Woody Allen’s Curious Intellectualism

Woody Allen films are famous for their existential comedy. On the one hand, these films tend to feature the Woody Allen character, a hyper-rational, neurotic atheist and existentialist who fears death and regards life as absurdly unfair. On the other hand, this character is highly sexual and instead of ascetically retreating from life, he finds humour in tragic situations, expressing that humour in wry one-liners. Most of his films mine this paradox, but Whatever Works, starring Larry David as the Woody Allen character, called Boris, neatly summarizes what seems Allen’s personal philosophy. No familiarity with this particular movie’s plot is needed to understand Boris’ concluding speech, since this speech could have been inserted into nearly any of his movies.

Boris says, “I totally lucked out. It just shows what meaningless blind chance the universe is. Everybody schemes and dreams to meet the right person, and I jump out a window and land on her [his soul mate]. And a psychic yet! I mean, come on, talk about the irrational heart [Boris is a hyper-rationalist physicist who loves her in spite of himself]...I happen to hate New year's celebrations. Everybody desperate to have fun. Trying to celebrate in some pathetic little way. Celebrate what? A step closer to the grave? That's why I can't say enough times, whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself, it's by no means all up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck than you'd like to admit. Christ, you know the odds of your father's one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that made you? Don't think about it, you'll have a panic attack.” (Whatever Works script)

This speech refers both to dark existentialism (the inevitability of death) and to the need for happiness and sexuality, to life’s unfairness (success’ dependence on luck) and to the possibility of grace. Evidently, the film’s title, “Whatever Works,” is meant to call to mind a pragmatic amoralist’s libertinism, the license to exploit nature’s inhumanity, not for evil but for good--which Allen assumes to be mainly the pursuit of personal pleasure with a life partner. As evidenced by his cerebral, philosophical humour and his scandalous love life, Woody Allen’s movies seem vehicles for preaching his personal wisdom, if not autobiographies.

New Atheist and Spiritual Atheist in Dialogue

New Atheist: What’s this I hear about you calling yourself a “spiritual atheist”? Are you a recent convert from some religion and can’t bring yourself all the way to a rational standpoint? Or maybe you’re a philosophical fellow who has to muddy all waters to leave work for academics of your ilk.

Spiritual Atheist: Neither. I grew up in a secular household and although I do read philosophy, I’m no partisan defender of its current academic form. On the contrary, for all the social good professional philosophers presently do, they might as well close up shop.

NA: Ah, then you must be a closet mystic, an accommodationist who thinks religion and science can live happily together, because there are some mysteries that science or reason more generally will never solve. In other words, you’re addicted to woo.

Spirituality as Woo

SA: Well, that’s a lot of loaded rhetoric. What do you mean by “woo,” for example?

NA: Just what I said: you want to preserve mysteries by using obscure notions that are supposed to build bridges between religion and science.

SA: More loaded rhetoric and ad hominem. Even if I were “addicted” to Mystery, shouldn’t you feel embarrassed as a so-called rationalist to stoop to such a postmodern fallacy, confusing the psychological origin of an idea with its epistemic merit?

NA: Fine, then, ditch the rhetoric! Sheesh! Who says the debate about atheism can’t be entertaining?

Dirge in the Undead God

The undead Creator writhes and lurches,

God of all but unsung in churches;

Entombed in vacuum its limbs decay,

Flesh the stuff of the Milky Way;

Commanded by moans the cosmos unfurls,

Drooling worlds in Fibonacci swirls;

Unaware, its galactic muscles flex,

Black maws swallowing its Hydra-like necks;

Chambers of its sprawling heart, the stars

Send life-blood to the god’s avatars

The pawns of Earth, proud and impious,

Deem themselves divine, ticks in God’s carcass;

Before their eyes the lifeless body moves:

Stars shine, wind blows and rain falls, which proves

That nature’s God, no spirit required,

The monstrous plenum from the first expired

The Creator evolved a head, the Earth,

Yet the minds thereon are tasked not to birth

Whole worlds but to behold the rotting face,

Tattered wings, shattered carapace.

Could a noble soul be found confined

To carrion or mustn’t that soul be resigned

To horror and folly, as a senile old man

Dines on the dung in his foul bedpan?

Or as a mad fish, loathing the sea,

Flops on land, comically free?

The Rich, Full Life

Among the throngs of shiny, happy people, there’s an upper tier in which are seated those renowned for their more monumental contentment: not only are these blessed few pleased with their lot and so unmoved by empathy for the suffering masses and undisturbed by knowledge of our existential predicament, but they’ve managed to accrue for themselves what we dub a Rich, Full Life (RFL). (See Happiness.) These champions of egotism are personally fulfilled, to be sure, but that understates the completeness of their triumph, since they’re happy many times over, as it were. The happiness of a hundred ordinary folks doesn’t equal that of a single hero who’s blessed with an RFL, who has traveled the whole world, garnered a bewildering variety of experiences, succeeded in numerous fields, loved and been loved by countless life partners.

Enduring their torments far beyond that upper tier and the herd of cheerful consumers and pragmatists, the inured losers moan in agony, crying in despair, trembling in horror. The worst of these are said to be cursed with the opposite of the RFL, namely with an Empty, Wasted one (EWL). Sometimes intentionally withdrawing from the race to flourish, these self-tortured existentialists, mystical ascetics, and assorted omega men and women are unhappy, to be sure; but time also passes them by, as do opportunities for advancement, and so their mind comes to resemble a barren echo chamber filled by their harping inner voice, bereft of memories of mountains climbed, friends and lovers enjoyed, conventional challenges met, or luxuries consumed. All the struggles of their ancestors have led, pitifully and tragically, to their withdrawal, to their dropping of the torch. (See Procreation for Ancestors.)

Such is my dramatic way of drawing the politically correct distinction between the happiest and unhappiest people. But let’s look closer at this pair of categories. Much of the meaning of an RFL and of an EWL is relative: the person with a wide variety of enjoyments and successes is deemed all the happier by comparison with the person with few if any of them. An RFL is praised and an EWL is pitied because they’re so far apart from each other: the happiest people have won the race only by leaving far behind the losers, and the unhappiest are those who can regret that they haven’t seen or done as much as the winners. Another way to frame the distinction is to rank each life next to the plethora of potential experiences that humans can have, in which case the happiest are those who have at least a representative sample of those total experiences, while the unhappiest are subhuman in that their accomplishments fall below that threshold.

Should Atheists Mourn the Death of God?

A Catholic priest, Robert Barron, criticized the exuberance of New Atheists, contrasting the New Atheist’s slogan, “There’s probably no God; now stop worrying and enjoy your life,” with the dark existentialism of earlier atheists like Nietzsche and Camus. According to Barron, only the existential atheists follow atheism to its logical conclusions, that life is meaningless, that there’s no hope, and as Dostoevsky implied, that everything is permitted. The biologist and New Atheistic blogger Jerry Coyne replied as follows:

The answer of course, is that we, not a sky-father, give life its meaning, and can find joy and fulfillment in the limited time we have. Is that “frivolous”? I don’t think so. Given our finite span, why spend our time being dolorous, weighed down by the supposed futility of life? There is so much beauty and love to be had, not to mention friendship, books, music, food, drink, and cats; and I for one am happy to be happy about these things.

I think most New Atheists would agree with Coyne. And of course, as a practical, political matter, the bus slogan is fine because it militates against the theist’s conviction that atheism is a highway to hell. In the sociopolitical context of the war between atheists and theists, exaggerated cheeriness in New Atheism is defensible on what Dawkins calls strategic grounds.

New Atheism’s Naturalization of Values

But as to the substance of the disagreement between existential and New Atheists, the memes (prepackaged platitudes) contained in Coyne’s response hardly settle the matter. The theist contends that if atheism is true, life has no meaning and therefore the atheist has no right to be merry. The New Atheist replies that while there may be no higher, transcendent meaning, value or purpose of our life, there are still local, subjective meanings dependent on our interests. Thus, Coyne finds meaning in books, cats, and so forth, and that’s why he’s happy. The theist can then say that this merely raises the further question of whether the atheist’s particular interests ought to be pursued, or whether her values are justifiable. If there’s no higher authority, why isn’t everything permitted? Coyne values music, food, and cats, while a serial killer enjoys killing children. If there’s no God, is this all just a matter of taste?

Revenge of the Omega Men

Human societies tend to develop the same underlying structure as that of most other social species. Differences in physical strength and in social connections between many animals solidify at the emergent social level, forming a dominance hierarchy, or pecking order, in which the strongest members or the possessors of the most powerful alliances in the group are given privileged access to food and sex, thus ensuring the proliferation of the most useful genetic lineages. (See Oligarchy.) Ethologists speak of alpha, beta, and omega males, as well as others, to denote the different positions in such a power hierarchy. This classification has filtered down to popular culture, where it’s now prevalent on websites exploring dating, the so-called Game of seducing women, and men’s issues. By way of evolutionary pop psychology, in which quasi-scientific just-so-stories from biology are concocted to explain the nuances of human behaviour, men and women rank men in those ethological terms and speculate on the psychological ramifications of being, say, an alpha man.

Alpha, Beta, and Omega Men

Here, for example, is what I’ve gleaned from perusing some of those websites about how alpha, beta, and omega men understand each other and themselves. (See, for example, Roissy’s blog, and these AskMen and Slate articles.) Ethologically, an alpha male is at the top of his dominance hierarchy, leading the group, eating first when food is obtained, and given exclusive or otherwise special access to the females. In the Game sub-culture, scientistic men contend that successful sexual hookups and even marriages can be literally engineered with insights from evolutionary psychology, reducing human interactions to moves in a game and concomitantly objectifying the players. Alpha men are often lauded as the winners of this game, because they’ve mastered the trick of wresting sex from the greatest quantity of the highest quality of women. Arguably, though, an alpha’s victory is naturally delusory, since his superficial pleasures mask his slavery to his self-imposed, often fallacious imperative to serve in the process of spreading his genes, at the cost of losing out on the richer pleasures from a long-term sexual relationship, which the alpha male is ill-equipped to earn.

Individualism and the Sexual Attraction of Opposites

In Plato’s dialogue “Symposium,” Aristophanes delivers a humorous speech that provides a mythical origin of sexual attraction. Aristophanes explains the romantic seeking for our complement in someone else, for our so-called soul mate, by imagining that humans were once physically very different: each member of an earlier form of our species had two heads, four arms, and four legs. As in the biblical Tower of Babel story, these creatures tried to storm heaven, and so the gods punished them, not by fragmenting their language, but by splitting each prehuman in two, condemning each of us now to long for reunion with our other half.

Indeed, human sexual attraction is ripe for such satire, partly because of sexuality’s conflict with the modern ideology of individualism. On the one hand, there’s a natural heterosexual instinct, which causes most men and women to bond hormonally with a member of the opposite sex. The differences between the sexes are psychological as well as biological: notoriously, men and women think differently, thanks to our different hormones and evolutionary social roles; moreover, these gendered thought pattern are often opposed to each other. For example, while some female politicians, such as Margaret Thatcher, are just as capable of masculine vices as male ones, women are often noted for their disinclination to fall into the same traps as men when exercising political power. While testosterone-filled, often sociopathic men aggressively compete for selfish advantage in a power hierarchy, estrogen-filled, baby-bonded women use their greater capacity for empathy to cooperate with their opponents to reach political compromises. The point, though, is that most men and women, who are psychologically at odds with each other, are naturally compelled to be yoked with such opponents, to live together as we fulfill our biological “function” of raising a family and preserving our genes after our death.

On the other hand, modern men and women are beholden to the values of individualism, believing we’re each sovereign agents with rights of ownership over our private property, including our own bodies. This ideology is a secularized form of Western monotheism, substituting the rational, technoscientifically creative human for the divine Creator of the universe. Modernists believe that our intelligence, freedom, and consciousness dignify us, giving us intrinsic value and inalienable rights. This atomistic view of human nature glorifies the ego, the self-conscious, logical, and pragmatic side of ourselves that was so instrumental in the Scientific Revolution and that’s celebrated in capitalistic democracies. According to the commonplace selective reading of Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand, for example, social Darwinian capitalism is supposed to unleash the unintended altruistic consequences of the practically necessary vice of egoism (selfishness). The legitimacy of this ideology has come into question in our so-called postmodern period, due to hyper-skepticism, feminism, the hollowness of utopian rationalism, and the familiar oligarchic reality of individualistic societies. Nevertheless, the myths of secular individualism are the most influential replacements for those of anachronistic theism. (See Modernism and Postmodernism.)

Can Evil Derive from Atheism?

I’ve argued that for propaganda purposes, many New Atheists whitewash the social consequences of atheism, ignoring more pessimistic forms like Nietzsche’s existentialism and Lovecraft’s cosmicism. Moreover, scientific atheists lack respect for philosophy and thus have low standards of argument in nonscientific debates, including the inevitably philosophical debate between atheists and theists. These two deficits combine to produce the howler that is the New Atheist’s frequent response to the theist’s tedious rejoinder to the Problem of Evil, the rejoinder being that in the last century atheists are responsible for their own horrifying measure of evil (Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc). This response to the classic theistic problem of evil, that a benevolent God wouldn’t allow so much natural and human suffering and therefore doesn’t exist as defined, takes the form of the Tu quoque fallacy, amounting to the childish outburst, “Yeah? Well so are you!” The problem of evil for theists isn’t just the pragmatic one, that religion has caused much violence and is thus especially dangerous given advances in weapons of mass destruction. The heart of the problem is that exoteric definitions of God, which rely on weak metaphors, are bound to be absurd. The facts that not all evil derives from religion and that atheists too can be evil have no bearing on that problem.

But one New Atheistic response to this counter-charge is highly revealing and annoying. The response seems to originate from Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, in which he says that even were Stalin and Hitler both atheists, their atheism would have been as causally relevant to their evil as the fact that they both had moustaches. “What matters,” he says, “is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does” (309). And at the end of that section, Dawkins, the brilliant writer that he is, might have birthed the meme so often repeated in these discussions, that “Individual atheists may do evil things, but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism” (315, my emphasis). 

Note the difference in Sam Harris’ handling of the issue in his book, The End of Faith, in which he blames evil on faith in irrational dogmas. Either secular or religious ideologies, he says, can turn people into depraved killing machines, but this just testifies “to the dangers of not thinking critically enough” about either sort of ideology (231). Indeed, Harris avers, “Genocidal projects tend not to reflect the rationality of their perpetrators simply because there are no good reasons to kill peaceful people indiscriminately” (79). In its own way, this response is just as wrongheaded as Dawkins’.

Philosophy and Social Engineering

Most of what’s said in public consists of various kinds of lies, including half-truths, spin-doctoring, lies of omission, self-delusions, exaggerations, equivocations, evasions, distortions, white lies, frauds, and other pretenses. Often, a professional or public figure has no beliefs on some issue but only uninformed opinion, and merely pretends to know what she’s talking about to save face or to manipulate an audience. There’s an old distinction, originating in Plato’s dialogues, between the philosopher and the sophist. The philosopher loves knowledge more than opinion, while the sophist makes a business of selling or otherwise persuading with useful works of rhetoric. The sophist doesn’t lie exactly, but merely denies that truth is relevant to business. Regardless of whether Plato’s distinction was biased in favour of Socrates, there’s a very important, similar difference between two present-day characters, which I’ll call those of The Philosopher and of The Social Engineer.

Philosophy, Humility, and Truth

By “philosopher,” I don’t mean an academic necessarily, whose profession is to teach philosophy; I’m speaking rather of philosophy in a psychological sense. Psychologically, some people are preoccupied with the task of creating a perfect map of reality. This sort of philosopher may be intellectually curious or perhaps possessed of a religious faith that promises a convergence of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Alternatively, the philosopher may have a sort of death wish, a suspicion that the ultimate truth will be horrible to know, but that we should annihilate ourselves with that knowledge like moths rushing to the flame.

Whatever her motivation, the philosopher assumes there’s a special relationship between the rational mind and the rest of the world: such a mind can know the facts. Although rational knowing here isn’t the biblical kind of knowing, which is to say a sexual experience between persons, the philosopher assumes that the rational mind does possess a sort of key that unlocks nature’s door or a mirror that reflects the world. Just as convention dictates that men and women have a functionally correct relationship between their sex organs, the philosopher assumes that the rational mind can be properly or improperly related to the external world. Moreover, just as sexist cultures dictate that men are active while women are passive, the philosopher’s metaphor implies that the rational mind is masculine in aggressively seeking to know the world, while the known world passively awaits our attentions (or seduces the scientist with tantalizing clues to solving its mysteries, etc). The key or mirror in question is just the symbol, the word or thought that carries a meaning. Put a set of symbols in the correct order and the key unlocks the door, the mirror captures the light and the Truth shines forth; that is, the sentence or thought agrees with an objective fact.

Sam Harris's Science of Morality: A Case Study of Scientific Atheism

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith was perhaps the first major book in the wave of New Atheist books published after 911. Harris argued for the importance of challenging our so-called private beliefs, since beliefs (mental representations) cause our behaviour and thus have public consequences. He argued also that so-called moderate religion shouldn’t be off-limits to nontheists, since moderates enable more dangerous, fundamentalist religion by contending that since religion has a harmless form, religion itself is never a primary cause of violence. That book defended a commonsense realist philosophy, according to which beliefs are made true or false by the facts, and the facts support atheistic naturalism.

Whatever you might think of his earlier case for a certain philosophical perspective, you should be struck by the shift taken by his more recent book, The Moral Landscape, in which he attempts to show that social conflicts between groups who disagree on moral issues aren’t inevitable, because science has the potential to show us the truth about moral values just as science has done with regard to the rest of nature. Harris uses his case for a science of morality as a weapon against religion, since theists claim that religion (along with philosophy) are valuable in part for providing the only conceivable framework that justifies morality; that is, the theist means to bash science-centered nontheism for the latter’s inability to justify morality. In the process of countering this moral argument for theism, however, Harris throws the baby out with the bathwater. If morality is actually in the purview of science, then neither the philosopher nor the theologian can have anything crucial to say about moral issues, just as a chef or a politician has no authority to speak about biology or physics.

Unfortunately, Harris’s case for scientific morality conforms to the positivist’s pattern of ironically celebrating science with a philosophy that must be kept in the shadows. In Harris’s case, he should have two reasons not to call attention to the philosophical nature of his arguments for scientific morality. First, those arguments would demonstrate that there is a crucial philosophical debate about morality after all, namely the debate about whether morality can be scientifically justified; the nature of this meta-debate, in turn, prevents a fulsome, Scientistic worship of science at the expense of philosophy. Second, his arguments happen to be badly flawed, often resting on evasive verbal tricks or contradicting each other, due presumably to his contempt for philosophy and thus for its ideals of clarity and rigorous logic even in discussions of nonscientific issues. Harris’s case for scientific morality, therefore, illustrates the perils of scientific, as opposed to philosophical, atheism.