Many people’s sense of meaning comes from history, especially the received history of their own country. They reflect on past events (as they understand them) and see them as a kind of glorious path. The fact that they are “part” of these events somehow by virtue of being part of that nation the history of which it is makes them feel a certain kind of pride and forms part of their belief that their lives have meaning.

American Patriotism, World ד Version

That’s abstract: here’s a more concrete example. I live in the United States of America, and I am surrounded by Americans, all but a very few of whom believe that their country “won” a big horrible historical event called the Second World War. The war was a war against “evil,” and a large part of it was against a particularly evil country called Nazi Germany run by a a particularly evil man named Adolf Hitler and his band of henchmen whose names were, well, something. This particularly evil country murdered and enslaved millions of innocent people — in particular millions of innocent Jews — but thanks to General Patton and D-Day and the Band of Brothers who we saw an HBO miniseries about and all that Hitler and his evil country were all defeated and the innocent people of Europe were saved. America went to war to save innocent people and democracy. A more reflective kind of American will note that while the war involved a great deal of suffering and destruction, after the war American, through something called the Marshall Plan, generously helped to rebuild Europe, including even its defeated former enemy, thus beginning an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

These are things that probably most Americans believe, roughly. Purely as matters of historical interpretation, there’s plenty to criticize about them. The United States quietly observed rising Nazi persecutions of German Jews for years without doing very much about it, declining generally even to raise immigration quotas to give increasingly threatened European Jews anywhere to flee to. American participation in the European war began not when the United States declared war on Germany but vice versa, and the enterprise of “saving innocent Europeans” played nothing except for a rhetorical role in the justification of America’s role in the war. (And “saving European Jews” played no role at all, not even a rhetorical one, in Allied conduct of the war.) By the time the first American soldier set foot on the European continent most of the Jews the Nazis were going to murder had already been murdered. And of course, the notion that it was “America” that won the war is a bit tendentious. Great Britain and her Empire had been fighting (really, losing) the war for more than two years before the reluctant entrance of the United States into the war, and by far the greatest bulk of casualties taken by Hitler’s armies were inflicted by Stalin’s Red Army. The great battles that broke the Wehrmacht’s offensive potential and doomed Nazi Germany took place around Stalingrad and Kursk and took place well before D-Day. As Norman Davies points out it is simplistic, indeed really rather wrong, to depict the Second World War as one which the good guys simply “won.” It would be more if not entirely accurate to describe the European war as one in which a horrible tyranny went to war with another horrible tyranny and in the end, a horrible tyranny won.

Well, enough historical carping. Nazi Germany went down in flames, Hitler shot himself in his bunker, and the United States did play a role in these historical events, and what is more the United States did play a postwar role in rebuilding and securing the continent, such that if you were a Western European who survived the war you could then indeed look forward to an era of peace and unprecedented prosperity, enjoying civil liberties under variants of parliamentary democratic government. (Sorry, Eastern Europe, but at least your grandchildren would have something to look forward to. Sorry also Portugal, Spain, and Greece, but things would work out in the end. Until they didn’t.) In the United States internally the war probably had important cultural and social consequences. The cruelty and destructiveness (and failure!) of an anti-Semitic and racist regime did a lot to discredit anti-Semitism and racism, and the war itself brought large numbers of both women and racial minorities into the economic life of the nation in ways that they hadn’t been before, so the war experience did help lay foundations for a more egalitarian social order in the U.S. than existed before. So the story that the good guys won isn’t completely wrong — it’s at least tethered to reality at certain points. And the story is convincing enough that even the Germans, though they have understandable complaints about the destruction of their cities and their civilian inhabitants by bombing, would even say the “right” side won. After all the destruction and carnage, people in the United States and Europe might very well say things like “While there was terrible suffering, by the grace of God the right side won in the end. The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” And they will then all feel that their lives, and the universe, all have lots and lots of meaning.

American Patriotism, World ה

Call the world we actually live in, the world this post is written in, the world where there’s a Marshall Plan and something called Band of Brothers on HBO World Dalet. There is a world with different history called World He (not “he” but the name of the letter — see above)..

In World He things take a different turn from World Dalit when a minor member of the German Uranverein circulates a letter among top Nazi leaders in 1939 as a consequence of which Hitler’s regime undertakes a much more serious atomic research program than it did in World Dalit. As a consequence of the program, Nazi Germany has a working atomic bomb by mid-1943. This weapon is first used in a tactical role in Operational Citadel in 1943. The destructive power of the weapon allow German forces to smash through Soviet lines on both sides of the Kursk salient, allowing for the destruction of a huge part of the Red Army right in the middle of the Eastern Front. Moscow and Leningrad are subsequently incinerated with additional atomic bombs, and German forces begin sweeping toward their Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line the marked their original Eastern front objective. What’s left of the Soviet government and army retreat to the Ural mountains. The German armed forces begin transferring units back to Western Europe. Between these additional forces and atomic weapons, any possible invasion of the European continent by British and American forces is now completely infeasible. Furthermore, Britain is now exposed to the possibility of atomic destruction. While Winston Churchill is determined to continue fighting the war no matter what the cost pretty much no one else in United Kingdom is. Churchill is removed from the premiership by a vote of his war cabinet and secret negotiations are begun with Germany for an armistice.

Under the terrible pressure of losing a war which by this point he expected to be winning, President Roosevelt dies of a stroke in December 1943. He is succeeded by Vice President Henry Wallace, who vows that the United States will continue the global struggle against tyranny. The U.S.-German war goes as a bitter trans-Atlantic stalemate for some months until the Kriegsmarine succeeds in launching a specially-modified A4 rocket from a U-boat at the East Coast of the U.S. This weapon is not very accurate — experts disagree as to whether it was aimed at either New York or Philadelphia. It misses both and hits (and thoroughly destroys) Princeton, New Jersey. Hundreds of thousands of people in the New York-New Jersey area are sickened, many fatally, by the subsequent fallout.

In a speech before the Reichstag in Berlin, Hitler formulates a peace proposal, suggesting that if the United States would lay down arms and “eliminate the influence on its politics of International Jewry” that the two nations could live at peace — the same sort of peace Hitler has just concluded with the British Empire. President Wallace angrily rejects this proposal and vows to fight on. But by this point many Americans are either disgusted or frightened by the war, seeing no reason to go on fighting in Europe when they have clearly already lost. A peace movement, calling itself the “George Washington Party” (did not President Washington warn us of the dangers of foreign entanglements?) convinces General Douglas MacArthur to resign his commission and run for President in the 1944 election. MacArthur, running on a peace platform, trounces President Wallace.

The German position at this point is tricky. There are hardliners in the Nazi movement who want to to use the German monopoly in atomic weapons to utterly destroy the United States, but ultimately a more pragmatic policy, urged on Hitler by the likes of Albert Speer, wins out. Speer notes that the United States is still fighting Japan in the Pacific War, and a U.S. victory there will represent a victory of the white races over the yellow ones. Furthermore, German resources are spread fairly thin as they attempt to digest their vast conquests in what used to be the Soviet Union. So eventually U.S. negotiators get a surprisingly good deal out of their German counterparts. The German Reich will allow the United States to remain intact and at peace, as long as the United States is willing make certain changes in its society that will prevent world peace from ever being threatened again. In 1946, President MacArthur and Chancellor Hitler meet in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, shake hands, and sign the Treaty of Paris, hailed by many commenters as a masterpiece of statesmanship that will be the foundation of peace and prosperity for decades to come.

(Subsequent historians speculate on Hitler’s sincerity in signing the Treaty of Paris, and some think that Hitler intended to conquer or perhaps annihilate America eventually when the opportunity presented itself. But Hitler’s own health was poor at this point and he dies in his bed at at the Berghof in 1948. His successors have their hands full with the project of subduing and administering their enormous East European empire — a task that proves far more difficult than they had anticipated. Eventually they settle into a modus vivendi with the United States. With Germany as the world’s dominant power in any event, they find this arrangement satisfactory in any event.)

In order to help implement these changes, a small corps of German experts arrive shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The Amerikahilfamt is headed by Baldur von Schirach, an inspired choice for, although a dedicated Nazi (he was the former Gauleiter of Vienna) he is also half-American and descended on his mother’s side from two signers of the Declaration of Independence. His operation is scarcely like an invasion; the Germans only occupy certain high offices and are able to find many able Americans more than willing to answer the call for the reconstruction of their country. Even the National Resettlement Office, advised by a highly energetic and competent technocrat named Adolf Eichmann, is able to recruit a capable and mostly American staff. Under the rest of the administrator of President MacArthur, and the subsequent one of President Joseph McCarthy and President Richard Nixon, various restructurings and reforms of American society are carried out. The reconstruction is much needed, as the subsequent war against Japan drags on into 1947, ending only with the brutal invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Thus did World He diverge from World Dalet. the children of World He learn a very different history in school, even the part of it up to 1939 where objective events were no different from that in World Dalet. The Civil War is an act of Northern Aggression against a peaceful society, and the Confederates are treated as tragic heroes defending the proper racial order, crushed under irresistible force by cruel, depraved fanatics. Their history books stress the horrors of the nineteenth century industrial system and the endemic and violent class conflict and poverty that existed in the United States’s Gilded Age. The gangster violence of 1920s is played up for all it is worth, while the culture of Jazz Age America is depicted as decadent and vile — this is blamed on Jews and black people. The subsequent suffering of the Great Depression and the World War are almost entirely blamed on Jewish financiers. “It’s a good thing the Germans won,” some people say, “or those Jews might still be in charge.”

The ethnic order of World He America is rather different form that of World Dalit America. Under a program begun under President MacArthur, initially as an emergency measure to provide labor to clean up atomic fallout in the northeast, African-Americans (note that the term “African-Americans” is unknown in World He; people use “Negroes” when they are being polite) were conscripted into a National Custodial Labor Program. This program was later made permanent and universal, “both for the good of America and America’s Negroes,” as President MacArthur would later explain, and that’s now the consensus opinion of anyone who matters that President MacArthur was right. To be sure, harsh measures were needed at first to deal with some resisters and troublemakers, but white Americans have a long tradition of applying harsh measures to African-Americans who won’t behave like white Americans think they should, so this turned out to be easy to do. With the defeat of Japan in 1947 and with the later Latin American counterinsurgency conducted under President Nixon a large number of Japanese and Latinos have subsequently been incorporated into the National Custodial Labor Program, where they are put to work in America’s thriving agricultural and extractive industries, which are such an important part of the 21st Century world’s prosperity.

As for Jewish people? Well, they don’t seem to be around any more as visible human beings. Someone’s great-grandmother might remember them. “There was a Jewish family that used to live on this street. The Leibowitzes, I think they were called. They seemed like nice people, in spite of all the nasty things people say about the Jews. They had to give up their house when they were resettled in 1949. I can’t remember where it was they were supposed to have been sent to. Paraguay, I think it was. Or was it Madagascar? Some people say Siberia. Well, in any event, I’m sure they’re doing fine.” But aside from someone’s great-grandmother, no one in World He America thinks about the Jews, save as abstractions in history books.

Yes, life is a bit different in World He America. There have been legal changes. Two new Constitutional amendments have been ratified: the 22nd, which repeals the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and establishes the legal basis for the National Custodial Labor Program, and the 23rd, which limits the franchise to property-owning white men with at least six years of service in the United States armed forces. Schoolchildren are taught the importance of the latter amendment — the horrible events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are taken to show that broadly-based democracy is a failure based on fallacies: the right to participate in government should be limited to responsible people with a stake in society who have demonstrated their patriotism. And civil liberties aren’t quite what they once were, but people like this because they think it makes the streets safe to walk at night when the police have a free hand to deal with criminals.

But things are not bad at all in World He America, if you’re one of the people who really matters. The world is peaceful and prosperous once again. In school children work hard on their lessons, especially on German. If they do really well they might win scholarships to the great universities at Göttingen or Heidelberg or the Technische Universität Dresden, a sure ticket to great success. But even those of more modest abilities can look forward to stable and prosperous lives that even their grandparents would not have known. There’s a Volkswagen in every driveway (that doesn’t have a BMW or a Mercedes, that is) and on the wall of most American living rooms you can find a Grundig High Definition Television on which families can watch the latest broadcasts from Berlin and Bayreuth. Better off families can get properly-trained, respectful servants who know their place through the Domestic Service of the National Custodial Labor Program. It’s a good present, and people look forward to an even better future.

And Americans look around the world they helped to make and are prone to say things like “While there was terrible suffering, by the grace of God the right side won in the end. The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” They feel proud to be a part of this, and feel their lives and the universe are suffused with meaning.

I’m not really sure how to feel about this:

“What you’re making may save my daddy’s life.” It’s a propaganda poster put out in 1942 by the U.S. War Production Board. The creator is identified as Louise Dahl-Wolfe.

I can’t look at it for any length of time without wanting to cry, and this fact makes me feel very manipulated.

It’s part of a remarkable collection of U.S. World War II propaganda posters maintained online by Northwestern University. A link to the underlying image (which I cleaned up a bit for blogging purposes) can be found here. Ed at Gin and Tacos gets a hat-tip for an old post which brought my attention to the collection.

Why do people think their lives have meaning? That’s a Gordian Knot, but here’s a strand we can pull out. They think something along the lines of “my life has a lot of suffering in it, but just imagine all that would never have been for other people had I never been born.” It’s an appeal to an implied (though imagined) counterfactual — the world would have been a worse place without me. It’s an easy belief to have if you are religious — you may think that you are carrying out your own itty-bitty piece of God’s plan for the world which is all for the best — but it also seems pretty common among non-believers as well, even among people who imagine themselves to be atheists. I call this the Wonderful Life Illusion.

It’s a Wonderful Movie

I get the name “Wonderful Life Illusion” from a 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life that was produced and directed by Frank Capra and starred Jimmy Stewart. Although not a Christmas movie in any strict sense, people in the United States tend to think of it as one since it’s always broadcast at that time of year. There’s a useful if somewhat lengthy summary in Wikipedia (accessed 15 November 2014):

In Bedford Falls, New York, on Christmas Eve, George Bailey is deeply troubled and suicidal. Prayers for his well-being from friends and family reach Heaven. Clarence Odbody, Angel 2nd Class, is assigned to visit Earth to save George, thereby earning his wings. God the Father and St. Joseph review George’s life with Clarence.

As a 12-year-old boy in 1919, George saved the life of his younger brother Harry, who had fallen through the ice on a frozen pond, and because of his heroic action, George lost the hearing in his left ear. Later, while working in the local pharmacy, George noticed that the druggist, Mr. Gower, despondent over receiving a telegram that his son had died in the war, had mistakenly filled a child’s prescription with poison; George stopped Gower and saved him from killing the child and irrevocably ruining his own life.

George grows up and dreams of travelling the world. In 1928, he waits for Harry to graduate from high school and replace him at the Bailey Building and Loan Association, vital to the townspeople. On Harry’s graduation night, George, now 21 and preparing to travel before attending college, discusses his future with Mary Hatch, who has long had a crush on him. Later that evening, George’s absent-minded Uncle Billy interrupts them to tell George that his father has had a stroke, which proves fatal.

George gives up his summer travel plans to stay in Bedford Falls and sort out the firm’s affairs, and a few months later, Mr. Henry F. Potter, a rapacious slumlord and a member of the Building and Loan Association board, tries to persuade the board of directors to dissolve the Building and Loan. His main objection is to their providing home loans for the working poor. George talks them into rejecting Potter’s proposal, but they agree only on condition that George run the Building and Loan. Giving his college money to Harry, George delays his plans with the understanding that his younger brother, Harry, will take over upon graduation.

When Harry graduates from college, he unexpectedly brings home a wife, whose father has offered Harry an excellent job. Although Harry vows to decline the offer out of respect for his brother, George cannot deny Harry such a fine opportunity and decides to keep running the Building and Loan, knowing that this will kill his dream to travel the world.

George calls on Mary, who has recently returned home from college. After several arguments, they reveal their love for each other, and marry soon after. As they depart for their honeymoon, they witness a run on the bank that leaves the Building and Loan in danger of collapse. The couple quell the panic by using the $2,000 set aside for their honeymoon to satisfy the depositors’ immediate needs. Mary enlists the help of George’s two best friends, Bert, a policeman, and Ernie, a cab driver, to create a faux tropical setting for a substitute honeymoon. The newlywed couple embrace while Bert and Ernie sing in the background.

George never manages to leave Bedford Falls, but does start Bailey Park, an affordable housing project. With his own interests compromised, Potter tries to hire him away, offering him a $20,000 salary, along with the promise of business trips to Europe, something that George always wanted to do. George, initially tempted, turns Potter down after realizing that Potter intends to close down the Building and Loan and take full control of Bedford Falls. He and Mary then raise four children: Pete, Janie, Tommy and Zuzu.

When World War II erupts, George is unable to enlist, because of his bad ear. Harry becomes a Navy fighter pilot and shoots down 15 enemy planes, two of which were targeting a ship full of troops in the Pacific. For his bravery, Harry is awarded the Medal of Honor.

On Christmas Eve morning, as the town prepares a hero’s welcome for Harry, Uncle Billy is on his way to Potter’s bank to deposit $8,000 of the Building and Loan’s cash funds. He greets Potter (who has the newspaper reporting Harry’s heroics) and taunts him by reading the headlines aloud. Potter angrily snatches the paper, but Billy inattentively allows the money to be snatched with it. Potter opens the paper, notices the money and keeps it, knowing that misplacement of bank money would result in bankruptcy for the Building and Loan and criminal charges for George. Uncle Billy can’t remember what happened to the money, and with a bank examiner present, he and George frantically search the town which turns up nothing. George is devastated that he is apparently destined to face scandal and jail and takes his anger and frustrations out on his family.

A desperate George appeals to Potter for a loan. Potter sarcastically turns George down, and then swears out a warrant for his arrest for bank fraud. George, now completely depressed, gets drunk at the bar owned by his friend, Giuseppe Martini, where he silently prays for help. After crashing his car into a tree, George staggers to a bridge, intending to commit suicide, feeling he is “worth more dead than alive” because of a life insurance policy. Before he can leap, Clarence jumps in first and pretends to be drowning. After George rescues him, Clarence reveals himself to be George’s guardian angel.

The counterfactuals roll out in response to George’s understandably skeptical response to the whole guardian angel thing.

George does not believe him and bitterly wishes he had never been born. Inspired by this comment, Clarence shows George what the town would have been like without him. In this alternate scenario, Bedford Falls is instead named Pottersville, and is home to sleazy nightclubs, pawn shops, and immoral people. Bailey Park has never been built, and remains an old cemetery. George notices that he can now hear in his left ear, that his lip is not bleeding, his clothes are dry and that he does not have Zuzu’s flower petals, as he never existed in the alternate reality.

Mr. Gower was sent to prison for poisoning the child and is despised and homeless. Martini does not own the bar. Martini’s bartender Nick owns the bar, and runs it in a more reckless manner. George’s friend Violet Bick is a taxi-dancer and is being arrested as George passes the location of the Building and Loan, now the location of the dance hall where Violet works. Ernie is helplessly poor, with his family having forsaken him. Uncle Billy has been in an insane asylum for many years since he lost his brother and the family business. Harry is dead as a result of George not being there to save him from drowning, and the servicemen he would have saved also died. George’s mother is a bitter widow, and Mary is a shy, single spinster librarian.

Clarence then explains how George single-handedly prevented this dire fate. He, and he alone, kept Potter in check, preventing the town from descending into squalor and vice.

George runs back to the bridge and begs to be allowed to live again. His prayer is answered, and he runs home joyously, where the authorities are waiting to arrest him. Mary, Uncle Billy, and a flood of townspeople arrive with more than enough donations to save George and the Building and Loan. George’s friend Sam Wainwright sends him a $25,000 line of credit by telegram.
Harry also arrives to support his brother, and toasts George as “the richest man in town”. In the pile of donated funds, George finds a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer inscribed, “Dear George: Remember no man is a failure who has friends. P.S. Thanks for the wings! Love, Clarence.” A bell on the Christmas tree rings, and his daughter, Zuzu, remembers aloud that it means an angel has just earned his wings. George realizes that he truly has a wonderful life.

In spite of the high reputation It’s a Wonderful Life enjoys, it’s hard for anyone with a skeptical eye not to see a great deal here that’s cheap and manipulative. The movie embodies many of the characteristic vices of popular fiction in that it uses the hero’s inspiriting story to write off the stories of others who are props therein. Did Mr. Gower’s son, the one shipped off to be used as cannon fodder in the First World War, have such a wonderful life? How about pilots of those 15 planes blown apart by Hero Harry in the Pacific? Somewhere back in Japan there are grieving parents and perhaps little boys and girls who will grow up as orphans (or not grow up at all, think Grave of the Fireflies). But I guess those people don’t even register as human, much less sympathetic, to an audience of 1946 Americans. Or perhaps even to audience of 2014 Americans.

The deus ex machina ending, with the townfolk taking up a collection to save George’s businss, also strains credibility, to say nothing of one’s digestion.

More interesting from a philosophical perspective are perhaps questions about how much we can really believe in the counterfactuals, those fulcrums of meaning, out of which the story was built. Suppose there were a world in which George Bailey were never born. Would there even have been a Harry to fall through the ice? The conception of Harry, after all, is a highly contingent event, the fusion of unique gametes at a specific time. With no little George toddling around the house, perhaps — indeed, almost certainly — Harry’s parents would have conceived a different child altogether. Or if George had never existed, Mr. Gower would have hired a different boy to help out around the drugstore, with whom he would have had a different line of causal interactions. How likely would it have been that these would have led to the same conjuncture of fatal telegram arriving at the moment of filling a prescription? We can replicate similar skepticism for pretty much ever event in George’s life. If there had never been a George to fall for, Mary might have fallen for someone else in college. No lonely spinsterhood for her, then. And so on.

World Alef

Every life is filled with events for which there are counterfactuals. We would like to imagine that our role in these counterfactuals is the “good” one. But is it really? Here is a sketch of a story set in one possible world, World Alef.

Alan sits at the bar in Hal’s, which is a beautiful bar with decent but none-too-showy restaurant attached. Alan is an associate at a big-city law firm. He has been lonely for some time, indeed, starving for a relationship. He’s at Hal’s because recently he’s met someone online. Ellen is a computer programmer whose workplace is one block from Hal’s. She has also been loney for some time. Alan and Ellen have been exchanging e-mail for some time and things look promising, so they agree to meet each other in person for the first time. Alan picks Hal’s as the place, and they agree to meet at the bar at 7.

Now it’s 7:30, and there’s no Ellen. Hal has just tried to reach her at her office and on her cell phone and has had his call go to voicemail both times.

A Stranger sitting at the bar near Alan asks “Waiting for someone?”

“Yes,” says Alan.

“She stood you up, didn’t she?”

Alan takes a sip from his glass of white wine. He wears a thoughtful expression. “Lots of things can happen. I’m going to wait another ten minutes.”

At 7:39 Ellen meets Alan at the bar. She’s a bit flustered. She had a meeting that went late at work. No matter — Alan handles it graciously, and there are still tables available. They have dinner. The date goes well. It’s followed by others. Alan and Ellen take their respective online profiles down. They go to the opera. They do on vacation together. In two years they get married and move together to the suburbs. Alan works hard at his corporate law job and makes partner. They have children.

Happy ending, right? Well, maybe. Alan doesn’t really like the suburbs and he doesn’t like being a lawyer. But he feels an obligation to support his family and basically Alan’s a pretty loyal guy. The stress and fatigue of his job and his commute mean that Alan doesn’t really get that much out of parenthood. Ellen senses Alan’s weary unhappiness and this echoes, so it’s not all that happy a marriage, even if it does last the rest of their lives. The kids grow up. Alan drinks too much, becomes overweight, and keels over from a heart attack at 60. As the darkness closes in, he thinks “Well, at least I succeeded in my career and provided for my family. My life had meaning.”

World Bet

Here is a different story, set in a different, but closely related world that diverges from World Alef sometime around 7:30 in the evening one crucial night.

“She stood you up, didn’t she” asks the Stranger, not unkindly.

Alan looked down at his glass of white wine glumly. “I’m afraid so,” he says. This has happened before. He’s beginning to wonder if he’s going to be alone forever. Alan signals for the barman for his tab. He pays and leaves a generous tip, swallows the rest of his glass at one go and leaves. Better get some sleep. A big deal is coming in from a client tomorrow.

At 7:39 Ellen enters Hal’s and sees no one who looks like Alan’s online picture. She sighs wearily and wonders if she’s going to be forever alone.

Alan and Ellen stop contacting each other online. But that’s not the end of either of their stories. A few months later Alan meets Karin. Karin is an artist, a bohemian free spirit and, it must be said, a truly imaginative lover. Alan is smitten. He and Karin start seeing each other. Alan quits his job and gets a position teaching philosophy at a community college in the next city over. He doesn’t make much money, but he likes teaching and over the course of his life writes a few well-regarded academic papers as well. He and Karin never marry and never produce children, but for the next decades they see each other approximately every other weekend and one or other of their respective urban apartments and have a wild time together.

And it’s not the end of Ellen’s story, either. A few months later she meets Brian, another computer programmer. They hit it off and eventually marry. They don’t make as much money as Alan would have in world Alef, but Brian works from home and turns out to be a devoted father to children other than those Ellen would have had with Alan. It’s a happy marriage, at least relative to that which Alan and Ellen would have had in World Alef.

Alan’s life comes to an end at 60 from a heart attack precipitated by a round of wild sex with Karin. As the darkness closes in he thinks nothing at all, he just slips away with a smile on his lips.

In a variant on Word Bet, World Gimel, Alan is never born at all, so Karin will have to find a different playmate and Hal’s another customer. No matter — they’re both good at that. As in World Bet, Ellen and Brian find each other and live mostly happily ever after.

Counterfactuals and Life

There’s a detail about World Alef which I didn’t add, which is about Brian’s fate therein. You see, Brian really was a pretty shy and socially awkward guy and even lonelier than Alan. In World Alef Brian never met anyone. He fell into a funk, spiraled downward, declined, and died of alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver at 35. Needless to say, neither of Alan nor Ellen knew this fact, or even knew of Brian’s existence in World Alef.

We’d like to imagine that the world without us would be a worse place. That if we had never been born that our parents would have lived out their lives unfulfilled, that the people we married would age and die as old lonely bachelors or spinsters, that the children we would never have would somehow regret their nonexistence. But most of this is nonsense. Our parents would have had other children, or would have had no children but would have found other things to do with their lives. Our spouses would (almost certainly) have found other people to be with. The children we never have are not little ghosts, sadly peering through the metaphysical ether with their big, tear-filled eyes at the bright warm existence that will never be theirs. They’re just not anything at all, left forever in the blessed calm of nonexistence. The world might have been just as well without us.

Indeed, it might even have been better without us. How many Brians are there as a result of our simply living our lives? We don’t know, but there could certainly be many. Brian-like figures tend, by their very nature, to be invisible to us, though perhaps in some cases — for example, in the case of known disappointed suitors for the hands of people we have wooed and won, or alternative candidates for cherished positions that we have beaten out — we might be able to at least guess at the identities of some of them.

It is an arrogant folly to claim to know that the world is better with us than without us. Perhaps you believe it as a matter of faith. If so, tant pis pour toi. Faith is a vice.

While I do take the view that a lot of literature biases us toward optimism, there are certainly exceptions to the rules, writers who don’t follow the rules. (Perhaps I should start a hashtag, #NotAllPoets, that will let all sorts of people be really angry at me.) An outstanding example was Georg Büchner (1813-1837). He wrote a play (or part of a play, as it exists only in fragments), Woyzeck, about a brutalized soldier who goes mad and murders his girlfriend. (The play would become the source-text for Alban Berg’s 1925 atonal opera Wozzeck.) In the course of the play a Grandmother tells a fairy tale of sorts which is almost an ingenious anti-story. (Kindly pardon my idiosyncratic translation!)

Hat tip to that one to Maria Tatar, whose engaging book on folktales, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales tipped me off to this charming bit of prose (and naturally, offered a better translation than I made).

People get most of what they know, or at least imagine that they know, not from scientizing but from stories. We find stories worthy of our time and attention not because they are good sources of truth about the world, but because they are sources of entertainment and reassurance about the world.

Think of the stories you’ve encountered in your life. Most of them conform to a few simple rules. There is a hero of some kind. The hero has objectives of some kind: blow up the Death Star, throw the One Ring in the Crack of Doom, rescue Catherine Martin from the Jame Gumb’s basement, or redeem your beloved Princess Buttercup from Prince Humperdink. In by far the vast majority of these stories, the hero simply achieves his objectives, overcoming obstacles and perhaps suffering some along the way but nonetheless winning in the end. People like it when the hero wins in the end, Make a good-enough story about that and you’ll have a large audience.

In many stories, the hero may win in the end, but other characters are likely to suffer and perhaps die prematurely. In the vast majority of the stories you have encountered in your life, these secondary characters fall into three categories.

1. Unsympathetic characters of one kind or another. These include both the villains and those who work for them, who are “evil,” and also characters whom the audience will identify as jerks and assholes, and whose sufferings or deaths are therefore “just” and a source of active moralistic pleasure to the readership (by “readership” here read those who read, or who are the audience, etc.), a reassurance that good triumphs in the world.

2. Characters who are not necessarily unsympathetic but who are too minor for most of the viewership to give much thought to, those footsoldiers and civilians on the side of “good.” The readership might briefly note the sadness of the suffering of the minor characters before being quickly diverted by the bright shiny object that is the hero and his pursuit of his objectives.

3. Characters who are neither minor nor unsympathetic, but whose suffering or death “mean something.” The wise teacher or friend of the hero who dies, and the revenging of whose death provides either a primary or secondary motive for the hero. The comrade of the hero may die, but his death happens in the course of a “good war” against the villains so that other good people might prosper in the future.

In slightly more sophisticated stories, the hero might not succeed in reaching his (putative) goals, but who will be redeemed in some other way. Perhaps the hero’s suffering or failure will be redeemed by “meaning” as described in (3), or his initial goal not be achieved but the hero will “learn something important” or achieve other more important goals of which he was not aware at the start of the story. Rick Blaine might not walk off with Ilsa Lund at the end of Casablanca, but he has recovered his idealism and might be at the start of a beautiful friendship.

At the outer limit of permissible narrative darkness there might be some genuine tragedies, but even here the audience will often interpret them as tales of how the hero’s fate was the result of his “hubris.” The notion that Hubris brings Nemesis, though a lot bleaker than the notion that you’ll get a medal at a neato ceremony for your role in blowing up the Death Star, still suggests a sort of moral order in the universe that people find comforting. (Best not to think about the fact that Stalin died in his bed at 73.)

There might be exceptions to these rules, a few examples of stories without traditional structures of actions or moral meanings, but they are generally pretty few and out on the fringes of their respective genres — the darkest of tragedies (or black comedies), the weirdest of weird fiction, the most experimental of experimental literature. Small in absolute numbers of works, and smaller still in overall cultural influence. Compare the audience for Star Wars to that of Thomas Ligotti’s “The Town Manager” if you don’t believe me. (If that’s not a fair comparison, then Star Wars to any story relevantly like “The Town Manager.” Or to all stories relevantly like “The Town Manager” added together.) Or just try to see how many stories you know that don’t apply any of the rules — stories that have no hero, or that have a hero without goals, have a hero that fails to achieve his goals, or that have sympathetic characters — or the hero himself — who suffer or die and whose failures or sufferings or death are not redeemed by any “meaning” or “higher purpose.” True, if you’re very well read you’ll be able to think of some. But not many.

We pay a lot of attention to stories because they are better than reality. Reality is arbitrary. It doesn’t care about our goals and doesn’t help us to meet them. If there were a Clarice Starling in reality, she would have been much more likely than not to have been killed by Jame Gumb in his pitch-black basement and had her skin harvested for his collection than she was to have killed him. (It’s his home ground, after all, and he’s the experienced killer with the night-vision gear.) Luke Skywalker can do better than Porkins in blowing up the Death Star only by the intervention of the supernatural in the form of the “Force.” In reality as opposed to the imaginative world of stories, perfectly decent people suffer and die all the time, and no one learns a damn thing from what happens to them or is particularly moved by their suffering to make the world a better place.

Small wonder people focus so hard on stories, and that when they do so they insert themselves sympathetically into the stories in the roles of heroes. How many people imagine themselves as Luke Skywalkers as opposed to Porkinses? If the world of Star Wars were possible world and you were somehow in it, you’d be pretty unusual even to be a Porkins and billions of times more likely to have been one of faceless dead on Alderaan. How many people imagine themselves as Rick Blaines? Again, if the world of Casablanca were a possible world you somehow plunked down in, you’d be privileged even to be an Ugarte (remember him? he was the guy played by Peter Lorre), perhaps even one of the nameless if numerous usual suspects.

Unlike most of the inhabitants of the Star Wars universe, Porkins at least got a name and a face.

Fiction agrees with us better than reality. So we pay attention to it rather than reality. But because we pay more attention to it, it becomes a disproportionate source of our information about the world. So we come to think that reality is in some important sense better than it is. Fiction is a balm for life, but it biases our understanding of the world toward optimism.

Why not write a post that is at once a thought experiment and a horror story?

Somewhere orbiting a distant star there is a computer laboratory of a hyper-advanced technological civilization. The computers in this laboratory are so powerful that they are capable of simulating entire worlds and their sentient inhabitants. These inhabitants don’t know that they are simulations, of course. As far as they know, they are just people living in a world. They have thoughts and lives and feelings of their own, just like you or me. You might think of their existences as being like that as persons in The Matrix, although if you really want a Hollywood equivalent it might be better look to The Thirteenth Floor, since these people have no physical bodies out in the “real” world; they are simply so much data and code in their virtual universe.

The laboratory is run by a Programmer, a being who has exhausted the other possibilities for pleasure in life and now cultivates a taste for enjoying watching other sentient beings rationalize their false beliefs. The Programmer has an ingenious plan. Ve creates an entire world simulation with people in it. The people who live in this world live according to the world’s physics, mostly. For the most part they take their chances in the world according to that world’s laws of natural selection. Some survive and reproduce, while others perish. Over time they become better adapted to their simulated environment. Over time of course their cognitive capacities improve in line with natural selection. The people in the simulation discover “science,” learning the laws of their world and learn how to apply their science to technologies to manipulate the world according to its rules. The better their science, the more accurately it encodes the actual workings of the simulated world they inhabit, the better they do, other things being equal. Not that the inhabitants are anything like flawless in their cognition. There’s a fair amount of random variation and noise in their ideas, just as there is in their simulated genes.

But the Programmer puts certain quirks into vis world, in accordance with vis purposes. One is that the world is designed to make its inhabitants experience various random forms of suffering. The ultra-complex code of the world throws in various disasters and miseries for its inhabitants. Perhaps it goes without saying that these actions are always undertaken by the Programmer’s code in ways far too subtle for the simulation’s inhabitants to notice that they are anything other than “natural” events in their world; however great their science, it is never equal to the programming. Wars, plagues, storms, volcanic eruptions, the depredations of wandering serial rapists and murderers and so on pop up in in the world with a fairly high frequency to blight the existences of its inhabitants. (Of course there’s plenty of more normal, garden variety unhappiness in this world as well, generated simply by the mechanisms of the world working themselves out as they will.) The other is that there’s a bit of a tweak in the way that natural selection works in the world. Inhabitants who carry around a certain Big Idea in their heads are “rewarded” with slightly higher inclusive fitness than those who do not. Not that this “reward” means that their lives go any better than anyone else’s. It just means that they leave slightly more descendants in following generations than others. The Big Idea is this: “The world we live in has a Creator who loves and cares for us.” This idea is only half true, of course. While the world does in a sense have a Creator in the form of the Programmer, it is simply not true that the Programmer loves and cares for the inhabitants of his simulation. Ve doesn’t care one bit about these inhabitants or their strivings and sufferings; to these he is completely indifferent. Ve’s only interested in ver recherché entertainment.

And naturally there is plenty of entertainment, as the suffering inhabitants of the simulated world create rationalizations to defend the Big Idea against the evidence of their own senses, and any inroads made by their science against it. Since the believers in the Big Idea outpopulate those who are not believers, they have the upper hand. The Big Idea never dies out or is even seriously challenged, but it does need to grow ever more sophisticated over time. The Big Idea is false, but will always be believed by most people as true, and it will grow and grow in complexity as the simulation is allowed to run longer and longer. The rationalizations have to do this as long as there is science and the possibility for intellectual mutation among the inhabitants of the simulation. Being good at science and being a mutant means questioning whether the stories we tell ourselves are true. Sometimes within the simulation this results in mutants being burned at the stake or confined to mental institutions, but much of the time the combat between the mutants and the believers stays at an a more purely intellectual level.

The Programmer who runs the simulation has full access to the simulants’ rationalizations, to their volumes of theology and philosophy, to their speeches and sermons, and to all the uplifting popular entertainment their various cultures generate. All these are neatly translated for the benefit of the Programmer and displayed on the screens in vis laboratory.

The Programmer smiles. Ve reaches for whatever the equivalent is of popcorn on his world, and settles down for a nice long read. The entertainment will never end.

Thanks be to God that we aren’t like those benighted sufferers in the Programmer’s simulation!

Antinatalist and genuinely pessimistic views don’t get a lot of play in the larger culture, given that most of our larger cultural production is organized around getting people to buy stuff they don’t need, and bleak worldview of, say, Giacomo Leopardi isn’t really the thing to get people to go to the mall. There was an HBO production of Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited in 2011 the did some deeply pessimistic themes, but that was a production so unusual as to strike me as sui generis.

So I was a bit surprised to see the following scene in the first episode of the recent HBO series True Detective. Two Louisiana State Police CID detectives are driving in the gathering dark of a late winter afternoon, having recently left the scene of a bizarrely-staged murder. Detective Marty Hart (played by Woody Harrelson) tries to get to know his strange partner, Detective Rustin Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey).

int. — the detective’s car — day

Hart drives and converses with Cohle.

cohle

People out here, it’s like they don’t even know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the fucking moon.

hart

All kinds of ghettos in the world.

cohle

It’s all one ghetto, man. Giant gutter in outer space.

hart

Today, that scene, that is the most fucked up thing I ever caught. Can I ask you something? You’re a Christian, yeah?

cohle

No.

hart

Well, whaddya got the cross for in your apartment?

cohle

It’s a form of meditation.

hart

How’s that?

cohle

I contemplate the moment in the garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion.

hart

But you’re not a Christian, so what do you believe?

cohle

I believe people shouldn’t talk about this type of shit at work.

hart

Hold on, hold on. Three months we’ve been together I get nothing from you. Today, what we’re into, now. Do me a courtesy, okay? I’m not trying to convert you.

cohle

Okay, I’d consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I’m what called a pessimist.

hart

Uh, okay, what’s that mean?

cohle

It means I’m bad at parties.

hart

(chuckles)

Let me tell you. You ain’t that good outside of parties either.

cohle

(lengthy pause)

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures should not exist by natural law.

hart

Well, that sounds God-fucking-awful, Rust.

cohle

We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.

hart

I wouldn’t go around spouting that shit if I was you. People around here don’t think that way. I don’t think that way.

cohle

I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

hart

So, what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?

cohle

I tell myself I bear witness. but the real answer is it’s obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.

hart

My luck I picked today to get to know you. What…three months I don’t hear a word from you and…

cohle

You asked.

hart

Yeah. And now I’m begging you to shut the fuck up.

(Can’t help but note that “begging you to shut the fuck up” is one of the politer things you can expect to hear if you are so unwise as to air pessimistic views to unprepared ears. Though I’ll confess that at least that’s a more respectful response than “I’ll pray for you.”)

True Detective has occasioned an interesting article on pessimism by Professor David Cartwright. It’s an interesting overview and worth your attention. I would quibble with some of it. Professor Cartwright attributes the philosophy behind True Detective to Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer unquestionably stands in the deep intellectual background of the show, but on my viewing its more immediate progenitor would have been Thomas Ligotti, so much so that there’s an active controversy about the extent to which True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto plagiarized that contemporary master of weird fiction.

Professor Cartwright suggests that a pessimist could be understood as someone who maintains that

1. existence is a mistake;
2. there is no meaning or purpose to human existence;
3. the best thing for humans is not to exist;
4. he next best is to obtain a state of being in which the world becomes nothing;
5. life is essentially suffering and suffering is evil, and;
6. this is the worst of all possible worlds.

And I would quibble a bit with some of these. Take (1). It sounds like something important is being said here, but the problem is that at lest in the contemporary world most pessimists are also atheists, and the concept of a mistake seems to suggest that there is a someone behind the mistake, someone with intentions or least with interests that can be well-served by some course of action and ill-served by others. With respect to the whether the universe we now know is a “mistake,” who could take a course of action with respect that universe as a whole exists or not, save for the God that pessimists don’t think exists? (5) would have to be amended by many pessimists who are also metaethical error theorists and for whom therefore the category of “evil” (at least in the sense of “objective evil”) is an empty one. Also, it might be too strong a claim to say that life is “essentially” suffering, whatever that means. It’s enough to count as a pessimist if you think that life is on balance suffering and that there is no reasonable prospect of its ever being any other way. (6) is what Schopenhauer himself believed and he offered a couple of not terribly convincing arguments for it, but it isn’t a necessary component of pessimism. It seems like an overly-strong claim — surely it’s enough to claim that this world is really bad, even if even worse worlds are possible (or, for a modal realist, actually exist).

Quibble, quibble. Professor Cartwright’s article nonetheless also entertains as it instructs. His observations about how sexual desire ruins us are particularly apropos:

Sex confuses even the greatest minds, and it interferes with humans’ most serious occupations, disrupting the activities of politicians and intruding in the investigations of scholars. Under the power of sexual love, humans engage in fights with their friends and family, breaking the ties of the strongest and most valuable relations. Sexual love can cause the fall of the upright and honorable, and it can make traitors of those who were once loyal and faithful. To satisfy their sexual urges people will sacrifice their wealth, health, social position, and sometimes even their lives.

And take a sufficiently bright twenty-six year-old German and thwart his desire to fuck pretty actresses, and you get The World as Will and Representation.

Though sadly in the end True Detective does find a way to disappoint. Spoilers of a very general kind ahead.

Continue reading →

There is so much dark pleasure to be found in interviews with Thomas Ligotti, many of which have now been collected in a handsome hardbound volume for those among you who still maintain an interest in such quaint artifacts. I think my favorite interview bears the title “Literature Is Entertainment or It Is Nothing,” the title of which not only succinctly states a correct and useful thesis, but also contains such gems as this.

Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time?

The realm of romantic love is a diarchy in the iron grip of its rulers Frustration and Heartbreak, a fact that almost no one ever learns, no matter how obvious it is.

In the past on this blog I’ve advanced a view about when it is that we might have cause to regard out own existence as a misfortune. I think it’s a sufficient (though perhaps not a necessary) condition for such if there exists a double-or-nothing bet, something which I have called a Mephistopheles wager which we would take as a condition for removing some deficiency from our lives. The bet would have a structure something like this: on the toss of a fair coin, if we were to win, then that deficiency would be removed. If we were to lose, we would experience instant and painless annihilation. It seems intuitive to me if there actually is such a bet out there which you would accept if some entity could offer it to you, then you have good reason to regard your own existence as unfortunate. I’d like to dig a bit underneath this intuition.

In taking monetary bets, taking a bet that has this sort of double-or-nothing structure is rational (on the assumption that the bettor is a wealth maximizer) if the magnitude of the monetary winnings is greater than the magnitude of the loss. I take this point to be sufficiently obvious as not to be in need of further demonstration.

If we extend by analogy into the context of a potential Mephistopheles wager and imagine ourselves as maximizers of utility rather than wealth, it seems pretty clear that taking the bet is only rational if the utility magnitude of the win — which means, the utility magnitude of the deficiency in your life which you are trying to make up — exceeds the magnitude of all the utility in your life — now and all that which is in prospect for the rest of your life.

Ponder for a minute, reader, how unfortunate one’s life would be if there were such a bet to be taken! You must be really suffering if you would take it. Or, if your life is apparently “okay” but there is still some such bet you would take, ponder for a minute how great a hole there is on your superficially acceptable life that you yearn to fill up. Something horrible would have to present in need of removal, or something desperately wanted would have to be absent to take the bet.

And yet I think that more among us have such bets that we would take, even if many among us — through defects of imagination, perhaps? — do not yet realize it.

Someone penetrates to the essence of one of the today’s triter sentiments.

Found in this tweet.