Burning Violin

When I was a kid, Sunday morning meant going to church. Every week, year after year, until I went to college and lapsed into proper heathenhood. I never really fought going, unless pretending to be asleep the first six times I was told to get dressed really counts as fighting. It meant too much to my mom, and even in the depths of teenage anger boys don't screw around too much with the things that really matter to their moms. Freud said something about it, but he also had a few words about those sixty foot steeples stapled onto every church.

It's a simple equation to solve, really. You add an overly intelligent child to a room with uncomfortable seats and a parent policed prohibition on sleeping and he's going to read a book if it's sitting right in front of him, there's just not much else to do. So I read the Bible. Cover to cover. Over and over. Year after year.

It didn't stick.

The New Testament was fairly boring except for Revelations, but the Old Testament had some deliriously fucked up parts. You ever read Maccabees? Them ancient Israelites were some crazy sum bitches. So I arrived at atheism and agnosticism through a rather Christian route. Those poor Jesuits spent a lot of years teaching the devil to quote scripture.

Spirituality is something distinct from religion: the search for meaning is not the same as the acceptance of god. Joss Whedon is an atheist. So is Russell T. Davies. David Shore isn't, but he's a Jew so he's halfway there. Atheists write some of the most deeply spiritual works because they have thought about it, tortured themselves over it. It's like how the greatest coaches were always the mediocre players, because nothing came naturally to them, they had to obsess over and analyze every detail, fight for every inch. It's that struggle that imparts insight and wisdom. Atheists are amongst the most spiritual because they have not found an answer, their struggle for meaning never ends by definition.

Staggering through the wasteland of television, there are a few shows that have stuck out over the years:

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel"

"If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters ... then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world." -- Angel, "Epiphanies"

Joss Whedon has said that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is the story of a teenager growing up and that Angel is the story of a twenty-something becoming a man. They are stages, waypoints on the path. They're not just universal stories, they are the story of our society.

We were young once, toddlers, we followed the rules under threat of immediate punishment: follow the priests or they'll cut out your tongue and stone your ass in the temple square. Morality enforced by spanking. Then we grew up a bit, had a renaissance, wrote some philosophy, religion and the state got divorced, we became tweens: follow the rules under threat of eternal damnation, do what the church says, or god will get you when you die. Morality enforced by grounding when dad gets home.

Buffy starts growing up the moment she starts sneaking out at midnight to do what she thinks is right, when she fights the darkness regardless of the consequences with her mom, with Principal Snyder, even with Giles. The point of no return comes on that night when the door to hell almost opens, when her mother tells her that if she walks out the door it'll be for the last time, and Buffy does anyway, heart broken, mind made up.

The industrial age came with all the bluster and violence of machinery and ideology. Civilization as a teenager. Stole the keys to the car, got drunk, plowed through some pedestrians. We issued thunderous proclamations that no one preceding us could possibly understand our agony, trashed our room and then scrawled endless bad poetry about our angst and pain. Morality is dead, they say. We need the old ways they say. This is what you get when you kill god, when you don't listen to your parents anymore.

Buffy sleeps with Angel. The world nearly ends. She watches Faith kill a man, helps her cover it up. These are the things that happen when we stop listening to our parents. She stabs Angel through the heart to save the world, blows up Sunnydale High to save her friends. These are the ways we find our own path, our own morality.

We're a civilization trying to figure out what the hell it means to be a man. We've grown up, got those world wars out of our system, but we moved out on our own. There aren't parents anymore to tell us what to do. Insisting that society cannot have a concept of morality without god is like insisting that an adult cannot have a concept of morality without parents. The opposite is true. In reality, it is only as adults, free and unfettered adults, that we truly adopt any sort of meaningful and mature morality. That's the morality that comes from deciding to be the kind of man we want to be. Not because our parents say so, not because god says so, but because that's the kind of man we want to be, that's the face we can look at in the mirror without flinching. Society works the same way. We have labored so long trying to live up to the morality of god, that we finally threw down and had the crazy teenage rebellion clusterfuck of the last two centuries. We're fucking hungover as a species: the car's parked in the yard, we somehow vomited on the couch and shit in the sink, vaguely remember beating the crap out of someone at a bar, and we really can't stand to look in the mirror. That's the challenge of the next century: to build a society we can respect, whether it lives up to the old religions and ideologies or not.

Angel goes to L.A., 200 years old and with a river of blood staining his hands, but still needing to learn to be a man. He watches friends sacrifice themselves. He becomes a father. He tries to help people, he tries to find some measure of redemption to dispel the darkness. But the more he fights for absolution, the more it slips away. The indifference sets in, the cynicism that rises up in self defense against the banality of evil, scoffing at him. "I just can't seem to care." It's that crushing nihilism that sets in when you move to a city alone for the first time, no parents, no friends. It doesn't matter what you do. No one is watching, no one is keeping score. But that's the seed of real morality, that's the epiphany: when nothing you do matters, the only thing that matters is what you do.

"House"

"I find it more comforting to believe that all this isn't simply a test." -- House, "Three Stories"

"You took a chance, you did something great. You were wrong, but it was still great. You should feel great that it was great. You should feel like crap that it was wrong. That's the difference between him and me. He thinks you do your job, and what will be, will be. I think that what I do and what you do matters. He sleeps better at night. He shouldn't." -- House, "DNR"

Man creates god. Man is less than god, man is equal to god, man is superior to god, man kills god.

There is a notion that our concept of god comes from the gaps in our knowledge. We rationalize god as the reason for things that we cannot understand. In ancient times, those gaps were immense, so wide and deep that we didn't even know for sure that they had bottoms, that they even could be understood by mortals. Even Newton ascribed to the hand of god phenomena in the universe that his theories could not explain. But at some point we passed a critical threshold in the comprehension of science, and we realized that while there are still gaps, while the remaining gaps may even exceed by orders of magnitude the safe areas we understand, the gaps are not special. There is a distinction between unknown and unknowable. They are knowable, even if we haven't managed it yet. The conception of god becomes irrelevant once we realize that the universe is knowable. God is no longer needed as a variable to balance the equations.

Gregory House is a scientist. There are no miracles, only things not yet understood. There is always an explanation. Some would say he is the farthest thing from spiritual, a bitter and narcissistic atheist, but he lives by the nuance that took Angel a couple centuries to tease out of the universe: what we do matters. If there is a god, then what we do doesn't matter. Then it's just a game, and as long as we've tried our best, everything will be ok. We will receive absolution. But if it's not just a game, if there are no do overs, then what we do counts.

There's a corollary to this understanding: if our failures are not our fault, then neither are our triumphs. We can't have our cake and eat it too. We don't get to celebrate our success if our failures aren't really our fault. Watch "House," really watch the moment when he figures something out: every discovery is an epiphany, that height of spiritual experience when the universe makes sense. He will pursue a miracle, break it down and figure out why it wasn't a miracle, why the laws of the universe still held true. This isn't cynicism or shallowness, this is faith at its most pure. Faith that the universe can be known, that there is no cheating, no cosmic sleight of hand.

Atheists are often accused of being deadened to the wonder and mystery of the universe, but "House" is the paragon of how atheists are the ones most conscious of the majesty of this universe. A six thousand year old earth at the center of the universe? A playground designed for us by a benevolent and loving personal god? And yet somehow House is the narcissist? Wonder at the mystery and unknowablity of the universe is the impulse of a child. Wonder at how vast and complex the universe knowably is, is the impulse of an adult.

"Doctor Who"

"He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe. And ... he's wonderful." -- Doctor Who, "The Family of Blood"

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest early in the twentieth century whose writings the Catholic Church proscribed, forbidding publication until after his death. His posthumous works were then unceremoniously declared heretical and denounced. Clearly Teilhard was on to something since the Vatican didn't get that worked up about The Da Vinci Code convincing a billion people that Jesus was into orgies.

What Teilhard hypothesized was a reconciliation of Darwinist and Catholic doctrine, introducing a meme he called the Omega Point, a singularity towards which all of evolution was propelled. Atoms begat molecules which begat cells which begat animals which begat man which will someday through further iterations beget the Omega Point. All of evolution has been an interminably long process of life evolving to be so advanced as to become one with god. God is not an entity, he is a destination.

The Doctor is a realization of that meme, a living breathing Omega Point beyond everything we have ever known. If House is the present, the Doctor is the future. He is the embodiment of the removal of the gaps, the laying bare of the knowledge of the universe. Like House, he cannot leave well enough alone, striving to understand the cause and effect, always straining to find the man behind the curtain.

He's not a pacifist, though that might be a fair first guess at his philosophy. He is a warrior, responsible for the death of his race and another. It is his reluctance that makes him a moral figure. An atheist understands that if there is no god, no heaven, no hell, if this really is all that there is, then the greatest crime is murder and the greatest stupidity is war. God won't sort out his own, they won't go on to a better place, they will simply be dust. Life is the most precious thing imaginable in a universe with no god. The greatest joy for the Doctor is when he saves a life, the greatest sadness when he must kill.

The Abyss

We have no idea what this place is that we are born into. It is strange and terrible and unfair. There are those who say that atheism is stubborn and easy, and it is, in the same way that realizing that you're gay in rural Alabama is a choice. Atheism is not an easy path. By acknowledging that there is no greater point, we shoulder the burden of every moment. There is no absolution waiting for us. If we fuck this up, we carry it forever.

There is an abyss underneath us, the yawning chasm of animal chaos. Everything we have, everything we are, is built on top of that abyss. We can build and build but there is no underlying foundation except us. We have bootstrapped order out of chaos.

The most terrifying moment in a person's life is when they first live on their own and realize that there is not anything actually stopping bad things from happening. Oh sure, there are laws and such to discourage people from doing bad things, but nothing actually physically restrains them. But there's a flip side to that, as there always is: it also means you are absolutely and totally free. Nothing can stop you from doing what you want, other than your own will.

I think our humble little species of upstart monkeys is standing on that precipice right now. Our art reflects that, Buffy and Angel and House and the Doctor are us, individually and as a group. Our choice is whether we fall back on the old rules, dig ourselves into those comfortable holes watched over by a concerned parent, or whether we choose to make our own path and grin back at our own reflections in the mirror.

A billion years from now when not even an echo of the memory of man remains, it will not have mattered what we did, except in so far as it matters now.

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

World War Z
Max Brooks

I started this book with the preconception gathered from both its title and that of its companion volume (The Zombie Survival Guide) that it would be a tongue and cheek affair, a textual Shaun of the Dead. It took about ten pages before I realized that World War Z had anything but a tongue and cheek approach. This bad boy is horror: dark, grim and bloody.

The most striking aspect of the novel is its structural approach. It's presented as a collection of oral histories gathered after the titular zombie apocalypse. The histories range in length from one to several pages, never returning to the same point of view. These vignettes (they aren't numbered, per se, but there are probably around a hundred total in the book) are arrayed chronologically from the first stirrings of a zombie plague, through the near collapse of civilization, the rousing and difficult process of starting to push back, all the way to a sort of victory. It's an approach generally found in histories, especially collections of primary documents. I've never seen it used in fiction, but it is incredibly successful in World War Z.

Think of the best Stephen King books, or any horror for that matter. There are probably a half dozen brilliant and gripping scenes from any of the books that sucker punch you and stay with you. World War Z is a novel composed entirely of those sucker punch scenes. Because there are no main characters specifically, the book can continuously change perspective and skip to new characters in different situations. In twenty pages, you might see the breakdown of society from the point of view of a teenage recluse living in a high rise in Japan, to Chinese sailors smuggling their families aboard and stealing a nuclear submarine once they decide the government has lost control, to a soccer mom who fleeing north out of the infested suburbs with her kids into the Dakotas because of rumors that the zombies freeze in the bitter winter.

What makes this approach work is the fundamental realization that in certain horror stories, the human characters are incidental. The true main character is the monster. So instead of feeling like a shallow story skipping from vignette to vignette without gaining traction with any one set of characters, the reader settles on the zombies themselves as the main character. We watch the growth and spread of the zombie plague, explore the aspects and permutations of zombie infection with a variety and breadth that would be impossible or at the very least eye-rollingly ludicrous if focused on one particular set of characters. But it's not just a freak show, it is a systematic and focused telling of a story from start to finish. It just isn't a story in which the human characters are constant fixtures from start to finish.

The end result is one of the most horrific and gripping horror novels that I have ever read.

Death by Black Hole

Neil deGrasse Tyson's anthology of science articles only briefly deals with the eponymous scenario, but delves into a myriad of other scientific details in a meandering book that is sometimes brash, sometimes humorous, but always fascinating. At the center of Tyson's writing is the idea central, but often ignored, in all science: we are not special or unique. This simple realization is at once obvious and terrifyingly unbelievable, but is also critical to making the smallest headway in scientific understanding. What exists out there, is fundamentally the same as what exists here. Without that basic understanding, there is no way to understand at all what goes on in the universe outside our insulated sphere.

The universe is vast and old. So vast and so old that we cannot even really understand it on familiar terms, but only at several removals of distance. We can only understand the scale logarithmically, like Russian dolls. The sun is so big that we could fit a million earths inside it, and it is so far away from us that we could fit ten thousand earths between us and it. Space is so vast and distant that the fastest spacecraft we have ever built would still take over 70,000 years to reach the nearest star. That's ten times longer than we've had civilization. The galaxy is so big that it would take 700 million years for us to send that same spacecraft across it. That's ten times longer than the dinosaurs have been extinct. And the galaxy is not just vast, but filled up with a mind-boggling number of stars: at least a couple for every human being who has ever been born in all of history. Top that off with the fact that in the known universe, there are at least as many galaxies as there are stars in our galaxy. In the grand scheme of the universe, our entire planet and history are less proportionately significant than a single cell of your skin.

The other point I took from Tyson is the phenomenon of the God of the Gaps. When we understand something, it is explainable, we only attribute the hand of god to things that we don't understand. Even physicists like Newton took this shortcut, attributing the stability of orbits (something his own work could not reconcile, and which waited another century for LaPlace to figure out) to the periodic intervention by god himself. We see god in the gaps in science's understanding the same way that primitive man explained the rising and setting of the sun with god's hand. The key is that the things science can't explain at the moment should not be scoffed at or defined as limitations in the concept of science itself. This is the central belief in science that has never been disproved: the universe is fundamentally knowable. It obeys laws and rules which we can work out, however shallow our current understanding of those laws may be.

Here's the topper, the great equalizer of science: all those unimaginably distant and huge and alien objects are composed of the same materials as your body. We are billion year old stardust. That doesn't make us special, it makes the universe knowable.

Ancient Shores, Jack McDevitt

A bureaucrat abused Jack McDevitt when he was younger. Each of the books in which his characters interact with bureaucracies are case studies in the small-mindedness of people, which is amplified whenever they are embedded in a bureaucracy. No one is responsible for either failure or success. All that matters is that the waves are smoothed out so that the whole floating wreck keeps meandering along to the horizon.

McDevitt takes a terrific exception to the common cliched comedy of manners so often used to represent bureaucracy. The problem with making something a stock comic resort is that it ends up papering over and excusing the horrors that can be perpetrated in the service of bureaucracy. Sure, it can be funny (if not original), that someone gets shuttled from line to line at the DMV, university, hospital or bureaucracy de jour, finally ending up back at the initial window with the original indifferent and overworked office worker, but it's a story that masks the real dangers of bureaucracy. When no one is responsible, the only motivator for individuals from the top to bottom of an organization is what will cause them the least hassle. More to the point, individuals cannot be rewarded for productivity in such an environment because productivity is not a measurable entity in a vacuum of responsibility. Therefore the inverse quantity of caused hassle is the driving force for promotion, not productivity.

Bureaucracies combine the disdain of responsibility with another great flaw in the human psyche: the scantron subconscious. Our brains work on a multiple choice basis shoehorning everything into the predefined situational options, with no "fill in the blank" option provided. When you see a giant furry thing try to attack you in the middle of the night when you're out for a walk, your brain fits the existent evidence into either: a. a large dog, b. your asshole roommate in a gorilla suit or c. your imagination. Regardless of whether it is a full moon, or the thing runs away at the sight of your silver cross, a sane mind does not write in "d. a werewolf". Writing in one's own options is our best measure of both insanity and genius. A bureaucracy demands that the options be filled in with a rabid single mindedness. If your application to the DMV has some irregularity (like the fact that you don't already have a driver's license, but you can provide your Ugandan passport for proof of identity), it doesn't meet the easy options and the easiest way to keep from rocking the boat is just to casually drop your application overboard and into the shredder.

Now imagine a bureaucracy having to deal with something truly earth-moving, like the discovery of alien technology that will revolutionize everything about energy and manufacturing. That is essentially the question posed by McDevitt in Ancient Shores. A bureaucracy's response will be to shove that thing under the rug so fast that the rug gets rug burn. The horror is never caused by evil but by human mediocrity. The government doesn't try to destroy the most fantastic discovery in human history because of evil conspiracies or arcane power struggles, it does it because dealing with something so extraordinary is just a big hassle. The challenge to leaders is to break that attitude in bureaucracies, force accountability and vision.