The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [141]
The humanities will always be with us, at least as long as our psychology retains the shape it assumed in the late Pleistocene. Our continuing fascination with narrative reflects this makeup. This passion for plot-finding is forever being combined with the artist’s eternal search for something new, surprising, outrageous, and otherwise attention getting. The result is criticism—diverting, enjoyable speculation about the meaning of art. Criticism, whether of literature, music, or the visual arts, is interpretation, storytelling. It is storytelling about art. Art, of course, is not always storytelling. In abstract expression or stream of consciousness, it rejects narrative. But when the critic seeks to understand it, the result is inevitably a story, a narrative about the artist or the artist’s time. At its best, this narrative provides as much pleasure and diversion as good art does itself.
When it comes to real understanding, the humanities are nothing we have to take seriously, except as symptoms. But they are everything we need to take seriously when it comes to entertainment, enjoyment, and psychological satisfaction. Just don’t treat them as knowledge or wisdom. Don’t feel the need to take sides about deconstruction, postmodernism, Freudian/Marxist structuralism in literary criticism, the dialectic or the eschatology of history, what Marlowe or Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or perhaps even Shakespeare were up to when they wrote Hamlet. Just sit back and try to enjoy the outrageous stories spun by those who think they are finally providing the true interpretations on the basis of the right theories about human motives—conscious or unconscious. Scientism encourages you to treat the study of the creative arts as itself a creative art. We don’t judge paintings or poetry by their predictive power and explanatory adequacy. Scientism tells us to judge humanistic scholarship devoted to the study of these human creations exactly the same way. If that is not enough for the humanists, if they are not satisfied with producing entertainment, well then, there is nothing for it but trading in their tools for those of the cognitive neuroscientist.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is not an advice or how-to or self-improvement book. There are far too many of these books tempting gullible people who think that all you need to change your life is a convincing narrative. But there are some things that scientism should have us take to heart and make use of, bending our lives in the direction of less unhappiness, disappointment, and frustration, if not more of their opposites.
Before outlining some of these take-home messages, it’s important to make clear why scientism isn’t fatalism. Yes, it’s committed to determinism and does deny us free will; and yes, it may put a whole new spin on our purposes, projects, and plans; and yes, it has to plead guilty to nihilism where values are concerned. But fatalistic it is not!
Fatalism is very different from determinism. Fatalism tells us that no matter what happens, the outcome is unavoidable. It claims that no matter what route life takes you down, all roads lead to the same place. Determinism is quite a different matter. If the universe is deterministic, then where you end up depends on where you start out (plus the laws of nature). Start at different points, and almost every time you will pass through altogether different places and come to a different end. Determinism does not dictate that you’ll end up in the same place at all. Of course, we are all going die. The difference between fatalism and determinism is this: If fatalism is right, you’ll die of the same thing no matter what you do. If determinism is right, how you die, what you die of, depends on what you did in life. (Did you smoke, overeat, wear your seat belt?) That’s a big difference. Some deaths are worse than others. Which we experience