God, evolution and depression. Now that is a combination to try the soul and test the limits of moral accounting. But let’s give it a go anyway.
All three subjects, favourites of mine, currently exist in disputed states.
God has been challenged by a heated phalanx of so-called New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk).
Along with other thinkers, such as Sam Harris and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, these New Atheists are thorough-going Darwinists, in love with the lucid genius of evolution, and its handmaiden, natural selection, the survival of the fittest.
It’s enough to make spiritual and religious people totally despondent. Even depressed.
Meanwhile, the New Atheists themselves are depressed that in the 21st century, 300 years after the dawn of the Enlightenment, we are still talking about God.
Isn’t He supposed to be dead, as the tormented 19th century philosopher Nietzsche had it? Or, at the very least, obsolete?
Making us human
Some scientists, such as the inestimable physicist Stephen Hawking, taking his cue from Albert Einstein and the philosopher Spinoza, are perfectly content to talk about aGod.
As long as by God, you mean the foundation laws of physics, with its formulas, theories and empirical data.
That’s what Hawking means when he writes of understanding the mind of God. He did not mean anything transcendental or otherworldly. He is referring to the physical universe, an arena where a transcendent God has no business intervening in any event.
New Atheists such as Hitchens wouldn’t even stoop to use that metaphor, even though he’s a literary man himself.
Plato talked about banishing poets from the ideal republic. Hitchens wants to ban believers from the public square and keep them sequestered in their private drawing rooms.
For the literary critic Leon Wieseltier, that is too much. “He’s a buffoon!” said Wieseltier recently about Hitchens, in a university lecture, captured on video.
What Wieseltier then went on to say was that even if you’re 99.99 sure that all life and meaning can be reduced to a materialist interpretation, it’s that .01 per cent that gives our lives its real purpose and makes us human.
Blood sport
Wieseltier, who I’ve written about before, is a brilliant and learned man who is partial to religion, philosophy and the search for larger meanings.
But I have to say that the sight of seeing such an eminent critic and cultural warrior calling people names is, well, depressing.
Shouldn’t it be beneath him? Is the path to wisdom a blood sport?
Perhaps in this internet age where high-minded attacks are often salted with irritation, contempt and Twitter-like dismissals, the notion of wisdom has undergone something of a sea change.
Although, come to think of it, intellectual discourse may have always been like that. Only now, we have the ability to capture the quick thoughts and emotional utterances of everybody so easily. All it takes is one click of the mouse.
Even polished thinkers like Wieseltier, who complain about the crass thoughtlessness of the internet, should probably take their own advice and think before they speak.
Killing the brave
But let me go back to my triune themes of God, evolution and depression.
Some of my alert readers have pointed out that in my last column a condition like depression could easily be passed on to a succeeding generation.
Evolution isn’t a glad-tidings, efficiency operation, they pointed out. We inherit bad backs and faulty appendices.
One day, one of our ancestors stood up straight and stopped scrapping his knuckles on the ground. He walked, jogged and started running marathons, chasing antelopes.
The rest is history, as is our need for yoga, chiropractors and Tylenol.
Depression, however, is more complicated, a bit like God himself. It is, to use the academically fashionable term, the “site” of much debate.
I mentioned last time the work of two psychologists, Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, who argue that depression may actually confer some cognitive benefits in that it seems to make at least certain sufferers smarter and more focused.
Other research shows that by experiencing shades of depression, some people gain a truer picture of reality, something that is not always achieved by wearing rose-coloured, happiness glasses.
Some reports I have read try to account for depression’s advantages in evolutionary terms.
For example, when bands of marauders raided your village, you might hide under the hedgerow and survive if a touch of depression caused you to be extra-wary.
The optimistically brave, of course, would be slaughtered.
This is my wife’s take on why there are so many sensible short men in the world (like me, she says charitably, though I’m really not that short).
At the same time, wariness and caution, handed down over generations, can turn into full-blown depression, as a habit of mind.
The advantage of mania
All told, depression, like God, has many sterling uses. It’s almost the Swiss army knife of mood disorders.
Manic depression, now called bipolar disorder, might have conferred real survival advantages, especially in past ages when a trance-like mania would be helpful in ferocious hand-to-hand combat.
Homer in The Iliad writes about the killing trance of Greek warriors doing battle before the walls of Troy. Watch a movie like Braveheart and you can see the ecstatic reveries of the Scots, mocking and defying their enemies, as they chopped and gored, enthralled by all the battlefield butchery.
Back then, death was no computer-game intellectual exercise. It required real manic frenzy.
Mania is also useful when you want to accomplish a great deal in a short period. It can be a business plus (as long as you don’t ruin the company before your mania settles down).
And remember, in the original stories, Sherlock Holmes was portrayed as a manic depressive. He would lie listless in his quarters, starring into space, until he was handed a new case, which turned his depression into creative energies once again.
Poor Sherlock Holmes. Like TV’s Dr. House, his latter-day counterpart, he had a miserable mood disorder that he both hated and needed, and couldn’t shake.
An accounting
God, evolution and depression. Draw up all three in an accounts ledger and you can see the pros and cons.
God can provide meaning, mystery and morality. He has also been an excuse at times for mass murder and stupidity.
Evolution seems to be the perfect scientific theory. It’s simple, all encompassing and can explain everything.
It can reduce almost any moral precept to hand-me-down behaviour. But it can’t explain the meaning of life, unless you’re a super-determined New Atheist.
And depression, that common cold of mood disorders, can confer both wisdom and painful lucidity. Just ask Oedipus and Hamlet, great ruminators who, if they were really alive today would be urged to take their meds.
God, evolution, and depression. Add up the pros and the cons and come to your own moral accounting.
The Ideas Guy
Richard Handler
CBC News