Book Tour: Of Gods and Ghosts

More than anything else – more than wonder, gratitude, confusion – the immense complexity of our species, of ourselves and our neighbors, seems to make us impatient. This impatience manifests interpersonally and politically in the way we reduce our enemies to a single dimension, a single motivation. That annoying coworker, whatever she says, is just a narcissist; that recipient of food stamps, whatever her situation, is only lazy or entitled. Intellectually, this impatience with our own complexity manifests, among other things, in our strange cultural preference for materialist theories of consciousness, and in our fascination with declinist grand narratives of history, which always presume that selfishness, idiocy, and cruelty are stronger or realer than anything else.

Adam Roberts’s novel Lake of Darkness posits a flawed but in some ways vastly improved future society, and then, in effect, drops Satan into it. In this future, humans have developed, along with near-infinite productive capacities and stronger versions of artificial intelligence, the ability to travel faster than light. The novel has, as Roberts’s novels always do, a fascinating and plausible-sounding technical explanation for all of its wonders, albeit one that I could only distantly follow. The attainment of such speed has scrambled the traditional calculations of war. How do you plan the effects of an attack if cause has been severed from effect? So war itself has died out. People instead handle conflict through exit: you just go start your own space colony where everyone does things your way. In this fashion, Roberts’s future has achieved what some people would see as the ultimate in secularity, while at the same time, billions of religious people, of every sort, perhaps more than have ever existed before, continue to spread themselves across all sorts of planets. Nobody has to labor, but most people choose to work anyway. Wrongdoers are rehabilitated rather than punished. I know that so far it sounds pretty good, but here’s the tradeoff: most adults don’t know how to read. Why bother, when the AIs can give you a reasonable explanation?

Satan, when he appears – he lives in black hole – makes every criticism of this diverse and technologically accomplished heterotopia that religious conservatives have ever made of liberal democracies. He says that the people are lazy and trivial. “You do not work,” he says. To know ourselves, to achieve ourselves, he says, we need violence and suffering. More than these, we need necessity: we need need itself. By the point in the novel, when he says these things, readers, whatever our political or metaphysical conditions, have probably at least thought a few of them, because some version of these assumptions turn up in worldviews of every kind, and because the characters in this book, sympathetic as they are, are often a little ridiculous, like us. The devil sculpts a great lie out of many petty truths. The parts of the novel where he speaks, tempting a highly accomplished, but lonely and depressed, member of the society to violently rebel against it, are uniquely upsetting. You find yourself mentally rebutting him, which is already a mistake. (If you find yourself mostly agreeing with him, you have lost the plot.) The idea that we need violence and suffering is a retreat from the complexity of finding out who we are and what we want, not an embracing of it.

I am describing one thematic strand of the novel. In truth, Lake of Darkness is extraordinarily rich, even by Adam Roberts standards. There are several excellent novels here, and they more or less get along, with some creative tension, much like the various topoi in Roberts’s heterotopia. One of these novels is about a shallow society, dying of hubris and of an insufficiency of self-knowledge, unable to recognize pride or aggression even when they reach dangerous levels. One of them is about the ways loneliness is still possible even under relatively utopian conditions. One of them is a thrilling and grown-up rewrite of the 1979 Disney movie The Black Hole. All of them are wickedly satirical, pants-wettingly frightening, and deeply sad by turns. The illiteracy of his future society gives Roberts a chance to indulge his love of Joyce- and Burgess-style deformation of the language. (The characters pilot “startships” and refer to the classic children’s novel Alias in Wonderland.) That Roberts, who can do humor, pathos, style, and big ideas with such dazzling effectiveness, in book after book, is not already universally acknowledged as one of the finest living English-language writers is probably another effect of our fear of wonderful and complex things.

If Lake of Darkness asks whether Satan could live in a black hole, David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods takes place in a full-blown Intermundium: the mythical side-realm in between the worlds, where temporarily unemployed gods live and drink and have their being. Here, one afternoon, Psyche, Eros, Hermes, and Hephaistos find themselves debating the nature of mind and life. This is how you write a philosophical treatise, when you’re David Bentley Hart: as a spirited, friendly fight between gods.

And All Things is a philosophical treatise, a serious and convincing one, even though both its arguments and its form are calculated to inflict maximum pain upon devotees of the Analytic way. Psyche and Eros, soul and love, believe the following: “All rational activity, from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind’s constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God.” Simple enough. Hermes, the messenger, the god of hermeneutics, agrees with them, and he particularly insists upon the irreducible complexity of language: “Language is nothing but intentionality, purposive meaning communicated in signs. It’s a world alongside the world, so to speak, or a plane of reality continuously hovering above the physical plane, a plane in which meaning is generated and shared entirely by meaning.” Hephaistos, that dealer with fires and elements and maker of marvelous automata, disagrees. He is a modern: he wants to entertain the possibility that consciousness is just another product of the world’s endless and directionless mechanical evolution. Reductionist methodology has served science well, up to a point: why can’t it serve metaphysics too?

All four gods know everything a person could want to know about the contemporary state of discussion surrounding these topics. They’ve read Hume and Kant and Descartes and Chalmers and Chomsky, and they freely cite the theological traditions of Hinduism and Christianity – though they’re still a little touchy about the religion that supplanted them. They know all about the famous Libet experiments, which supposedly disproved the existence of free will. They also know more than you’d expect about quantum physics. I was especially beguiled (to use one of Hart’s favorite words) by one section of the book where Psyche uses modern physics, with its uncertainty principles and its various forms of dependence on an observer, to argue that: “Maybe nothing fully exists except as made manifest in thought, just as mentality exists only in being the site of the world’s manifestation of itself.”

If All Things Are Full of Gods sounds to you like it’s a decent amount of work to read, you’re right. (The ascent is made somewhat easier if you read, or reread, Hart’s earlier The Experience of God, also maybe You Are Gods.) If it sounds boring, though, then may I suggest, ever so humbly, that you’re not paying enough attention. When we think about our own minds, what they do routinely – the way they compose a world out of an impossible chaos of information – it’s incomprehensible. This book is a compendium of arguments about the mind, the soul, and the body, and a useful exercise for reminding readers that we have, that we are, all of them. Early in the book, Hephaistos wryly observes that, if we appreciated our most basic mental capacities as fully as Psyche wants us to, we would live in a state of rapture incompatible with getting anything done. He’s right. This book, read carefully, will bring you a little closer to that state.

In the later chapters of All Things, as in much of Hart’s recent work, a certain melancholy descends. The mechanical view of nature has been too successful – it hasn’t explained the world, but it has partially destroyed it. The sacred groves are razed; the seelie folk have gone elsewhere. This was the subject of many moving discussions between Hart and (an imaginary version of?) his late dog Roland, in 2021’s Roland In Moonlight, one of my favorites of Hart’s books. And perhaps he’s right. After all, Roland, who may or may not actually have known how to talk but who was most certainly a real dog, is no longer with us, as devoted readers of Hart’s Substack already know. That’s one less enchantment in the universe. (We lost our cat Scarlett around the same time; she couldn’t talk, but she was still magic.)

As mood, the idea of disenchantment makes sense to me. As argument, it really doesn’t. I am as Protestant as they come, and, the older I get, the more I appreciate liberalism (as method if not as metaphysical map) – it’s like reductionism in that way, a needed methodological kludge. To hear Max Weber and his theologian-fans tell it, I have always lived in the iron cage. But despite these deplorable deficiencies on my part, I have always lived in a thoroughly enchanted universe. I don’t think it’s in our power to disenchant anything. I think it’s in our power to kill stuff, but that’s different. If one of our idiot world leaders ever pushes the button, our ghosts will wander an irradiated landscape, howling in rage and regret, but they will be ghosts and they will wander, and even if they don’t, it will all be a thought in the mind of God.

Joy Williams unites two sorts of disenchantment – the actual destruction of our habitat and the attenuation of capital-M Meaning itself – in her recent work. Her superb 2021 novel Harrow examined people living in the absence of an unspecified disaster – a hotter and less populated world, but also one where things like individuality and significance seemed themselves to be dying. She picks up this thread in her recent Concerning the Future of Souls, a collection of extremely short stories. Having given us, in her last collection, 99 Stories of God, she now turns her attention to God’s support staff. Many of these stories concern Azrael, the figure from medieval Jewish and (more so) Muslim tradition whose job is to conduct the souls of the recently dead to wherever it is they go. He conducts such distinguished souls as Vladimir Nabokov’s and, one of the book’s most effective little sketches, Thomas Merton’s. He observes the deaths of non-human beings, too, such as forests: “The forest had been a living being and then it was not.” The Devil appears here and there, less scary than in Roberts’s novel but equally loquacious. In this book he seems a little exhausted, too. Maybe he’s just tired of winning, to borrow a phrase, because the world has become distinctly smaller and deader. “Everything he stood for was running along on its own, requiring very little involvement on his part,” Williams writes. The book offers only the consolation of Williams’s meticulous style and her pitch-dark humor. These are, however, considerable enchantments.