Leo Tolstoy is most famous for his door-stopper book War and Peace. Weighing as much as a full-term infant, it represents a daunting challenge to a generation with the attention span of a hummingbird. I’m one to talk – I have never read it myself. And since I have successfully avoided it for the first half of my life, I have great confidence in my ability to hide from it the second. In recompense, I read Tolstoy’s autobiography Confession, which I found profound, prescient, and a svelte ninety pages.
Written in 1880, Tolstoy had ridden the tsunami of agno-atheist scientists and authors that all seemed to be stuffed into the last half of the 19th century – Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Haeckel, etc. Each of these minds explored the barren world scrubbed clean of God’s fingerprints. Like any well-heeled novelist, Tolstoy rubbed elbows with the elite among whom these godless ideas were daintily nibbled between thumb and forefinger at high-end socialite gatherings.
But Tolstoy sensed a hollowness to them. Somehow, by explaining everything, they explained nothing. The reduction of human existence to atoms, hormones, and libidinous rutting had done nothing to answer the big questions that haunted the cosmos of his mind.
Tolstoy was searching for an answer to a question, to the question that lurked behind all of life’s activities, relationships, and intellectual pursuits: what is the meaning of his, or anyone’s life? In a Solomonic procession, he traveled the same experimental roads in attempts to find meaning, smacking his forehead on vanity at every turn. Thwarted by money, prestige, and pleasures as paths to purpose, he despaired of the cavernous conclusions that yawned like a black mouth to swallow him up. Life’s meaning in the dim light of the godless universe was obvious:
You are a little lump of something randomly stuck together. The lump decomposes. The decomposition of this lump is known as your life. The lump falls apart, and thus the decomposition ends, as do all your questions.
Leo Tolstoy, Confession
Tolstoy was correct. Given his atheistic premise, a something lump is as high an achievement as we can aspire to, and all the drama, love, passion, wonder, intrigue, despair, and laughter are the balancing of chemical equations in your bonehouse as we move toward a high-entropy state. If the premise is true, the conclusion follows: You are the lump of something caught in the throat of the universe.
A Time To Shoot Straight
For some time, America hasn’t known what it wants to be. On the one hand, we like science; it has been pretty good to us, extending our lives, making things cheaper and more efficient. On the other hand, we speak about it with a level of abstraction that protects us from its metaphysical implications. Trumpeted “facts” of accidental beginnings and Darwinian randomness and astronomical dice rolls are marvelled at like a man sticking his head inside a lion’s mouth to count the teeth and fondle its uvula, without acknowledging the danger of where our heads are. The greatest purveyors of this feline dentistry are the public schools and universities, where all the facts are added up, but the sum of their meaning is never calculated.
As the Teacher says, there is a time for everything, and that includes interventions with the decadence of a world that has swallowed the jagged little pill of chaos. If our nation continues to pound godless kegs, we will eventually get to the dregs, and in the splotchy sediment, our future madness will be divined. If we are to follow Tolstoy to the nadir of existence in a godless universe, let us have an intervention with ourselves and what this premise really means.
You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You do not got this, girl. What are you? You are an intermediary. Just as trees produce fruit to pass on their DNA, and dandelions fluff the next generation, you are your DNA’s clever means of making more of itself. You do not pass on your DNA; it passes you along. You are a seed pod; the more you drop your seed, the more you approximate the universe’s provided purpose. Your body, aspirations, desires, hopes, and dreams are your selfish DNA’s schemes to weed and seed the world. Cooperation, conviviality, and communalism are temporary truces among men until the water hole shrinks and the number of eligible mating females dwindles.
But it doesn’t matter whether this is true, because there is no reason to believe what our consciousness tells us is true. What you perceive as consciousness is, as Tolstoy put it, “the response to your own responses.” We are all one big tautology, spinning in a circuit, living to live, surviving to survive. Apart from investigating the satiation of basal instincts (ie, can this be eaten? is it safe? can this be humped?), there is no reason to think there is any truth, much less the need to fight about it. Love is biochemical; oxytocin is a molecule evolved to keep couples together and provide an in-house incentive to not abandon -or eat- your offspring. Kissing your daughter goodnight, Christmas dinners with family, cooing affectionately over an infant, and selfless acts of heroism are affectations that collapse into the primordial urge to continue urging. The only hint the mostly black void of a universe gives us for our identity is whatever we can glean from chimps and bonobos, and what is between our legs.
Speaking of what is between our legs. If you are gay, this means that whatever conciliatory purpose the universe might have had to offer, random selection opted you out of, making your sexual drive incompatible with this purpose. Animal Planet will tell you that gaity exists to build alliances, reduce aggression, and maintain harmony, three traits never observed in any group of gay humans ever, which is abundantly obvious to anyone involved in high school theatre. The consolation prize for being a terminal leaf in the phylogenetic tree is that you get to hump with abandon as many other “aggression-reducing” units you choose. Maybe you can help babysit your nephew, but Darwin has selected you for extinction. Thank you for playing.
In this world, identifying as trans makes complete sense, as would identifying as a crippled chipmunk, because, whatever the odds that a man is really a woman may be, they are certainly better than the chances of life evolving on the planet in the first place. If there is “no law of nature that instructs matter to produce end-directed, self-replicating entities,” yet you are such an entity, I say go for it. Forge your own path. Gender is a social construct, and so is everything else, including social constructs.
Marx was right, except for the dialectic; it is not between oppressors and the oppressed but between our violent and docile primate natures – and to riff off of Solzhenitsyn, the line between bonobos and chimps passes through every human heart. If we can only find ways to encourage our inner bonobos and stand in solidarity against the mustachioed chimps, the world would be a better place. Apparently, bonobos resolve social conflicts with sexual contact, so at least we have that to look forward to, though conflict resolution in the United Nations may be awkward.
Honest thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre understood the bone-bleached meaning-desert humans have found themselves in. Absurdity is the name given to the rotten luck of an organism evolving to the point where it can question life’s meaning when there clearly isn’t any. Science has revealed the cosmic joke; we evolved eyes in a lightless universe. In the face of this absurdity, all you can do is laugh, even if it is a giddy one, and find something to keep yourself occupied. “The literal meaning of life,” as Albert Camus says, “is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” Tolstoy beat him to this conclusion: “Choose to live life as a conscious lie, or find the most painless way to kill yourself.” For the better part of a year, the single question that occupied his mind was whether a bullet or a rope would do the job better.
Carl Sagan, our great High Priest, has descended from the heavens and revealed to us that we are made in the image of our maker: we are “star stuff,” atoms all the way down, knocking their heads, sharing or stealing electrons, and fizzing at a particular temperature. Poor Western civilization, blamed for all kinds of atrocities like slavery, colonialization, and subjugation of women, when all it was trying to do the whole time was grow up into the image of its father, humbly dominating as it was taught. With chaos as its father, it was bound to be more accidental than occidental.
Fadiman quipped, “Neitsche said God is dead. Freud said God is Dad.” They both got it backwards: if all we see and love and enjoy comes from black, cold, canvas of chaos, then death is god, death is dad, and the long history of blood and soil testifies to our heritage. And “if chance be the father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky. And when you hear a state of emergency – sniper kills 10, youths go looting, bomb blasts school – it’s but the sound of man worshipping his maker.”
So be good. Or not. Have babies. Or not. Get religion. Or not. Distract yourself. Pick up activism as a hobby. Rescue a dog, buy a Subaru, and avoid having kids so you can maintain the vaginal tone of a twenty-year-old. Doom scroll until your dopamine centers hypertrophy like a baboon’s ass in heat. Eat, drink, be merry. For tomorrow, you merge with your creator and return to nothing. Any rubbish about life having meaning or purpose is the cowardly recycling of religious beliefs, borrowing the conclusions of those they have most ardently sought to destroy, because the conclusion of their own pretensions is unpalatable. If you disagree, take it up with Nietzsche and Sartre, who were at least consistent enough to face the chaos and polish the brass on the sinking ship.
Conclusion
We can be very grateful that none of the above is true. There is a God of order who created the universe, having in mind the uniqueness of each individual since the dawn of time, and knowing how many hairs He would place into their scalp. We are not something lumps or cellular clumps. Our purpose is to enjoy God and His gifts in creation, and sex is the pleasurable means He provided to fill the earth. If you believe yourself to be gay, consider leaving the abusive worldview that precludes you from having purpose; leave your old master and his perfunctory identity, and come to receive the identity, purpose, and meaning you were created to embody. Stop trying to manufacture meaning from a trash heap and sit down at the banquet God has laid free of charge.
Of course, there is nothing about science per se that obviates the metaphysical. Science is perfectly happy to lead us to the edge of the observable world, where her lush grass hangs over the white, chalky cliffs overlooking the vast ocean of Truth. She leads us there because that is why she was sent. She points in the direction of wonder, which is her scientific word for worship; it is only philosophical priors that have cordoned off the park.
If we, as a nation, have grown tired of our young men and women shooting up schools and dyeing the tide red with suicide, perhaps we should consider amending our science programs that exclude, on penalty of law, any indication, hint, or smell of the metaphysical or religious. We indoctrinated them to believe they have come from chaos, death, and meaninglessness, have assigned grades based on their understanding of these facts, and are surprised when they follow the premises to logical conclusions.
Thought Butter 