Review, Interrupted: Unpublished review of Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind

This is another piece that got pre-empted by the sudden death of Identity Theory. I’m beginning to think that Absence of Mind is the book that will trigger the inevitable Marilynne Robinson backlash. Nine years ago, when I started reading her, mentioning her got me a whole slide-show of politely befuddled looks; only people old enough to remember Housekeeping had ever heard of her, and her last two books had been works of plague-on-all-yer-houses polemical nonfiction. (I found out about her from an entry in the invaluable Eighth Day Books catalogue, from Wichita. Where most book catalogues have ad copy, these guys have little mini-essays. The Eighth Day catalogue was also where I discovered the existence of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Pavel Florensky, T.F. Torrance, and Eastern Christianity.)

Gilead sort of made Robinson famous again, which is funny, because if I have a least favorite Marilynne Robinson book, it’s that one. But between her opposition to neoliberalism and her liberal Calvinism and her ornate prose style she’s begging for detractors. If she praised the free market and attacked, say, the Civil Rights Act while defending Christianity, she’d have a berth waiting for her over at The New Criterion; if she attacked Bush and racism and colonialism and kept her mouth shut about Jesus, she’d fit right in at Mother Jones. But she talks about all of these things, frequently in the same essay.

I thought William Deresiewicz’s take on Home in The Nation was kinda wrongheaded. He complains about The Death of Adam for not talking about the role of non-religious intellectuals in 19th-century struggles for justice. (I have a problem with the word “religion” and the way it invites us to assume, from both sides, that some are in, some are out, but that’s for another day.) Deresiewicz’s complaint would be well-taken if Death of Adam were an exhaustive account of the Abolitionist, Gilded and Progressive Eras, rather than a series of very specific essays designed precisely to remind people that so-called “religious people” also had a hand in these periods’ reforms.  But it isn’t. And then the Blographia Literaria guy really ragged on her Yale Terry Lectures, which became Absence of Mind. His criticisms, quite honestly, are mystifying to me. For most of his essay he accuses her, in effect, of saying what she said, and then acts as if he’s revealed some gaping flaw (the nature of which is rarely explained); and then he accuses her of “chuckling otiosely” at ideas she doesn’t like. Pot, meet kettle. He insinuates that she sees no flaws in Christians’ historical behavior, which is bullshit. (Home is one long acknowledgment of such flaws, for starters). He reprimands her for bothering to point out problems in Steven Pinker’s bestselling The Blank Slate, because, in effect, everybody knows that Pinker is an idiot anyway; which, if that’s true, why’s Pinker always on my TV and in my New Republic? He attacks her for sounding like Saul Bellow, which she does, if Bellow were less macho, and less sexist, and less of a snob, and if he had a completely different prose style and sensibility, which is to say she doesn’t sound like Saul Bellow at all. He mocks her for writing about science without being able to name a favorite contemporary scientist. Umm, science is collaborative and is only getting more so. Of course she can’t name one particular favorite guy. And she isn’t really writing about science in Absence of Mind; she is writing about bad philosophy and its habit of hiding out in bestselling books of pop-science. Finally he accuses her of only liking science that “smiles at God,” which doesn’t really square well with her repeated, more-or-less friendly references to Bertrand Russell, for starters. His main complaint seems to be that she doesn’t say enough nice things about science done well. To me, this is exactly like complaining that The Death of Adam doesn’t say enough nice things about secular progressives. It confuses an exhaustive historical or thematic treatise (on “Science” in one case; on “nineteenth-century history” in the other) with a targeted intervention at a very specific place in the conversation. These are essays, not textbooks. I mean, look at the title, for fuck’s sake: The Disspelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. If you want her to talk about how awesome Brian Greene is, or how cute it is that John Bell’s socks are mismatched, wait for another book.

But anyway, that’s two very smart people, whose writings I generally don’t consider a waste of time, who really seem to have a problem with Robinson. And she seems to be becoming a generational influence. Her widely-acclaimed ex-student Chris Adrian has a John Calvin tatoo, which suggests he’s taken a long soak in The Death of Adam, and apparently a good chunk of the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ listed her as a favorite. She’s ubiquitous enough to be worth attacking, in other words. Now the reviews of Absence of Mind have started to filter in, and most of them are tepid—”she digresses too much” (to me, that’s a turn-on); “I can’t figure out what Freud’s doing here” (again, look at the title); “she doesn’t know science” (these complains are always suspiciously nonspecific). I made a big mistake and read the comments underneath a recent Guardian excerpt from AOM. Mostly it was a bunch of reductionists having a circle jerk. The least stupid response was this: ”I feel spooky sometimes = Science can’t explain everything. Thanks for that.” This comment has the advantage of being funny, but it is no kind of response, since “I feel spooky sometimes” is not her argument. (There was also a complaint that she doesn’t understand probability. That may or may not be true, but probability isn’t a big part or really any part of her argument—I read her use of “improbable” as nontechnical—so it doesn’t do much.) And they kept calling her “Marilynne.” WTF? I really need to emulate Jessa Crispin of Bookslut and swear off reading comment threads.

All of that is a very long-winded way of introducing my own much more laudatory review of Absence of Mind, in which I wanted to summarize Robinson’s argument while saying all of the above, in fewer than 1200 words. Ha!

Orphaned review Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind

Whether from laziness or for some deeper reason, much of American intellectual and political life is framed as a contest between caricatures. We have all heard about the contrasting mores and beverage preferences of those mythical Red and Blue Americans, mismatched partners in our national screwball comedy. (How long before the inevitable movie?) And we have all had our nerves scoured by the hysterical, sometimes murderous pronouncements of pundits and politicians whose only claim on our attention is a false one, that they speak for the silent half of some specious binary. (How long before the inevitable domestic terrorist attack?)

This habit dominates our thinking in subtler ways. There is, for example, widespread belief in a “war between science and religion,” a sloppy formulation even if it were rephrased, more accurately, as a war between evolutionary biology and fundamentalist Protestantism. Perhaps this fuzzy notion survives from mere habit—chance variation persisting by inertia; or perhaps it serves the psychological needs of both groups. Harassing biology teachers is easier, after all, than some of the other imperatives that might arise from a literal perusal of the Bible (“give to those who ask”). Shock at Malthusian biology thus excuses acquiescence in Malthusian economics. And on the other side, some science pundits attempt to rescue the notion of inevitable religion-science warfare by offering definitions of religion so silly that they would raise suspicions as to the authors’ basic intelligence, if they weren’t so clearly intended to nourish that heady sense of lonely superiority that is the simplest guarantor of cult success. Daniel Dennett describes religion as a group attempt to secure the God’s or gods’ favor—as if the impossibility of doing so, the wrongness even of trying, were not, notoriously, a central preoccupation of Christian theology since at least the Protestant Reformation.

Marilynne Robinson the essayist, who shares body and sensibility if not renown with Marilynne Robinson the Orange Prize-winning novelist, is among our most trenchant critics of such habits. In Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, she examines a number of bestselling writers who have, in the matter of Science v. Religion, testified for the former, finding that the “scientific worldview” from which writers like Dawkins or Dennett claim to speak owes more to bad philosophy than to science. It is a sort of lobotomized logical positivism, censorious toward metaphysical ideas (the soul, human exceptionalism, etc.) because of their long association with religious thought, but constantly slipping, unaware, into metaphysical claims—as when E.O. Wilson, for example, deduces from the existence of biodiversity the moral rightness of awe toward it. (Wilson’s references to Darwin’s “There is grandeur in this view of life” should raise our suspicions. Why is grandeur important? To discuss it, aren’t we leaving behind our commitment to reductionism?) She argues further that this tendency is as inimical to science as it is to any other human pursuit, because it renders felt experience indescribable, and creates a vacuum in which weak accounts of human nature flourish. “If ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are not entities in their own right,” she writes, “they are at least terms that have been found useful for describing aspects of the expression and self-expression of our very complex nervous system.” And if these terms, in the twinned histories of religion and philosophy, are sometimes used to block rather than to enable inquiry, Robinson shows that this tendency enjoys a robust enough life without them.

Robinson examines over a century’s worth of speculation on “altruism,” that problem stirring within so many books of Darwinian fundamentalism like an undigested burrito. She is unimpressed by efforts to explain human kindness as a misfiring of the emotional responses that our genes have evolved in order to maneuver us into preserving our kin (and, thus, our masterminding genes). “What are ‘we,’” she asks, “if we must be bribed and seduced by illusory sensations we call love or courage or benevolence? Why need our genes conjure these better angels, when, presumably, the species of toads and butterflies … flourish without them?” She is likewise unimpressed by Richard Dawkins’s effort to explain this anomaly by positing the existence of memes. If certain ideas, she argues, have “sprung free from direct dependency on our genes,” then why bother constructing “a genetic or sociobiological account” of behavior at all? The two explanations render each other unnecessary, but are offered together, in the manner of rationalizations.

In the book’s third chapter, she offers a rich and unexpected account of Freud. This writer is today—rightly—consigned to the trash bin of pseudoscience, but he helped render unfashionable (“debunk”) the idea of the self, and thus belongs squarely to the intellectual lineage Robinson examines. Freud, like Spenser before him and like, say, behaviorists and evolutionary psychologists after, claimed to have discovered that what we think of as “me” is a complicated illusion produced by impersonal forces. The irony that Robinson finds in all this, however, is that Freud’s theories also functioned perfectly as a way of explaining, as universal and inescapable features of consciousness, the very pathologies—anomie, maladjustment, a sense of disconnection from a primordial self—that Freud’s crank contemporaries were wont to blame on the presence of Jews (“alien elements”) in Europe. In her telling, Freud’s career is an oddly moving, probably unintended act of self-defense against the beloved Vienna whose murderous designs on him he was notoriously slow in recognizing.

This is, in sum, a smart, funny, dazzlingly eloquent book, influenced by William James and worthy of him. It poses this challenge to all reductionisms: As long as reality, with its lacunae and its imponderables, is so mysterious as to drive us to the adoption of ethical and metaphysical and aesthetic terms simply to describe it, why not acknowledge as much, and drop any pretention to conceptual chastity? “Here is another instance of evolution,” Robinson writes. “The universe passed through its unimaginable first moment, first year, first billion years … Then, very late, there is added to the universe of being a shaped stick or stone, a jug, a cuneiform tablet. They appear on a tiny, teetering, lopsided planet, and demand wholly new vocabularies of description for reality at every scale.”