Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir and theological ruminations in "Living with a Wild God".
It turns out that everyone is a seeker. Somewhere there must be something or someone to tell us the meaning of life- something we don't have to manufacture with our own hands, but rather can go into a store and buy. Atheists are just as much seekers as anyone else, only they never find anything worth buying. The late writer Barbara Ehrenreich was such an atheist, as well as a remarkable writer and intellectual who wrote a memoir of her formation. Unusually and fruitfully, it focuses on those intense early and teen years when we are reaching out with both hands to seize the world- a world that is maddeningly just beyond our grasp, full of secrets and codes it takes a lifetime and more to understand. Religion is the ultimate hidden secret, the greatest mystery which has been solved in countless ways, each of them conflicting and confounding.
Ehrenreich's tale is more memoir than theology, taking us on a tour through a dysfunctional childhood with alcoholic parents and tough love. A story of growth, striking out into the world, and sad coming-to-terms with the parents who each die tragically. But it also turns on a pattern of mystical experiences that she keeps having, throughout her adult life, which she ultimately diagnoses as dissociative states where she zones out and has a sort of psychedelic communion with the world.
"Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that's what I would have said I was doing, but the word "tree" was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen years or so since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed to me? Or was it a substance- the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration? I don't know, because this substance, this residue, was stolidly, imperturbably mute. The interesting thing, some might say alarming, was that when you take away all the human attributions- the words, the names of species, the wisps of remembered tree-related poetry, the fables of photosynthesis and capillary action- that when you take all this this away, there is still something left."
This is not very hard to understand as a neurological phenomenon of some kind of transient disconnection of just the kind of brain areas she mentions- those that do all the labeling, name-calling, and boxing-in. In schizophrenia, it runs to the pathological, but in Ehrenreich's case, she does not regard it as pathological at all, as it is always quite brief. But obviously, the emotional impact and weirdness of the experience- that is something else altogether, and something that humans have been inducing with drugs, and puzzling over, forever.
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As a memoir, the book is very engaging. As a theological quest, however, it doesn't work as well, because the mystical experience is, as noted above, resolutely meaningless. It neither compels Ehrenreich to take up Christianity, as after a Pauline conversion, nor any other faith or belief system. It offers a peek behind the curtain, but, stripped of meaning as this view is, Ehrenreich is perhaps too skeptical or bereft of imagination to give it another, whether of her own or one available from the conventional array of sects and religions. So while the experiences are doubtless mystical, one can not call them religious, let alone god-given, because Ehrenreich hasn't interpreted them that away. This hearkens back to the writings of William James, who declined to assign general significance to mystical experiences, while freely admitting their momentous and convincing nature to those who experienced them.
Only in one brief section (which had clearly been originally destined for an entirely different book) does she offer a more interesting and insightful analysis. There, Ehrenreich notes that the history of religion can be understood as a progressive bloodbath of deicide. At first, everything is alive and sacred, to an animist mind. Every leaf and grain of sand holds wonders. Every stream and cloud is divine. This is probably our natural state, which a great deal of culture has been required to stamp out of us. Next is a hunting kind of religion, where deities are concentrated in the economic objects (and social patterns) of the tribe- the prey animals, the great plants that are eaten, and perhaps the more striking natural phenomena and powerful beasts. But by the time of paganism, the pantheon is cut down still more and tamed into a domestic household, with its soap-opera dramas and an increasingly tight focus on the major gods- the head of the family, as it were.
Monotheism comes next, doing away with all the dedicated gods of the ocean, of medicine, of amor and war, etc., cutting the cast down to one. One, which is inflated to absurd proportions with all-goodness, all-power, all-knowledge, etc. A final and terrifying authoritarianism, probably patterned on the primitive royal state. This is the phase when the natural world is left in the lurch, as an undeified and unprotected zone where human economic greed can run rampant, safe in the belief that the one god is focused entirely on man's doings, whether for good or for ill, not on that of any other creature or feature of the natural world. A phase when even animals, who are so patently conscious, can, through the narcissism of primitive science and egoistic religion, be deemed mere mechanisms without feeling. This process doesn't even touch on the intercultural deicide committed by colonialism and conquest.
This in turn invites the last deicide- that by rational people who toss aside this now-cartoonish super-god, and return to a simpler reverence for the world as we naturally respond to it, without carting in a lot of social power-and-drama baggage. It is the cultural phase we are in right now, but the transition is painfully slow, uneven, and drawn-out. For Ehrenreich, there are plenty of signs- in the non-linear chemical phenomena of her undergraduate research, in the liveliness of quantum physics even into the non-empty vacuum, in the animals who populate our world and are perhaps the alien consciousnesses that we should be seeking in place of the hunt through outer space, and in our natural delight in, and dreams about, nature at large. So she ends the book as atheist as ever, but hinting that perhaps the liveliness of the universe around us holds some message that we are not the only thinking and sentient beings.
"Ah, you say, this is all in your mind. And you are right to be skeptical; I expect no less. It is in my mind, which I have acknowledged from the beginning is a less than perfect instrument. but this is what appears to be the purpose of my mind, and no doubt yours as well, its designed function beyond all the mundane calculations: to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a palpable Other or Others, not necessarily because we love it, and certainly not out of any intention to "worship" it. But because ultimately we may have no choice in the matter. I have the impression, growing out of the experiences chronicled here, that it may be seeking us out."
Thus the book ends, and I find it a rather poor ending. It feels ripped from an X-Files episode, highly suggestive and playing into all the Deepak and similar mystical tropes of cosmic consciousness. That is, if this passage really means much at all. Anyhow, the rest of the trip is well worth it, and it is appropriate to return to the issue of the mystical experience, which is here handled with such judicious care and restraint. Where imagination could have run rampant, the cooly scientific view (Ehrenreich had a doctorate in biology) is that the experiences she had, while fascinating and possibly book-proposal-worthy, did not force a religious interpretation. This is radically unlike the treatment of such matters in countless other hands, needless to say. Perhaps our normal consciousness should not be automatically valued less than more rare and esoteric states, just because it is common, or because it is even-tempered.
- God would like us to use "they".
- If you are interested in early Christianity, Gnosticism is a good place to start.
- Green is still an uphill battle.
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