No Time to Spare Page 11

  I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from profoundly different ways of looking at the same world—different ways of coming at reality: the material and the spiritual. They can and often do coexist in perfect harmony.

  Extreme literalism in reading religious texts makes any kind of thinking hard. Still, even if one believes that God created the universe in six days a few thousand years ago, one can take that as a spiritual truth unaffected by the material evidence that the universe is billions of years old. And vice versa: as Galileo knew, though the Inquisitors didn’t, whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes round the earth doesn’t affect one way or the other the belief that God is the spiritual center of all.

  The idea that only belief sees the world as wonderful, and the “cold hard facts” of science take all the color and wonder out of it, the idea that scientific understanding automatically threatens and weakens religious or spiritual insight, is just hokum.

  Some of the hokum arises from professional jealousy, rivalry, and fear—priest and scientist competing for power and control of human minds. Atheist rant and fundamentalist rant ring alike: passionate, partial, false. My impression is that most working scientists, whether they practice a religion or not, accept the coexistence of religion, its primacy in its own sphere, and go on with what they’re doing. But some scientists hate religion, fear it, and rail against it. And some priests and preachers, wanting their sphere of influence to include everything and everyone, claim the absolute primacy of biblical revelation over material fact.

  Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you can’t believe in evolution, and vice versa.

  But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you can’t believe in artichokes.

  Maybe the problem is that believers can’t believe that science doesn’t involve belief. And so, confusing knowledge with hypothesis, they fatally misunderstand what scientific knowledge is and isn’t.

  A scientific hypothesis is a tentative assertion of knowledge based on the observation of reality and the collection of factual evidence supporting it. Assertions without factual content (beliefs) are simply irrelevant to it. But it’s always subject to refutation. The only way to refute it is to come up with observed facts that disprove it.

  So far, evidence fully supports the hypothesis that Creation has been changing since its origin, that on earth living creatures, adapting to change, have evolved through eons from single-cell organisms through a vast profusion of species, and that they’re still adapting and evolving right now (as can be seen in the evolution of finch species in the Galápagos, or moth coloration, or barred/spotted owl interbreeding, or a hundred other examples).

  Yet to the strict scientific mind, the theory of evolution is not absolute knowledge. Exhaustively tested and supported by evidence as it is, it’s a theory: further observation can always alter, improve, refine, or enlarge it. It’s not dogma, it’s not an article of faith, but a tool. Scientists use it, act on it, even defend it as if they believed in it, but they’re not doing so because they take it on faith. They accept it and use it and defend it against irrelevant attack because it has so far withstood massive attempts at disproof, and because it works. It does a necessary job. It explains things that needed explaining. It leads the mind on into new realms of factual discovery and theoretical imagination.

  Darwin’s theory vastly enlarges our perception of reality—our always tentative knowledge. As far as we have tested it and can test it, and always subject to modification as we learn more, we can accept it as true knowledge—a great, rich, beautiful insight. Not a revealed truth, but an earned one.

  In the realm of the spirit, it appears that we can’t earn knowledge. We can only accept it as a gift: the gift of belief. Belief is a great word, and a believed truth too can be great and beautiful. It matters very greatly what one believes in.

  I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we’d avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.

  About Anger

  October 2014

  i. Saeva indignatio

  In the consciousness-raising days of the second wave of feminism, we made a big deal out of anger, the anger of women. We praised it and cultivated it as a virtue. We learned to boast of being angry, to swagger our rage, to play the Fury.

  We were right to do so. We were telling women who believed they should patiently endure insults, injuries, and abuse that they had every reason to be angry. We were rousing people to feel and see injustice, the methodical mistreatment to which women were subjected, the almost universal disrespect of the human rights of women, and to resent and refuse it for themselves and for others. Indignation, forcibly expressed, is an appropriate response to injustice. Indignation draws strength from outrage, and outrage draws strength from rage. There is a time for anger, and that was such a time.

  Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon—a tool useful only in combat and self-defense.

  People to whom male dominance is important or essential fear women’s resistance, therefore women’s anger—they know a weapon when they see one. The backlash from them was immediate and predictable. Those who see human rights as consisting of men’s rights labeled every woman who spoke up for justice as a man-hating, bra-burning, intolerant shrew. With much of the media supporting their view, they successfully degraded the meaning of the words feminism and feminist, identifying them with intolerance to the point of making them almost useless, even now.

  The far right likes to see everything in terms of warfare. If you look at the feminism of 1960–1990 that way, you might say it worked out rather like the Second World War: the people who lost it gained a good deal, in the end. These days, overt male dominance is less taken for granted; the gender gap in take-home pay is somewhat narrower; there are more women in certain kinds of high positions, particularly in higher education; within certain limits and in certain circumstances, girls can act uppity and women can assume equality with men without risk. As the old ad with the cocky bimbo smoking a cigarette said, You’ve come a long way, baby.

  Oh gee, thanks, boss. Thanks for the lung cancer too.

  Perhaps—to follow the nursery metaphor instead of the battlefield one—if feminism was the baby, she’s now grown past the stage where her only way to get attention to her needs and wrongs was anger, tantrums, acting out, kicking ass. In the cause of gender rights, mere anger now seldom proves a useful tool. Indignation is still the right response to indignity, to disrespect, but in the present moral climate it seems to be most effective expressed through steady, resolute, morally committed behavior and action.

  This is clearly visible in the issue of abortion rights, where the steadfast nonviolence of rights defenders faces the rants, threats, and violence of rights opponents. The opponents would welcome nothing so much as violence in return. If NARAL vented rage as Tea Party spokesmen do, if the clinics brandished guns to defend themselves from the armed demonstrators, the opponents of abortion rights on the Supreme Court would hardly have to bother dismantling Roe vs. Wade by degrees, as they’re doing. The cause would be already lost.

  As it is, it may suffer a defeat, but if we who support it hold firm it will never be lost.

  Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.

  If women who value freedom are dragged back into open conflict with oppression, forced to defend ourselves against the reimposition of unjust laws, we will have to call on anger as a weapon again: but we’re not at that point yet, and I hope nothing we do now brings us closer to it.

 
; Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous. Nursed for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process. The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.

  ii. Private Anger

  I’ve been talking about what might be called public anger, political anger. But I went on thinking about the subject as a personal experience: getting mad. Being angry. And I find the subject very troubling, because though I want to see myself as a woman of strong feeling but peaceable instincts, I have to realize how often anger fuels my acts and thoughts, how very often I indulge in anger.

  I know that anger can’t be suppressed indefinitely without crippling or corroding the soul. But I don’t know how useful anger is in the long run. Is private anger to be encouraged?

  Considered a virtue, given free expression at all times, as we wanted women’s anger against injustice to be, what would it do?

  Certainly an outburst of anger can cleanse the soul and clear the air. But anger nursed and nourished begins to act like anger suppressed: it begins to poison the air with vengefulness, spitefulness, distrust, breeding grudge and resentment, brooding endlessly over the causes of the grudge, the righteousness of the resentment. A brief, open expression of anger in the right moment, aimed at its true target, is effective—anger is a good weapon. But a weapon is appropriate to, justified only by, a situation of danger. Nothing justifies cowing the family every night with rage at the dinner table, or using a tantrum to settle the argument about what TV channel to watch, or expressing frustration by tailgating and then passing on the right at 80 mph yelling FUCK YOU!

  Perhaps the problem is this: when threatened, we pull out our weapon, anger. Then the threat passes or evaporates. But the weapon is still in our hand. And weapons are seductive, even addictive; they promise to give us strength, security, dominance . . .

  Looking for positive sources or aspects of my own anger, I recognized one: self-respect. When slighted or patronized, I flare up in fury and attack, right then, right there. I have no guilt about that.

  But then so often it turns out to have been a misunderstanding—the disrespect was not intended, or was mere clumsiness perceived as a slight. And even if it was intended, so what?

  As my great-aunt Betsy said of a woman who snubbed her, “I pity her poor taste.”

  Mostly my anger is connected less with self-respect than with negatives: jealousy, hatred, fear.

  Fear, in a person of my temperament, is endemic and inevitable, and I can’t do much about it except recognize it for what it is and try not to let it rule me entirely. If I’m in an angry mood and aware of it, I can ask myself, So what is it you’re afraid of? That gives me a place to look at my anger from. Sometimes it helps get me into clearer air.

  Jealousy sticks its nasty yellow-green snout mostly into my life as a writer. I’m jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I’m contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them—if I don’t like their writing. I’d like to kick Ernest Hemingway for faking and posturing when he had the talent to succeed without faking. I snarl at what I see as the unending overestimation of James Joyce. The enshrinement of Philip Roth infuriates me. But all this jealous anger happens only if I don’t like what they write. If I like a writer’s writing, praise of that writer makes me happy. I can read endless appreciations of Virginia Woolf. A good article about José Saramago makes my day. So evidently the cause of my anger isn’t so much jealousy or envy as, once again, fear. Fear that if Hemingway, Joyce, and Roth really are The Greatest, there’s no way I can ever be very good or very highly considered as a writer—because there’s no way I am ever going to write anything like what they write or please the readers and critics they please.

  The circular silliness of this is self-evident; but my insecurity is incurable. Fortunately, it operates only when I read about writers I dislike, never when I’m actually writing. When I’m at work on a story, nothing could be farther from my mind than anybody else’s stories, or status, or success.

  Anger’s connection with hatred is surely very complicated, and I don’t understand it at all, but again fear seems to be involved. If you aren’t afraid of someone or something threatening or unpleasant, you can as a rule despise it, ignore it, or even forget it. If you fear it, you have to hate it. I guess hatred uses anger as fuel. I don’t know. I don’t really like going to this place.

  What I am coming away from it with, though, seems to be a pervasive idea that anger is connected with fear.

  My fears come down to fear of not being safe (as if anyone is ever safe) and of not being in control (as if I ever was in control). Does the fear of being unsafe and not in control express itself as anger, or does it use anger as a kind of denial of the fear?

  One view of clinical depression explains it as sourced in suppressed anger. Anger turned, perhaps, against the self, because fear—fear of being harmed, and fear of doing harm—prevents the anger from turning against the people or circumstances causing it.

  If so, no wonder a lot of people are depressed, and no wonder so many of them are women. They are living with an unexploded bomb.

  So how do you defuse the bomb, or when and how can you explode it safely, even usefully?

  A psychologist once informed my mother that a child should not be punished in anger. To be useful, he said, punishment must be administered calmly, with a clear and rational explanation to the child of the cause of punishment. Never strike a child in anger, he said.

  “It sounded so right,” my mother said to me. “But then I thought—was he telling me to hit a kid when I’m not angry?”

  This was shortly after my daughter Caroline, a sweet-natured, affectionate two-year-old, came up to me while the family was sitting around on the terrace outside my parents’ house; she smiled up at me rather uncertainly and bit me hard on the leg.

  My left arm swung out in full backhand and knocked her away like a fly. She was unhurt, but enormously surprised.

  There were then, of course, many tears, many hugs, many consolations. There were no apologies on either side. I only got guilty about hitting her later. “That was terrible,” I said to my mother. “I didn’t think! I just whacked her!”

  My mother then told me about what the psychologist had told her. And she said, “When your brother Clifton was two, he bit me. And he kept doing it. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I shouldn’t punish him. Finally I just blew up, I slapped him. He was so surprised, like Caroline. I don’t think he even cried. And he stopped biting.”

  If there is a moral to this tale, I don’t know what it is.

  I see in the lives of people I know how crippling a deep and deeply suppressed anger is. It comes from pain, and it causes pain.

  Maybe the prolonged “festival of cruelty” going on in our literature and movies is an attempt to get rid of repressed anger by expressing it, acting it out symbolically. Kick everybody’s ass all the time! Torture the torturer! Describe every agony! Blow up everything over and over!

  Does this orgy of simulated or “virtual” violence relieve anger, or increase the leaden inward load of fear and pain that causes it? For me, the latter; it makes me sick and scares me. Anger that targets everything and everybody indiscriminately is the futile, infantile, psychotic rage of the man with an automatic rifle shooting preschoolers. I can’t see it as a way of life, even pretended life.

  You hear the anger in my tone? Anger indulged rouses anger.

  Yet anger suppressed breeds anger.

  What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, se
lf-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?

  The Annals of Pard

  An Unfinished Education

  July 2015

  LAST THURSDAY NIGHT, Pard woke me up about 3 a.m. by bringing his real, live mouse toy onto the bed so I could play with it too.

  This was the third time he’s done it, always about 3 in the morning. For the third time (having had some practice) I flung both cat and mouse off the bed with a giant convulsion of bedclothes. Both cat and mouse went right on running briskly about the room, scrabble scrabble silence scutter scamper silence scrabble . . . This time I didn’t stick it out at all. I fled down the hall to another bedroom and shut the door.

  In the morning Pard was walking up and down the hall all bright and innocent and wondering why I was in that bedroom.

  No sign of mouse.

  Last time there never was any sign of what became of mouse. I assumed it escaped, that time and this time.

  But Friday night Pard woke me about 3 a.m. by rummaging persistently at the base of the standing lamp in my bedroom, making annoying noises, and worrying me that he’d knock the lamp over, even though the base is a big, heavy brass disk. No way to go back to sleep with that going on. I picked him up and shut him out of the room.

  There’s no use trying to shut out both Pard and a mouse, because the door is so high off the floor that the mouse can run back in, leaving Pard out, and then Pard will rattle the door and cry.

  But this time when I shut him out, Pard just went down the hall to sleep in the other bedroom. This told me, indirectly, something about the mouse.

  Pard is an excellent hunter, but as I said in an earlier blog, he doesn’t know that he should kill the prey, nor, evidently, does he know how to. His instincts and skills are impeccably feline, but his education was incomplete.