Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Have you ever been caught outside in a rainstorm? I’m old enough to have found myself sheltering in a doorway or under some random tree any number of times. My favorite is when John and I were caught walking back to our rented apartment in Florence after dinner and after dark. It was September and still warm. The tourist crowds were thinning but there were still plenty around. Suddenly the heavens opened up and poured rain. Bolts of lightning illuminated the familiar domes and towers of the old city as we looked on open-mouthed, pressed against a wall under a little overhang. We were quickly drenched as was everyone else who was out that night. When the rain stopped, the streets quickly filled with bedraggled pedestrians, gasping, laughing, exclaiming, barefoot and carrying soggy shoes, shaking water from our eyes — but also exchanging knowing glances. We had all experienced something powerful and awe-inspiring together. And for a moment at least, we were no longer individuals. We were something bigger than our usual selves, all moving toward warm, dry places and hot drinks, glad to be alive, and somehow connected.
Welcome to tonight’s issue of Odd Company, and our continuing quest to understand how to understand each other better!
Everywhere we look, we see these sudden groupings of perfect dance partners. They might be starlings in a murmuration or fish in a school. Stars in a galaxy. Snowflakes in an avalanche. Molecules of water rising together to form a cloud. We don’t always know what starts these groupings or why they eventually dissipate. So much of what we see in the world around us refuses to fit neatly into the metaphor of machinery. How did we get that idea, anyway — that everything works mechanically, with A causing B, and B causing C, in ways a smart person should always be able to work out using rigorous rationality? It came out of the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, which followed the Scientific Revolution, featuring such stars as Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and John Locke.
For the past week or so, I’ve been reading The Psychology of Totalitarianism, a book by the Belgian psychology professor Mattias Desmet. I came to this book and its author innocent of any previous knowledge. I overheard someone listening to a podcast where Desmet was being interviewed, and what he was saying sounded fascinating. In many practical ways, life in the 21st century is better and easier than ever before. So, he was asking, why are we so sad? Why are so many people feeling lonely and angry? His theory is a complete surprise. He thinks it’s because the principles that have guided and sustained us for the past 300 years — the Enlightenment view of the world as a place we will eventually be able to understand completely using the Scientific Method — has begun to fall apart.
Now…I know this is beginning to sound a little far out there. If we can’t trust Science, what can we trust? After all, the study of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology have brought about one miracle after another. Space travel, amazing cures for awful diseases, higher crop yields, computers, to name a few. And there are other principles of the Enlightenment we would never want to give up. Individual liberty, for example. Religious tolerance. The Rule of Law. Democracy.
But over the past fifty years or so, cracks have begun to develop. Maybe you can feel them. I certainly can. As a person with a chronic disease (rheumatoid arthritis), I long ago discovered the limits of modern medicine, and its susceptibility to trends. And now, as the wife of a lung transplant patient, I’m seeing those limits and trends again. We’ve come a long way, but we don’t understand it all, we often understand less than we think we do, and — regrettably — we too often ignore what we don’t understand, or write it off as unimportant. Why is the placebo effect so powerful, for example? Why does acupuncture work? Why does a person’s mental and social state have so much to do with their physical state? How can we explain spontaneous remission?
During the pandemic, we saw some of these issues in action. Credible scientists clearly disagreed about the effectiveness of various treatments and approaches, but once a particular idea caught on, discussion of opposing ideas was shut down. People’s careers were ruined simply because they wondered if we were doing the right things. We’ve seen this in the Global Warming debate as well. Even though there’s a lot of disagreement about how to interpret the data we have and how best to proceed, we don’t hear much about those other ideas because those of us with the loudest voices have decided they are untrue or dangerous and therefore should not be considered. As a person who lives and breathes academia, I see this all the time on campus. Some lines of inquiry are okay; others result in shaming. Sometimes there are good reasons, but quite often there are not.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the traditional mechanical view of the universe, though, is that so many of our greatest scientists have left it behind. I think it was Niels Bohr who said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Quantum theory leaves us with the unnerving possibility that atomic particles may be no more than ideas. The closer we look, the more the mere act of looking changes what we see. As Desmet says, “Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Louis de Broglie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir James Jeans — all of them had a mystical worldview because they were confronted in their research objects with an irresolvable mystery.”
I confess, these ideas kind of make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Ever since I was a kid I have worried that maybe the world was a figment of my imagination, which might be why I ended up becoming a horror writer. (And yes, I was that kind of kid.) I think that on some level, we all sense these cracks in the paradigm that has seemed so solid and reliable for so long. So maybe it’s no wonder we’re seeing movies like The Matrix and Inception. The trouble is that these signs of a coming paradigm shift have left us feeling alone and trapped in lives that may be meaningless. Which makes us susceptible to the feeling of belonging that comes from taking part in mass movements and totalitarian thinking. But that isn’t real belonging, as anyone who has ever tried to stray from a mass movement can tell us. If we have to fit in, we don’t really belong.
One of Mattias Desmet’s most pleasing conclusions is that poetry is the only way to truly understand the world. If you haven’t read much poetry, you might try the work of Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, or Lucille Clifton. Robert Frost is good, too. A poet friend of mine suggested Frances Mayes’ The Discovery of Poetry if you don’t know where else to start. That’s where I started.
In keeping with the idea that the world is probably not what it appears to be, here’s one of the weirdest performances I’ve seen in quite some time. This is the German musician Carolina Eyck performing Rimsky Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” on her trusty theremin. If you find the theremin as mysterious as I do, here’s a little video in which Carolina attempts to explain what the heck a theremin is and how it works. I might add that I think Desmet is mistaken. While poetry is surely one way to understand the world, music is another.
In keeping with the idea that poetry can get us about as close as we can come to understanding the whole shebang, here’s a thought of mine about rain. See you in two weeks, by which time it will be spring, assuming Kepler was right.
THE RAIN?
You said,
”It's the rain!”
As if you had found
the Grail or the Ark,
after fevered months
of seeking.
I recall your eyes as
you said this, bright
in the darkened room,
a flash of lightning
far off.
It's so long ago.
Could that be right?
And what should I do
if it was?