollar auction, once you start there’s no natural place to end until the experimenter calls a halt to it. It’s all perfectly rational, step by step, even if it leads to a bizarre result. In fact, given that the experiment is, in fact, an escalation game, the outcome is completely predictable.

“And here’s how to empirically test what I’m proposing. Run the experiment with the participants instructed, with no matter how much authority, to administer a deadly voltage on the first trial, without any incremental escalation, and see what happens. I predict that not a single subject will do it.”

Lucinda Mandelbaum had, on the spot, not only devised an alternative explanation that undermined the claims of the presenter, but, in the best scientific tradition, had also conceived a way of testing the two alternative hypotheses. And it had all come out so smooth and polished— frankly, a lot more coherent than the delivered lecture itself. Cass thought there might have been a scattering of applause following her rejoinder, although he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t projected his own silent ovation onto the external world.

Cass, ravished, followed the ensuing dialogue between the astonishing Lucinda and the atomizing Lipkin. There was no doubt in Cass’s mind, as he was sure that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, including Lipkin’s, that Lucinda got the better of the man, whom Cass now actively disliked for keeping up his increasingly whining refusal to accept Lucinda’s brilliant counter-explanation.

Pavel Yarnau, the smarmy chair of the Psychology Department, finally called a halt to the heated Q & A, thanking “our speaker for providing us all with such a lively time and much food for thought. And now let’s continue the discussion over more mundane fare, not to speak of drink. I ask you all to join me upstairs in the Leah and Marty Feingold Room for the reception in honor of Professor Lipkin.”

“Well, this
has
been fun,” Lucinda said to Cass as they were both standing, waiting for their row to clear out so that they could proceed. Did she mean merely Lipkin’s talk or the communion between them? Her eyes were scanning the crowd. “Are you going to that dinner for Lipkin?” she asked without really looking at him.

“No, I didn’t sign up.”

Cass rarely put his name on the sign-up sheets that had slots for ten faculty members and four graduate students to entertain the speaker at one of the local restaurants that had sprouted up along the formerly decrepit and now almost hip Maudlin Street. With the inflated property values of Cambridge and Boston driving chefs to outlying areas, Weedham, Massachusetts, was enjoying a restaurant renaissance, trendy little spots blossoming amid the blight.

“Well, then, I guess I’ll see you soon,” and she turned away, apologetically squeezing past the colleagues over whom she’d just recently stepped. Cass stood there watching her as she strode up to the podium. She and Lipkin shook hands cordially, even enthusiastically. Lucinda was smiling broadly as she spoke to him, and he was laughing as he answered her. There were obviously no hard feelings between these MVPs.

Cass watched for a while, his head cocked and his crooked smile in place, until everybody started heading out to the reception, lining up behind Lipkin and Lucinda like retinue behind royalty. Cass skipped the reception, and went home happy, chewing over it all. It wasn’t so much food for thought. It was ambrosia.

He saw Lucinda Mandelbaum two days later, at a university building where faculty meetings were held. She was standing next to Sebastian Held, both of them tanking up on caffeine in the few minutes before the meeting began.

Cass hated faculty meetings and skipped as many as he could get away with. Watching his colleagues’ intense engagement in the proceedings, the eloquence and pedantry slathered on points too minute for any but the best-trained minds to discern, he would be overtaken by his own failure to grasp human nature. But today he had looked forward to coming.

Lucinda, dressed in a pair of tailored black slacks and a pale-gray sweater matching the color of her eyes, seemed deep in conversation with Sebastian Held, but Cass strode right over and greeted them both enthusiastically.

“Hello,” Lucinda had said, smiling back at him with formally polite blankness, reaching out her hand to shake his with a briskly firm shake. “Lucinda Mandelbaum.”

“Yes, of course. I’m Cass. Cass Seltzer.”

“Nice to meet you, Cass.”

“Oh, we’ve already met,” he said, stopping himself before he could wail out his dismay: Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember how we laughed together like careless gods?

“Oh, sorry. I’m terrible with faces. Remind me of what you do?”

“Psychology of religion.”

“Psychology of religion?” Her thin upper lip curled slightly, not quite achieving a smile. “As a branch of abnormal psychology? Or are you one of those people who try to offer an evolutionary explanation for group madness?”

“Well, not exactly. What interests me more is the phenomenology of religion in all its varieties. What does it feel like from the inside? What sorts of terrors does it address, and what sorts of emotional growth does it both block and enhance? And how does the religious response manifest itself, even in ways that may not seem religious?”

Her lip curled a bit more, and it was a smile, and she lifted her chin so that her throat was exposed.