I used to like Marilynne Robinson, and much enjoyed the two books of hers I’ve read: Housekeeping and Gilead. The latter book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Robinson’s also been awarded the National Humanities Medal. But she’s a theist, and her drinking the Kool-Aid of faith has not only produced a substantial degeneration of her prose, but has eroded my admiration of her books, something that really isn’t warranted. (Someone can be a religious jerk and still write good books!). According to Wikipedia, she’s pretty religious:
Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City. Her Congregationalism, and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin, have been important in her works, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister. In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: “I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker.”
But her religiosity has led her into a crusade against “scientism”: the perjorative term for the view that science either neglects The Big Questions That Can Be Answered in Other Ways, or dehumanizes us through materialism and reductionism (Robinson apparently subscribes to both of these notions). I’ve mentioned her first anti-atheist book, Absence of Mind, in an earlier post; I’ve since read much of it and found it appallingly biased and ignorant.
Now she’s back again with another anti-science and anti-atheist rant, a book called The Givenness of Things, a series of 17 essays that comes out in three days. The Amazon summary is thin, but Kirkus Reviews, which likes the book (curiously, it also liked Faith versus Fact) gives a summary that I reproduce in part:
A sober, passionate defense of Christian faith.
In these 17 essays, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Robinson (Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Lila, 2014, etc.) returns to themes she considered most recently in her memoir, When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012): ethics, morality, reverence, and her own convictions as a Christian. “My Christology is high,” she writes, “in that I take Christ to be with God, and to be God. And I take it to be true that without him nothing was made that was made.” Much scientific thinking, she believes, draws conclusions from only a “radically partial model of reality” that excludes the marvelous and the improbable. She criticizes, for example, “the reductionist tendencies among neuroscientists” to propose a material model for the human mind; instead, she finds the soul “a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.”
I haven’t read this book, and doubt I will, but if you are feeling composed and ready to wade through a thicket of dreadful prose and misguided argument, you can see a long summary of Robinson’s views in a extract just published at The Nation, “Humanism, science, and the radical expansion of the possible.” It’s a truly awful piece, and the writing is of extremely poor quality: wordy, tedious, and unworthy of someone who won a Pulitzer Prize. Frankly, given how execrable the piece is, I’m surprised that The Nation published it. It goes to show what you can get away with if you have a Pulitzer.
What’s worse is Robinson’s arguments that reductionism, science, neurobiology, and Darwinism are sucking the life out of humanity, and we need to grasp and hold onto the concept of the soul, which she really seems to see as some kind of non-materialist ghost in our machine. She also gets into some quantum woo à la Chopra, considering quantum entanglement and string theory as aspects of a scientistic “ideological reductionism.”
I needn’t rebut Robinson’s views, as readers can do that for themselves—if they have the stomach to read her piece—but I present two excerpts as an example of her antiscientific views. The first goes after neuroscience with an implicit attack on its reductionism:
The old humanists took the works of the human mind—literature, music, philosophy, art, and languages—as proof of what the mind is and might be. Out of this has come the great aura of brilliance and exceptionalism around our species that neuroscience would dispel. If Shakespeare had undergone an MRI, there is no reason to believe there would be any more evidence of extraordinary brilliance in him than there would be of a self or a soul. He left a formidable body of evidence that he was both brilliant and singular, but it has fallen under the rubric of Renaissance drama and is somehow not germane, perhaps because this places the mind so squarely at the center of the humanities. From the neuroscientific point of view, this only obscures the question. After all, where did our high sense of ourselves come from? From what we have done and what we do. And where is this awareness preserved and enhanced? In the arts and the humane disciplines. I am sure there are any number of neuroscientists who know and love Mozart better than I do, and who find his music uplifting. The inconsistency is for them to explain.
I’m not sure what “inconsistency” Robinson’s talking about. It may well be that science will never understand why someone can write like Shakespeare (while others can’t) or compose like Mozart, but surely the answer must involve neurons, evolution, and environment. After all, all of these things are known to be involved in performance and personality, while we have no evidence at all for any kid of “soul” that isn’t at bottom based on physical phenomena. As for why we find some music uplifting and some not, or some landscapes beautiful and some not, the answer surely must reside in part in our evolved brains. Songs in minor keys, for instance, make many people feel melancholy. We like ice cream for an evolutionary reason, and there’s no reason why that can’t hold in part for art.
Finally, it’s simply not true that neuroscience dispels human brilliance and exceptionalism. I know something about neuroscience, and I still love literature, music, and art. I suspect that Sam Harris, who knows far more than I do about neuroscience, also appreciates the humanities.
What Robinson raises here is the old canard that science devalues creativity. It does not; it enhances our appreciation of not only creativity, but of the universe as a whole. One might as well say that the humanities suck the life out of science because they don’t tell us anything about black holes or quantum entanglement. To each their own. But that is not to say that science can’t contribute something to understanding why great art moves us.
Finally, get a load of this indigestible and petulant word salad about evolution, another Robinsonian culprit supposedly eroding the humanities:
A type of Darwinism has a hand in this. If evolution means that the species have a common ancestry and have all variously adapted and changed, that is one thing. Ovid would not object. If it means that whatever development is judged to be in excess of the ability to establish and maintain homeostasis in given environments, to live and propagate, is less definitive of the creature than traits that are assumed to reflect unambiguous operations of natural selection, then this is an obvious solecism. It is as if there are tiers to existence or degrees of it, as if some things, though manifest, are less real than others and must be excluded from the narrative of origins in favor of traits that suit the teller’s preferences. So generosity is apparent and greed is real, the great poets and philosophers toiled in the hope of making themselves attractive to potential mates—as did pretty well every man who distinguished himself by any means or tried to, from Tamburlaine to Keats to anyone’s uncle. (Women have little place in these narratives—they are the drab hens who appraise the male plumage.) This positing of an essential and startlingly simple mechanism behind the world’s variety implies to some that these pretenses, these very indirect means to the few stark ends that underlie all human behaviors, ought to be put aside, if only for honesty’s sake. So, humanities, farewell. You do not survive Darwinian cost-benefit analysis.
First note how wordy and opaque this passage is. Second, try to figure out what it means. (It would be easier if she were a clearer writer.) What it seems to say is that we’re all victims of natural selection—sexual selection in particular—and that creativity is always an attempt to enhance reproduction. Well, that may be true sometimes, but I strongly doubt that it’s true always. Think, for instance, of all the gay artists and writers, or solitary creatures like Proust who write because they must. There is far more to the creative impulse than pure evolution, for once our brains got up to a certain size, they were capable of doing things, like playing chess or doing math, that could not have been of any selective advantage. Why do we do them? Do we play chess to gain mates? (Well, maybe checkmates. . . ). The world’s variety far transcends the ability of evolutionary biologists to explain it.
But I’m tiring of this, for Robinson’s piece is far longer than my patience. Have a look at it, and be amazed that someone who can write great novels can become a hectoring pettifog when it comes to science—probably largely because of her religion.
My last suggestion is this: if Robinson is going to whale on science because of its supposed inimical effects on the humanities, she might want to have a scientist look at her piece. I would recommend a neuroscientist, an evolutionary biologist, and (given her New Agey remarks on quantum entanglement) a physicist.
