Totalizing Systems

You might believe that God rules the universe, that every action occurs according to God’s will, that all decisions can be judged according to whether or not they comply with God’s prescribed set of morals, as described in the Bible.

You might believe that nothing exists outside of your own mind, that only your own thoughts are known to you, that everything else is an illusion created by your own psyche. Or you may believe that it is impossible to know for certain whether anything beside your own mind exists; and therefore, you will treat everything outside your own mind as though it does not exist, just to be safe.

You might believe that the laws of physics determine every action in the universe, including your actions, movements, thoughts. If you decide to jump off a bridge, it is because of electric signals in your brain set into motion at the time of your conception. If your psychiatrist convinces you not to jump off the bridge, her words, the thoughts that gave rise to them, your thoughts and actions in response to her words were all effects of the physical interactions of particles in your brains and bodies and in the universe around you, and all of this was determined at the beginning of time and cannot be changed any more than we can change the force of gravity.

When I was in college, I discovered a totalizing system that saved me from being stuck with the B grades that seemed to be my perpetual fate in my chosen major, English. When I started studying English, I wasn’t sure exactly how the graduate students who graded my essays wanted me to analyze works of literature. I would try to make causal arguments about the characters’ actions, or discuss the psychological distinctions between two characters. My graders were never impressed; they didn’t agree with my premises or the conclusions I was drawing from them.

Then I discovered a field of study that I was really, really good at: linguistics. And I figured out that the study of language could be applied readily to analyzing literature, because literature is nothing but language. I discovered that a whole tradition of structuralist and post-structuralist literary critics agreed with me, approaching literary texts as an assemblage of words and sentences, descriptions and metaphors, not as hypothetical worlds populated by imaginary people.

This strategy of interpretation became my doctrine, and it saved me from all the inane disagreements about character motivation that I had had with my graduate student instructors. Characters had no motivations, because the characters did not exist. No one could argue with this fact. One professor, my senior thesis advisor, would actually shoot me a guilty, apologetic look every time she made a statement like, “Hardy implies that Tess of the D’Urbervilles was raped, but a lot of readers think she really wanted to have sex with Alec.” She did not need to voice her acknowledgment aloud: Tess of the D’Ubervilles doesn’t want anything, except in the sense that Thomas Hardy’s narrator says that she wants it—she is nothing but a collection of words and descriptions, not a real person who can act in defiance of the author who created the illusion that she exists.

This approach to literary analysis seemed to be objection-proof. I wrote an essay about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past that compared the similes used in the first half of the giant novel (comparisons to concrete objects) to those used in the second half (comparisons to abstract ideas). I invented some explanation of what this change meant, relating it to the novel’s themes of self-doubt and self-acceptance. I wrote this essay during the five hours before it was due; I was taking the class pass-fail, so my grade didn’t really matter.

I got an A, and some gushing commentary from my graduate student reader about what a solid analysis I had achieved. I knew why my grade was high: there was no easy way to argue against my analysis. I had carefully documented examples of similes from beginning to end; and who would want to bother going back into that giant tome to verify that the pattern I had identified was correct? By focusing on purely linguistic elements, which are the only factual truths about literature, I made myself invincible as a literary critic. Everything I wrote in college from this point on got a grade of A or even A+, all focusing on language-based truths that were impractical or impossible to refute.

I liked this newfound power—the power to wield a system that I had mastery of, one that impressed and confounded my professors, one that could be used equally on any text, because, ultimately, they were all cut from the same cloth, just a bunch of language.

By the time I got to graduate school, this way of thinking had gotten pretty old. Of course the characters didn’t really have motivations. Of course they didn’t have histories, families, futures, identities. But I was ready to write about those things again, anyway, illusory though they were, because they comprise the meaning of literature, and it occurred to me that I did not want to spend the rest of my career ignoring the point of what I was analyzing just to be invulnerable to criticism.

The idea that literature is nothing more than language was the first and last totalizing theory that I ever subscribed to. It isn’t a theory that applies to everything in the entire universe, as a true totalizing theory would. But it applied universally to every work of literature—in fact, to every written or spoken text.

Since the time I gave up my own theory, I have found myself on the wrong side of a number of others. One semester, I had a student who used to come to my office hours every few weeks to debate with me about Christianity, which he was a strong believer in; in fact, he was training to be a minister. I normally wouldn’t engage in religious debates with anyone, much less my student, but he was a strong and interesting debater and I liked hearing what he had to say.

“My moral system is absolute,” he would say to me. “I believe morality comes from God, so I can always defend my values and beliefs. If you believe that your morals are defined by your society, you have to accept that other societies have different morals. How are you going to tell them that it’s wrong to commit murder?”

He was right, of course: it is a messy process to make any moral argument when morality is relative. Your argument is likely to contradict itself at times, or end up anchoring itself in absolutes (“it is wrong to cause suffering”) that cannot be proven any more than my student can prove that God doesn’t want us to murder people. This is the nice thing about totalizing systems; they’re tidy and consistent and avoid hypocrisy.

The issue of absolute versus relative morality arises whenever we discuss conservative and liberal politics in my English classes. Conservatives know what they believe, and state it outright: We are for big-business. We are against abortion. We believe America is the greatest country on earth, and we support traditional American values.

Liberals tend not to state concrete beliefs, but rather systematic principles: We might not agree with what you say, but we will defend your right to say it. We are pro-choice (not pro-abortion). We believe it is important to respect other people’s beliefs.

Predictably, the conservative position is internally consistent, while the liberal one is conflicted. How can we justify respecting other people’s religions and cultures, except when they fundamentally disagree with our own values? Theocracy is okay; preventing women from getting an education is not okay. Communism is okay; suppressing the free speech of your opponents is not okay. Of course, in these cases, the values that are violated are part of what we call human rights, values we hold so sacred that we don’t even see them as values but self-evident morals. Which I believe we should, but I can’t explain that belief through recourse to any absolute morality. If someone asks me why I hold those values to be self-evident, I will ultimately have to respond that I just do. And that, of course, is a horrible basis for an argument.

If we wish to avoid such messiness, we must believe all sorts of counterintuitive things that will make consistency out of a messy world: that there is a god who cares deeply about our dietary habits and who we have sex with; that America is the greatest country on earth; that all of our actions and thoughts can be predicted by the laws of physics. These beliefs are orderly, and once we have embraced them, we will never be lost, illogical, confused, or frightened again.

The Heavens

My friend Adam is a skeptic. He doesn’t believe in unseen, unprovable phenomina like conspiracy theories, ghosts, or gods. If he’s going to believe in something, he wants empirical proof.

One day when we were talking, I mentioned something about horoscopes. “You don’t actually believe in that, do you?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. If he was asking whether I believe that people’s personalities are shaped by celestial patterns, that all people born on a particular day, or even during the same month, would share a set of identifiable traits based on the position of the planets—then no. If he was asking whether I believe that knowing somebody’s astrological sign affords some worthwhile insight into his or her personality—then, I suppose, yes.

I’ve always been interested in astrology and horoscopes, and it seemed dense of me that I had never thought about whether I actually believed in them. They’ve always just been there, like Democrats and Republicans, black, white, Asian and Latino people, like terriers and schnauzers, and every other useful but probably fictitious categories we classify things and people by.

Horoscopes had always been one of my ways of understanding all sorts of personal relationships, starting with my family. My mother and sister are a Cancer and Pisces, respectively, both signs known for their emotionalism and sensitivity. My father, on the other hand, is a Virgo, a logical, Mr. Spock kind of sign. My own sign, Gemini, represents duality, which seemed to explain my status as the peacemaker between the two factions.

Our professions also reflect these traits. My emotional mother is an artist, while my logical father is a computer engineer. My sensitive sister is a psychologist. And I, the mediator, am an English teacher, which means that my job is largely to help people with different viewpoints and perspectives to communicate with one another.

My first serious boyfriend was a Virgo, born on the same date as my father. After we broke up, I looked up our compatability in a book my roommate owned called Love by the Stars. The book said the following about Gemini-Virgo couples:

You are joined by your mutual interest in intellectual pursuits. However, aside from that fundamental similarity, you are not naturally compatible. The Gemini will perceive the Virgo as uptight, rigid, and overly serious, while the Virgo will find the Gemini to be flighty, disorganized, and prone to silly distractions.

I couldn’t believe it; the description seemed to have been written by someone who knew me and my ex-boyfriend personally. It turned out that my next relationship, with yet another logical, serious Virgo, followed this pattern as well.

How could I not believe in astrology, after all of this evidence of its predictive and explanatory powers? And yet how could I believe in something so patently untrue, from a strictly empirical point of view?

Reflecting on these patterns, I realized that they are less a belief than a mythology, a pattern more literary or symbolic than scientific. Certainly not every Virgo in the world behaves like my father or first two boyfriends, and not every Gemini acts like me. Still, these categories have always been a part of my consciousness. They have shaped the way I understand the world for so long that if I decided to excise them as illogical, I would lose a shade of meaning as rich as art or music.

It’s a lot like religion, really, because I use that to explain my life, too, even though I don’t strictly believe in it.

Monday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Proper Jews stayed home from work and attended services, praying and fasting until sunset.


I didn’t do doing anything at all to observe the holiday this year, and I haven’t for many years. I used to observe this holiday every year, you might say religiously. It took on a special significance to my family when I was seventeen, just after my mother’s father died. Yom Kippur was on his birthday that year, and my mother, sister and I fasted and attended services on Stanford campus near our house (my father was never much for synagogue; he went to work). My mother brought printed copies of my grandfather’s eulogy, since my sister and I had not been able to go to the east coast for his funeral. After the service, we sat on the grass and read the eulogy, and then we shared memories of my grandfather. It was a very sweet and sad afternoon, its significance heightened by the dreaminess of hunger.

By the time we were ready to go home, my mother felt too lightheaded to drive, so I drove, being extra attentive to traffic since I was also fairly woozy. When we got home we could not find the copies of the eulogy, which had been in a folder along with some pictures and documents. It turns out I had left them on the roof of the car, back on Stanford campus. I drove back to Stanford, now in a really surreal haze, and found the folder, scarred by a dusty tire-print, in the parking lot. I expected my mother to be angry with me, but she said, “It’s okay. We’re all just really out of it.”

This was a special day for my family, and for a while, Yom Kippur became a meaningful family tradition in a way that other Jewish holidays were not. My mother still observes Yom Kippur fastidiously each year, but I stopped long ago. It seemed that the significance of the day was more about family history and the headiness of hunger than about religion. Even if there is a God, I don’t think It would be interested in micromanaging us to this level. With all the activity and matter in the universe, what kind of Supreme Being would busy Itself worrying about what I eat?


Cartoon--"Compare and Contrast: God Versus Superman" written by Karin Spirn and illustrated by Adam Caldwell.

Pills

When I first read Roland Barthes' book Mythologies, which describes the mythological significance of everyday objects and events, the first thing I thought was that he had left out pills.

What could be more mythological, more like magic really, than a tiny, self-contained package the size of a fingernail, with the power to change all the complex chemical workings of your vast, expansive body? If it were food, it would be less than half a bite, a sixteenth of a bite, not enough to provide any nourishment at all. Yet this minuscule vessel holds the power to cure headaches, clear mucous from your nose and throat, lull you into a deep sleep, keep you awake through the night, correct the feeling that your life has no meaning, make you hallucinate, prevent the growth of a tumor. It could make you terribly sick. It could make you break out in a sweat, make your skin turn red or blue, send you into a coma. It could kill you. So much power in something so small that it would get lost in your pocket, something that needs to be carried around in special tiny bottles, something that can hide snugly between your back tooth and the inside of your cheek in case you get into a sticky spot and need to execute a hasty suicide.

It must be some sense of the connection between pills and magic that leads people to associate them with Alice in Wonderland, even though there are no pills in that book, just magical potions and cakes and mushrooms:

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all. Go ask Alice, when she was just small.

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

In the real world, we don't have enchanted cakes and potions and computer programs that instantly transport us to a different reality; all we have are chemicals.

When I was a child, I loved Alice in Wonderland and I thought pills were magic. They reminded me of the scene in The Secret of NIMH where the mother mouse carries packets of mysterious herbs home to heal her little mouse son, who has pneumonia. She pours the packets into a cup of hot water, where they fizz a bit and then settle into a steaming, volatile-looking brew. It reminded me that medicine was like magic, the magic of secret hiding places and chemistry sets and Native American remedies and poisonous plants and everything else that blurred the lines between the scientific and the supernatural.

When I was in high school, I carried my Advil and Pseudoephed tablets around in antique pill boxes that felt infused with the mystery and intrigue of their contents. I loved to pull the box out during class, swallow a pill without water, and feel like I was doing something illicit and covert, when in fact it was the most culturally sanctioned of activities, the easy solution to problems that could have been solved with more sleep, more and healthier food, and, ironically, less medicine.

The sickest I’ve ever gotten was from pills, specifically an antibiotic called erythromycin that I took for strep throat when I was fifteen. When my mother called the all-night advice nurse to report that her daughter was screaming in pain and couldn’t stop dry-heaving and vomiting water all over the floor because of a medicine she had taken, the nurse said:

“Was it erythromycin? It’ll do that.”

I was given a new antibiotic to take, but my bottle of erythromycin sat on the windowsill of my bedroom for months afterwards. It seemed like a shame to throw out medicine, especially such pretty pills: they were lovely translucent green capsules that shone in the light from the window.

Once over the phone, I told my friend Matthew that I had pills on my windowsill.

“I’ll take them,” he said.

“They won’t do anything to you,” I said. “They’re antibiotics. They made me sick.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “I’ll take them.”

I thought he was stupid, but I also knew why he wanted them. There’s an extra, scandalous thrill in taking pills that weren’t meant for you, your mother’s painkillers, your little brother’s Ritalin. They can’t be bad for you because they’re medicine, meant for healing. Even if you’re not sure what they’ll do to you, you’re ready for it. You’re brave, like Neo in The Matrix, prepared to face the unexpected, and whatever it is, it’s bound to be interesting.

Thanks to Adam Caldwell for the illustration.

Love, Magic, Logic

“I was reading this thing about love,” said a teenaged girl sitting behind me on a couch in the tea shop. She was telling her friend about a recent break-up, trying to get some perspective and make herself feel better. “It was about how you can’t go looking for love, that love is more a force that just comes into your life through different portals, through your own process of self-discovery.”

“That’s so right,” said her friend.

Their conversation reminded me of an anthropology lecture I watched recently about people who have schizotypal disorder, which is a mild version of schizophrenia. According to the anthropologist, people with this disorder are prone to metamagical thinking. This term, as he explained it, really just meant magical thinking, belief in the reality of unreal things: ghosts, angels, demons, gods, unseen forces, metaphysical realities.

Of course, as the anthropologist acknowledged, you don’t need to be schizotypal to engage in some form of magical thinking. Many of us believe in unprovable phenomena; it’s just that people with healthy brains secretly know that our beliefs are delusional, while the schizos really believe in them.

As humans, when we can’t understand some aspect of our own nature and the nature of the world we live in, we can search for meaning in one of at least two ways: through logical reasoning or through metaphysical beliefs. Logic is sort of agreeable in that it provides provable answers, reproducible outcomes. But since these conclusions can only be based on empirical evidence, they are not very emotionally satisfying.

In other words, the bare facts, what we can prove, can be pretty depressing. The facts about falling in love will tell that girl on the couch that her happiness is contingent on other people and that she can’t control those people. Those people will hurt her, leave her, betray her, or, failing all of that, eventually die, unless she dies first. So she wants to find answers that draw from what she can’t prove: imaginary answers to make her feel better about the grimness of the real. Love is a force; it comes into our lives through portals.

Much of our magical thinking stems from the classical flaw in logic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, after-this-therefore-because-of this. That’s how our superstitions work: “I broke a mirror yesterday and today I got in a car accident; therefore breaking the mirror caused my car accident.”

A lot of magical thinking follows this model:

Five hundred people performed transcendental meditation to end the Vietnam War; two weeks later, U.S. troops began to pull out.

I prayed to Jesus, and he cured my son’s Leukemia.

With this type of thinking, two known facts (I prayed, my son was healed) are connected in an illogical way (my prayer healed my son). But sometimes, our magical thinking is not based on any known facts at all:

We will be rewarded for our good deeds in a future life.

There is a god, and everything happens according to his plan.

Likewise, when we think about love, our magical thinking can follow a post-hoc model of reasoning, where we connect unconnected events:

Someone I know met the person of her dreams after she stopped looking; therefore I must stop looking.

Someone I knew met the person of her dreams after she decided to suck it up and try internet dating; therefore I should try internet dating.

But a lot of what we think is based on absolutely no evidence at all:

If we put it out to the universe that we are looking for love in our lives, the universe will send us what we need.

I will meet somebody when it’s the right time.

All of this reasoning is flawed, but there’s no better way to think about it. As with all the other types of pain that accompany the paradox of being both a mind and a body—death, hunger, illness, loneliness, longing—the cold, bare logic of love is too depressing to view objectively. We need make-believe stories to make us feel okay about our physical drive to mate with other people. No one wants to receive the Hallmark card that tells us the proven facts:

You cannot control whether somebody loves you.
Even if you work your hardest at making your relationship a success,
your partner could leave you, cheat on you, or abuse you.
Even if you have the most wonderful relationship in the world,
your partner could die. Therefore,
it would be prudent to prepare to be alone.
Happy Valentines Day!

It’s just like how we don’t want to tell ourselves: we need to eat other living things to survive, and we need to kill them brutally, and even if we don’t kill animals brutally, they will kill each other brutally; these are the facts of the world. People we love get diseases and get hit by cars and die and the only causal logic to explain it is, “We are mortal, and bad things happen.”

My sister the psychologist once told me that the schizophrenics she worked with didn’t want to take their medicine. “They love their hallucinations,” she told me. “They feel exciting and important.”

We need our delusions, because the facts make sense, but it is a depressing, empty, meaningless kind of sense. We need to believe that there is an order to all this, a meaning, that it is connected by some causal logic. There’s someone out there for me, we tell ourselves. It will happen when the time is right. It’s meant to be.

Thanks Brain for the lecture recommendation.