Any
Good Books
June,
2018
Living
with a Wild God: A Non-believer's Search for the Truth about
Everything
Barbara
Ehrenreich (Twelve, 2014)
When
Barbara Ehrenreich was a girl, she was not religious. Her bent, both
personally and by family tradition, was toward radical rationalism;
this book, a not-quite-memoir, could have been titled "I Was a
Teen-Age Solipsist." In Living with a Wild God,
Ehrenreich revisits her journals from that time, which she'd kept
through four decades and a dozen or so moves, "because,"
she says, "if I have any core identity, any central theme that
has survived all the apparent changes of subject, the secret of it
lies with her."
As
an adult, Ehrenreich is a writer and an activist, always on the side
of the economically down-trodden, and this, she comes by honestly:
her family emerged from Butte, Montana, a mining and smelting town in
the middle of Big Sky country. Her father got out of the mines by
pursuing the study of metallurgy, and then parleyed his good looks
and ability to hold his liquor into a series of upwardly mobile
management jobs. This entailed repeatedly uprooting his family,
through Pittsburgh and various spots in New York and Massachusetts,
before their arrival in Southern California.
The
family's tradition of hard-headed atheism also sprang from Butte. "I
was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their
own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of
authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods
or demons." So when the fourteen-year-olds around her were going
through religious training, Barbara was on her own with the Big
Questions, like 'why are we here?' and 'why do we die?' She was also
wrestling with a secret. Starting about a year before the journal
begins, she had begun to have moments of direct experience,
unmitigated by words or thoughts.
The
nearest name for this seems to be 'dissociation'; Ehrenreich
satisfied herself that it was neither a religious experience nor a
sign of insanity. In what was probably a very good decision, she
almost never discussed her episodes with others: the more accurate
her description, the more it would have made her sound insane. The
unpredictability of her episodes was worrisome, and made avoiding the
psychedelic drugs of the day the obvious choice: "For some of
us, at some times, participation on the dullest,
lowest-common-denominator version of 'reality' is not compromise or a
defeat; it is an accomplishment."
Having
devoted her college years to the study of chemistry and physics,
Ehrenreich went on to graduate school in New York. It was there, in
1965, that the larger world, at last, broke in on her ruminations.
The war in Southeast Asia changed everything, as reports trickled
back of atrocities in the jungle. "...now that I had begun to
love the protective armor of solipsism, there was less to shield me
from accounts of bayonets cutting through the bellies of pregnant
Vietnamese women or napalm-dispensing helicopters swooping down over
children. Once the imagination learns how to construct an image of
another person's subjectivity–however sloppy and improvised that
image may be–it's hard to get it to stop."
She
never quite gets to the answers her teenage self was looking for;
life got in the way. She got married and had children; she continued
to find things out and write things down, producing nearly two dozen
books to date. So the answer to sixteen-year-old Barbara's question
to her future self, "What have you learned since you wrote
this?" is missing some things that girl would have liked to
know. Neuroscience would have been very interesting to her, and
philosophy as well. What she did learn, though, about engagement with
the world, matters a lot: we are members of a species, in a network
of life. Other people are real, and their suffering matters.
Posts
