Nothing to Be Frightened Of (19 page)

It could, I suppose, be worse. It almost always can—which is some mild consolation. We might fear the prenatal abyss as well as the post-mortal one. Odd, but not impossible. Nabokov in his autobiography describes a “chronophobiac” who experienced panic on being shown home movies of the world in the months before he was born: the house he would inhabit, his mother-to-be leaning out of a window, an empty pram awaiting its occupant. Most of us would be unalarmed, indeed cheered, by all this; the chronophobiac saw only a world in which he did not exist, an acreage of himlessness. Nor was it any consolation that such an absence was mobilizing itself irresistibly to produce his future presence. Whether this phobia reduced his level of post-mortal anxiety, or on the other hand doubled it, Nabokov does not relate.

A more sophisticated version of the bird-in-hall argument comes from Richard Dawkins. We are indeed all going to die, and death is absolute and God a delusion, but even so, that makes us the lucky ones. Most “people”—the vast majority of potential people—don’t even get born, and their numbers are greater than all the grains of sand in all the deserts of Araby. “The set of possible people allowed by our DNA . . . massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” Why do I find this such thin consolation? No, worse than that, such a disconsolation? Because look at all the evolutionary work, all the unrecorded pieces of cosmic luck, all the decision-making, all the generations of family care, all the thissing-and-thatting which have ended up producing me and my uniqueness. My ordinariness, too, and yours, and that of Richard Dawkins, yet a unique ordinariness, a staggeringly against-the-odds ordinariness. This makes it harder, not easier, to give a shrug and say philosophically, Oh well, might never have been here anyway, so may as well get on enjoying this little window of opportunity not granted to others. But then it’s also hard, unless you’re a biologist, to think of those trillions of unborn, genetically hypothetical others as “potential people.” I have no difficulty imagining a stillborn or aborted baby as a potential person, but all those possible combinations that never came to pass? My human sympathy can only go so far, I’m afraid—the sands of Araby are beyond me.

So I cannot be philosophical. Are philosophers philosophical? Were the Laconians truly laconic, the Spartans really spartan? Just in comparative terms, I expect. Apart from my brother, the only philosopher I know well is my death-haunted friend G., who as a four-year-old beat me to mortal awareness by a decade. He and I once had a long exchange about free will. Like everyone, I have always—an amateur in and of my own life—assumed that I had free will, and always, to my own mind, behaved as if I did. Professionally, G. explained to me my delusion. He pointed out that though we might think we are free in acting as we want, we cannot determine what it is that we want (and if we deliberately decide to “want to want” something, there is the usual problem of regression to a primal “want”). At some point your wants must just be givens: the result of inheritance and upbringing. Therefore, the idea of anyone having true and ultimate responsibility for their acts is untenable; at most we can have a temporary, surface responsibility—and even that, with time, will be shown to be mistaken. G. might well have quoted to me Einstein’s conclusion that “a Being endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, would smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.”

At a certain point, I admitted that I had lost the argument, though carried on behaving in exactly the same way (which, on reflection, might have been a useful proof of G.’s point). G. consoled me by remarking that though, in his philosophical opinion, we cannot possibly have free will, such knowledge doesn’t make the slightest practical difference to how we do, or even should, behave. And so I have continued to rely on this delusionary mental construct to help me along the mortal path to that place where no will of mine, free or fettered, will ever operate again.

There is What We Know (or think we know) To Be The Case, there is What We Believe To Be The Case (on the assurance of others whom we trust), and then there is How We Behave. Christian morality still loosely governs Britain, though congregations dwindle and church buildings make their inexorable transition to historic monuments—setting off in some “a hunger to be serious”—and loft apartments. That sway extends to me too: my sense of morality is influenced by Christian teaching (or, more exactly, pre-Christian tribal behaviour codified by the religion); and the God I don’t believe in yet miss is naturally the Christian God of Western Europe and non-fundamentalist America. I don’t miss Allah or Buddha, any more than I miss Odin or Zeus. And I miss the New Testament God rather than the Old Testament one. I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm. I also realize that this God I am missing, this inspirer of artworks, will seem to some just as much an irrelevant self-indulgence as the much-claimed “own personal idea of God” I was deriding a while ago. Further, if any God did exist, He might very well find such decorative celebration of His existence both trivial and vainglorious, a matter for divine indifference if not retribution. He might think Fra Angelico cutesy, and Gothic cathedrals blustering attempts to impress Him by a creation which had quite failed to guess how He preferred to be worshipped.

Chapter 34

My agnostic and atheistic friends are indistinguishable from my professedly religious ones in honesty, generosity, integrity and fidelity—or their opposites. Is this a victory for them, I wonder, or for us? When we are young, we think we are inventing the world as we are inventing ourselves; later, we discover how much the past holds us, and always did. I escaped what seemed to me the decent dullness of my family, only to find, as I grow older, that my resemblance to my dead father strikes me more and more. There is the angle I sit at a table, the hang of my jaw, the incipient baldness pattern, and a particular kind of polite laugh I emit when not really amused: these (and doubtless much else that I fail to pick up) are genetic replicas and definitely not expressions of free will. My brother finds the same: he talks more and more like our father, using the same slang and half-finished sentences—he catches himself “sounding just like him, and even shuffling in my slippers the way he used to.” He has also started to dream about Dad—after sixty years in which neither parent intruded upon his sleep.

Grandma, in her dementia, believed my mother was a sister of hers who had been dead for fifty years. My mother, in turn, welcomed back all the relatives she had known in childhood, come to express concern for her. In time, our family will come for my brother and for me (only please don’t send my mother). But did the past ever really relax its grasp? We live broadly according to the tenets of a religion we no longer believe in. We live as if we are creatures of pure free will when philosophers and evolutionary biologists tell us this is largely a fiction. We live as if the memory were a well-built and efficiently staffed left-luggage office. We live as if the soul—or spirit, or individuality, or personality—were an identifiable and locatable entity rather than a story the brain tells itself. We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.

Will such knowledge sink in? How long will it take? Some scientists think we shall never entirely decipher the mysteries of consciousness because all we can use to understand the brain is the brain itself. Perhaps we shall never abandon the illusion of free will because it would take an act of the free will we don’t have to abandon our belief in it. We shall go on living as if we are the full arbiters of our every decision. (The various adjustments of grammar and sense that I made to that last sentence, both immediately in the writing and after subsequent time and thought—how can “I” not believe that “I” made them? How can I believe that those words, and this parenthesis which follows them, and every elaboration I make within it, and the occasional misytpings, and the next word, whether completed or abandoned-halfway-through-as-I-have-second-thoughts-about-it and left as a wo, are not emanations of a coherent self making literary decisions by a process of free will? I cannot get my head round this not being the case.)

Perhaps it will be easier for you, or if not you, the generations born after you are dead. Perhaps I—and you—will seem to them like the “old-type
natural
fouled-up guys” (and gals) of Larkin’s poem. Perhaps they will regard as quaint and complacent the half-assumed, half-worked-out morality by which you and I seem to think we live. When religion first began to collapse in Europe—when “godless arch-rogues” like Voltaire were at work—there was a natural apprehension about where morality was to come from. In a dangerously ungoverned world, every village might produce its Casanova, its Marquis de Sade, its Bluebeard. There were philosophers who, while refuting Christianity to their own satisfaction and that of their intellectual circle, believed that the knowledge should be kept from peasant and potboy, lest the social structure collapse and the servant problem get completely out of hand.

But Europe stumbled on nonetheless. And if the dilemma now seems to pose itself in an even sharper form—what is the meaning of my actions in an empty universe where even more certainties have been undermined? why behave well? why not be selfish and greedy and blame it all on DNA?—the anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are able to offer comfort (if not to the faithful). Whatever religions may claim, we are set up—genetically programmed—to operate as social beings. Altruism is evolutionarily useful (ah!—there’s your virtue—another illusion—gone); so whether or not there is a preacher with a promise of heaven and a threat of hellfire, individuals living in societies generally act in much the same way. Religion no more makes people behave better than it makes them behave worse—which might be a disappointment to the aristocratic atheist as much as to the believer.

Chapter 35

When I was first studying French literature, I was puzzled by the concept of the
acte gratuit.
As I understood it, the notion went like this: in order to assert that we are now in charge of the universe, we must perform a spontaneous action for which there is no apparent motive or justification, and which lies outside conventional morality. The example that I recall, from Gide’s
Les Caves du Vatican
, consisted of the gratuitous actor pushing a complete stranger out of a moving train. Pure act, you see (and also, I now realize, a supposed proof of free will). I didn’t see—or not enough. I found myself thinking about the unfortunate fellow dashed to death in the middle of the French countryside. Murder—or, perhaps, what bourgeois minds still mired in Christianity chose to call murder—as a means of demonstrating a philosophical point seemed too . . . too theoretical, too French, too repellent. Though my friend G. would say that the gratuitous actor would have been fooling himself (merely “wanting to want” something). And I suppose that if his assertion of pure free will was a delusion, then so too was my reaction.

Are we like those Antarctic penguins, or are they like us? We go to the supermarket, they slither and wobble across miles of ice to the open sea in search of food. But here is one detail the wildlife programmes omit. When the penguins approach the water’s edge, they begin to dawdle and loiter. They have reached food, but also danger; the sea contains fish, but also seals. Their long journey might result not in eating but getting eaten—in which case their offspring back in the penguin-huddle will starve to death and their own gene pool be terminated. So this is what the penguins do: they wait until one of their number, either more hungry or more anxious, gets to where the ice runs out, and is gazing down into the nutritious yet deadly ocean, and then, like a gang of commuters on a station platform, they nudge the imprudent bird into the sea. Hey, just testing! This is what those loveable, anthropomorphizable penguins are “really like.” And if we are shocked, they are at least behaving more rationally—more usefully, even more altruistically—than the gratuitous actor of our own species pushing a man from a train.