36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Goldstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reason in a Sea of Faith

Rebecca Goldstein knows academics and academic celebrities. She is after all both. So she knows the drill within the ivy covered walls and on the production set. She also understands the psychology. In no other line of work is the link between professional ambition and personal neurosis closer than in making one’s living with the mind. How could it be otherwise when the organ in question is central to both? Each chapter explores a distinct variety of neurotic behaviour in a world in which the mind itself has become a divinely tinged fetish.

The life of a doctoral graduate student, the academic in waiting, is especially neurotic. Some want an “inner life”; others are fascinated by and strive toward ‘genius’; still others are merely avoiding the possibility of commercial competition or manual toil. Not yet with a mind officially endorsed as professional, but also alien to the hoi pilloi of those in gainful employment, the graduate student is a sort of zombie with an ontology “somewhere between the angels and human beings.” In short, the first step in becoming a professional thinker is to join a congregation of like-minded neurotics.

The second step is to accept a source of intellectual salvation, a messiah or guru called the Supervisor. The fate of the aspiring intellect rests entirely in the hands of the Supervisor, beyond whom there is no appeal. Until the Supervisor gives his blessing, the student might be forced into the intellectual peonage of research assistant; required to attend assiduously to ego-stroking on demand; or ignored entirely for extended periods. Rigid loyalty to the messianic message is essential for one’s progress within the congregation (at Oxford, the ultimate governing body, consisting of all established academics is in fact called simply Congregation).

Only the neurotic would apply for and accept such status. And the neurosis has to be serious indeed to stay in it for an indeterminate length of time during which one’s life is on hold: “Genius itself is diseased and self-destructive, antisocial and ill-mannered. It’s also the only thing that redeems us.” This approach/avoidance contradiction is the essence of graduate studies, a horrible trap of one’s own making. One of Goldstein’s characters has made a career out of such self destruction: he “had always had a rigorous bent to his mind. He’d come to identify this as his major problem... It was why, after a full dozen years, he was still a graduate student, which was to be something a little less than human, the determination of his life for someone else to decide.”

What qualifies as a ‘significant contribution’ to one’s field of knowledge is entirely arbitrary. Innovation signifies disrespect for one’s intellectual betters. Reformulating some disciplinary truism is pedestrian. The path between the two is narrow and precipitous. Many are called but few are chosen. The least dedicated doctoral candidates leave the life of protected persecution; those who remain will likely consider suicide at frequent intervals as an option to reduce the feelings of incipient madness. The entire experience has one functional objective: to eliminate confidence. It is boot camp for the mind. Cass, the protagonist, has the searing memory from his graduate training of a profound inadequacy which has never left him: “Wherever he turned, he was confronted by the vast ignorance that made him unentitled to be a student of Faith, Literature, and Values.”

Not that it gets much better after one’s academic gonads are screwed in by an examining committee, probably stacked by the Supervisor. The professional academic game is as perilous as the preparation for it. Style, fashion, contacts, and luck are far more important than in the commercial world. And unlike the ecclesiastical world from which the institution of the university emerged, there are few career paths that are dependent upon dogmatic credentials. Results, after all, are measured not in terms of objective metrics like sales or profits or successful deals, or doctrinal orthodoxy but in terms of the opinions of one’s colleagues and peers, most of whom have reason to fear or resent one’s success. Academia doesn’t expand like business, making room by getting bigger; it expands by refining its specialisms, and each of these is a zero-sum game - every winner has its loser.

Coming out on top in academia is often a sudden event - very unlike the slow rise up a corporate ladder. Suddenly finding the light of notoriety may not be any less worrisome than obscurity. As Goldstein’s protagonist finds, “The more sophisticated you are, the more annotated your mental life, the more taken aback you’re likely to feel, seeing what the world’s lurch has brought to light, thrusting up beliefs and desires you had assumed belonged to an earlier stage of human development.” In short, you feel like a babe in the woods with absolutely no clue about how to feel or act in the circumstances: “[Cass] did something that won him someone else’s life, a better life, a more brilliant life, a life beyond all the ones he had wished for in the pounding obscurity of all his yearnings, because all of this, this, this, THIS couldn’t belong to him.”

So being a professional academic demands at least one central virtue: faith. Faith in what specific object is open to question. One’s abilities? The call to genius? The possibility of celebrity? A higher power? Whatever it is, it is beyond any rationality. And whatever else it ismight be, faith announces itself in response to the question ‘Why are you doing this?’ with the answer ‘Because’. Such a response is literally the end of reason but not the end of thought. Taking such a response seriously can lead to all sorts of thoughts that are commonly classified as metaphysical or spiritual. These thoughts may not be ‘useful’ but they seem to be irrepressible and they are certainly perennial. Whether they are also identifiably religious in any sense is entirely beside the point. They are part of being a human being.

Put another way, faith is constituted by the presumptions we make about the world that we dare not question in the normal course of our lives. It is difficult to distinguish the faith of an academic from an obsession in other people. Without obsessive faith in intellect nothing is possible; but having it guarantees nothing except bad pay, family tension and another generation of hopeful intellects to torture. Only when we summon up the courage (and the time) to confront what these presumptions have made of our lives, do we have a chance of understanding what we are.

“Everybody has written or is planning to write a book,” is a necessary academic truism. How ultimately depressing it is to think that the only reason academics read is to write something. Far more edifying to think they might read in order to explore whatever it is they might have faith in, and thereby themselves. I think this might be Goldstein’s point: academic neuroses may have their virtuous aspects. Let us hope, if not with faith then at least with charity.

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