Contemporism

When people show an interest in my religious leanings, I tell them I’m an atheist. What I mean is that I don’t believe in the God of the Old or New Testament, the divinity of Christ, virgin birth, angels, miracles, heaven, hell, Satan, the soul, or salvation. Nor do I believe in the gods outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Amazingly, many people think such a broad declaration doesn’t make me an atheist! They wonder if I’d accept the existence of an unconventional supreme being, some incomprehensible force that is Pure Love or the First Cause or That Which Is And Always Has Been. It doesn’t matter how many times I say no to such inquiries; there’s always one more. “Do you think God might be the undetectable dark matter that astrophysicists talk about?” “No.” I’ll stand by that answer, but I’ve recently realized there’s a better answer: “Spare me, please.”

Thinking about an afterlife or about a rebirth or about passing into some kind of cosmic glory is a waste of time. My concern is the here and now, where there is no shortage of epic challenges, fascinating ideas, and sensory pleasures. I don’t want to denigrate my experience of what is likely the only world I’ll ever know by spending a minute obsessing about old superstitions or whacked-out speculations.

I’ve tried to find a word that sums up this point of view, and so far the best I can think of is “contemporism.” It makes sense because it’s a form of the word “contemporary”—“belonging to or occurring in the present.” And a person whose focus is on the world we live in would therefore be a “contemporist.” I was happy with these neologisms for about five minutes, and then I began to wonder, What are the implications of being a contemporist? Would he value other times in history? What about the worth of art and science? Could he be bothered with them? And is there a connection between contemporism and human affairs in general? That is, would contemporism have an affinity for any political or economic system? It seemed like a good idea to have a go at these questions.

First, the question about history: Should a contemporist’s focus on the present exclude curiosity about the past? Well, if it did, he would be the kind of American moron we hear about now and then—a person who, for example, maintains Benjamin Franklin was our greatest president and believes World War I preceded the American Civil War. In fact, the past matters because “the past is prologue”: it’s impossible to understand the present out of context, and context is precisely what knowledge of the past confers. The same reasoning, by the way, explains why a contemporist must also be concerned with the future. The present is continually creating the context for the future. If a contemporist is indifferent about this connection, he might as well assert that the consequences of our actions don’t matter.

What about the arts? They would seem to give the contemporist a problem. After all, visual art, performance art, and literature are born of the imagination. Their subjects often deal with legend, mysticism, and fantasy. Shouldn’t such art be shunned because it isn’t about the world we live in? No, thinking of the arts this way is completely misguided. In fact, everything an artist creates is a reflection of the here and now. He holds a mirror up to the passions and preoccupations of his generation and reflects them back to us in an aesthetic form. He gives us a powerful way to see ourselves. If what we see is, in part, a belief in the unreal, so be it. It’s the truth, and we must deal with it.

Science is a tool for discovering the nature of reality. It empowers us to cure illness, feed the multitudes, power cities, communicate globally, and retrieve the accumulated knowledge of millennia. And for the contemporist there’s a bonus: science is a wedge that pries us away from superstition, freeing us to live in the present. I suppose you could say that, from a contemporist’s point of view, nothing could be valued above science because no other field of endeavor can match its potential for improving the present. However, science is double-edged. It’s also correct to say that no other field of endeavor has the potential for destroying the present. To be fair, this duality isn’t a property of science but a property of humanity, its practitioner. What to do? We can’t just say, “Science, be gone! You’re too dangerous.” So one of the preoccupations of a contemporist must be to understand the political and social implications of every scientific discovery.

(Before I leave the subject of science, I need to spend some space on a connection between science and religion: they both deal with ultimate questions. Where did the observable world come from? Where did life come from? What happens to us after we die? Both ask those questions, but that’s just about where the similarity between them ends. Religion asks us to take its answers on faith. Science offers hypotheses and evidence. Further, science searches for ultimate answers in places where religion never treads. What are the ultimate constituents of our universe (not world), and how do they interact? How has the universe changed over time, and what is its destiny? What existed before the Big Bang? (Equivalent to the never asked, “What existed before God?”) Does reality have dimensions that we can’t perceive and, if so, what are they? Curiously, I react the same way to most of these questions as I do to religion: Spare me, please. I don’t care whether the universe expands forever or collapses back on itself. I don’t care if space-time somehow existed before the Big Bang. I don’t care how many dimensions exist that I can’t perceive. And I don’t care whether our universe is part of a multiverse or exists as a singularity. Nothing critical to our lives lies in the answers to science’s deepest questions.)

Last, the question about how contemporism relates to political or economic systems, if at all… I can answer it only by explaining why I chose “contemporism” over “humanism” as a label for my values. Humanism was in the running but it has a couple of connotations I don’t like. One is that humanity is essentially good. I think it’s absurd to put a moral label on humanity, good or bad. We can be essentially good only if God finds us to be, and we can be essentially bad only if Original Sin is responsible. But if there is no God, …, etc. I would therefore reject any political system that is premised on the moral nature of humanity. The other connotation is that some social mechanism should exist to ensure “distributive justice.” This means humanists prefer a society in which there are no incidental inequalities in the distribution of goods or wealth. That’s an admirable goal, but the bureaucratic costs of achieving it are unsupportable. Social justice, which includes distributive justice, is an ideal that can only be approximated. To do so, the law must take history and culture into account and prescribe what will most likely have socially constructive results. In other words, I would have humanists redefine themselves as pragmatists. When that day comes, I will no longer belong to a group of one.

Current of sadness

Last week on the Charlie Rose show, I saw an interview with Robert Redford. The principal subject was Redford’s new movie, All Is Lost (another survival drama). Toward the end of the interview, Rose asked about his interest in the problems afflicting people today. Redford abruptly turned solemn and, without preamble, offered this: “Life is essentially sad…  it has great moments of happiness; it has great moments of joy… but sadness is like a current running through life.” I gaped at the TV. Life is essentially sad! That’s a taboo thought. No one is supposed to utter it, especially on American television. In this land of pursuing happiness, if you haven’t achieved it or given that appearance, you’re a loser. Moreover, this is a Christian nation, probably the most ardently Christian in the world. If the certainty of God’s love, redemption from sin, and everlasting life don’t put a smile on your face and a spring in your step, you’re the worst kind of ingrate.

Though I know nothing of Redford’s personal life, I’m prepared to guess that he’s not a Christian. No, a person who faces life’s sadness with such frankness would have to be a Jew, a Buddhist, or an atheist. Jews are theists—though I’ve heard some claim otherwise!—with a focus on the here and now much more than on the hereafter. In fact, Reform Jews reject the notion of an afterlife altogether. More to the point, the millennia of Jewish history are replete with periods of shunning, abuse, and violence. Sadness to them is a stalker. When he makes an appearance, a Jew can only say, “Ah, it’s you again.”

Buddhists believe that suffering is an integral part of existence. Life isn’t essentially sad; it’s pervasively sad. They don’t have a religion so much as a coping strategy, a behavioral prescription for dealing with suffering. I commend Buddhists for the discipline to look at life without flinching. They are almost clinical in their dedication to diagnosis and cure. That said, I find Buddhism inherently flawed. Striving so intently to put a lid on suffering must in itself cause suffering. Buddhists are, I believe, in a loop of self-repression. Worse yet, they imagine that they can exit the loop by practicing their discipline over innumerable lifetimes—a delusion. So they, like Christians, find their salvation in the unreal.

I most empathize with atheists (agnostics, too—they are simply atheists in hiding). They accept that there is no refuge from misery. That doesn’t mean they are indifferent to it—far from it. Misery can be mitigated. Barbarism can be thwarted, the impoverished can be fed and sheltered, diseases can be cured, broken lives can be mended, and social justice can take root where none exists. Atheism moves this agenda forward by insisting that human existence has no broader context than that existence itself. It isn’t part of a larger context; there is no divine plan. Existence is terribly fragile and ephemeral, and we are its only guardians.

Mitigation of life’s sadness is as close as we can come to victory in our struggle to be happy. The current of sadness cannot be altogether dammed: hearts will continue to be broken, egos will be crushed, dreams will be shattered, trust will be betrayed, youth will be lost, and despair will pay its visits. A different kind of living is impossible to imagine.