Heirs to the Wreckage

The most common misconception of Atheism is that we are nihilists. Oftentimes, when conversing with others, my attempts to deny that I am devoid of any spirituality lead to them replying, “Ah, then you’re agnostic, why didn’t you say so?”, as if that remotely changes anything about my beliefs. I never said anything about not believing in a higher power, for I know there is one. Light, heat, conditions so perfectly formed so as to support life, evolution so deliberately and meticulously facilitated to transform an organism. That science has iterated to a point where it can explain such phenomena does not negate the majesty of them. How can one imagine our planet, precariously caught in the grip of gravity amidst a vast darkness, and not see such titanic deliberate forces as divine? The questions of whether these forces constitute a consciousness or entity that mirrors humanity I happily leave to the churchgoers. But in any case, for me it is the sheer unthinkable scale of the universe in all its quiet and blackness, the seemingly limitless light of the sun, and the unreadable but coherent will of nature that signify higher powers. The titanic and subtle forces that stitch together our world, things that we will never fully understand in entirety.

So if I say I am an atheist, it is a denial of the God of organized religions, the God of Institutions. It is a political disavowal, but also very much a spiritually reasoned one. For it makes no sense to me that the powers at work are ordered by a single being that so closely parallels our species of hairless primates. And even if that were true, it seems doubly uncertain that this being would interest itself in our troubled race much as the deities of religion do. The universe does not need a consciousness or a mind that resembles that of humanity, it is powerful nonetheless. If I had to pick one excellent interpretation of the Divine, it is without a doubt the ineffable (such as the ineffable Dao)- that which exists but cannot be named. Something that we can only pluck at, allude to in a roundabout way, but nobody can name or know its full nature. Divorced from the tyrannies of organized religion, if such people choose to worship “God” or anything else as a proxy or reference point for the unnameable thing, I will not tell them they are wrong.

The reason I mention this is I’ve recently felt fleeting instances of thanatophobia, an uncanny terror of death. Understand that this fear does not originate from any state of precarity or risk in my life, it assails me in the quiet of my own room. I feel it in the 4 dark walls of my home, in the stillness of the air, in how deathly and inert my environment already seems. For one, it does not seem that it is the actual act of dying that scares people. For from what we understand, death has the potential to be quite peaceful, even euphoric (despite the many traumatic ways to die). No, it is the aftermath that terrifies us. We are petrified when we ask the contradictory question: what does non-existence feel like? What is it like to be nothing, perhaps until the end of time and beyond? It is one of those things that is impossible to think through, perhaps it is unthinkable for the living. All we have ever known is an extant state of being. The secrets of un-being, perhaps, are not for the living to contemplate. After experiencing the horror I think every child goes through when they discover the concept of death for the first time, the way I often comforted myself was by comparing my own existence to a book. The book must end at some point, lest the events become meaningless and the reader is condemned to an eternity of endless reading- a modern Sisyphus-like torture.

Then, I arrive at the true origin of my fear, the content of the book. Because I know that someday, when I’ve experienced everything that life has to offer, sampled all the tastes I can, and given myself to a worthy project, I’d be at peace with going gently into the good night. But at the moment, I do not feel on-track to reaching that state. I dread a seemingly endless train of unemployment, instability, sporadic paychecks, odd jobs, meaning and purpose denied to me as my time whittles away. Or, I imagine an monotonous grind in a “dead-end” career, one where I forsake all my dreams- as vague and uncoordinated as they are- and watch myself age from 21 to 45 while pumping hour after hour into something that contributes to no greater accomplishment or passion. Arguably, a 21 year old should not be staring down the barrel in this way. But even so, the rhetoric of our society characterizes one’s 20s as if they were on a sloped precipice: once you slide down you snowball into the rest of life, and there is no going back. This is why I also fear the notion that college is the best few years of one’s life; I am, in perhaps thanatophobic fashion, succumbing to the fear that nothing better lies ahead.

Terry Eagleton wrote a book known as Hope without Optimism, which I’m reading now. The argument I find most compelling is the admonishment against so-called “rational optimism”, framed explicitly in an ecological-marxist context. Rational optimism, is, let’s say, the belief that climate change will eventually work itself out if the status quo remains. Trust in informed consumerism, trust in neoliberal respectability (which is withering away under Trump’s vigil), and all will turn out fine. And it is clear that the cultural dissemination of rational optimism, is in large part accomplished by the reduction of the world to informatics. Violence is banalized so much so that we view it livestream on CNN now, climate change and poverty are neutered by how they appear to us in statistical form. Perhaps rational optimism is so easy to adopt because our forms of data shield us from true political reckoning like a bomb shelter. Eagleton speaks of a hope borne in acknowledgment of risk, of scarcity, of mourning the fantasy-world where life would proceed unhindered by threat. I suppose Eagleton isn’t referring to me here. And the threats I perceive that spur my fear of death are not true threats in the immediate sense, more so the ominous possibility of half-realized ambitions and bleak existences. Death lingers, precarity lingers, the possibility that I will fail, and destruction will always exist; we can’t entertain a fantastical existence where these things do not exist, but they can’t hinder the happening of life.