Wishing It So

It was during the joyless middle years of the first Trump era that I started attending Mass. We were living in the Rogers Street house, in a neighborhood cordoned off from the rest of our college town by the intersection of the lake and the river, which created something of a microclimate. In the winter thick fog banks rolled in each morning from the lake, and in the summers the humidity was almost tropical: monstrous plantain lilies extended over the sidewalks, mosquitoes loitered, blood drunk, in the shade, and Persian ivy grew so prolifically across the windows that our apartment was perpetually washed in green light. I was working on a long magazine article about the new religious right and spent a lot of time sitting at our kitchen table, encased in a pair of heavy circumaural headphones, listening to an endless feed of speeches and sermons. The upstairs neighbors had two mastiffs who were left home all day and who barked incessantly and scratched at the floor of their kennel.

It was impossible to do interviews in the apartment, which is why I started spending my afternoons at the public library, where I could reserve a private conference room. Among the people I spoke to were members of the president’s so-called evangelical advisory board, televangelists and hucksters of all stripes who were incapable of answering a direct question and who talked my ear off about how Christians were a persecuted minority, how the president understood the power of prayer, how religious leaders were like the Old Testament prophets, entering the lion’s den of politics to speak truth into the ears of kings. When I asked one of them whether Christian principles conflicted with anything the president did, he thought for a long moment, then said that he personally didn’t like it when the president cursed.

Friends and colleagues said they didn’t understand how I stomached this work. The pageantry of “resistance” was already by that point giving way to news fasts and a fixation on personal boundaries. My husband and I had spent the previous year participating in marches, signing petitions, and attending a community action group downtown where everyone sat at round tables scattered with golf pencils and little scraps of paper on which we could, if we wished, take notes. I remember the little scraps of paper because I recently found dozens of them while cleaning out a desk drawer, artifacts of what seems to me now a more innocent time, scribbled with hieroglyphs I could barely make out: the email address of a man who worked with unions in a neighboring city. The date of an upcoming town hall meeting. A note apprising my husband that we needed to pick up half-and-half on the way home.

We’d first started attending these meetings years earlier, when our city came together to protest a union-busting bill that was proposed by the state legislature. While the national election swelled the ranks and infused the gatherings with an unprecedented level of energy, there was also, as time wore on, a predictable enervation, and a retreat into a familiar brand of wishful thinking. I remember one meeting when a man stood and spoke at length about how we must resist the temptation to compare our time to regimes of the past. This was not Weimar. It was not another Red Scare. It was a blip on the long arc of justice, which was, by and large, trending up. The speech got a lot of applause. It was the kind of thing that people were furiously applauding that year, though I was not convinced that history does not repeat itself. It seemed to me that the current political crisis was partly due to the liberal fantasy that progress is a linear narrative stretching toward some final Parousia, not an aspiration that is, like all aspirations, vulnerable to inertia and relapse. Throughout the late Obama years, I’d been prodded by editors to mention in my articles a Pew survey claiming that religion in America was on the decline, a suggestion I almost always refused.

I believed it was important to remain on speaking terms with the things one has renounced. This is what I said when asked why I’d chosen to write about religion, as though I understood it myself. I’d lost my faith while studying theology at a conservative Bible college in Chicago and published my first articles years later, in graduate school, shortly after I’d gotten sober—some book reviews about obscure theological debates, some personal essays about evangelical youth culture for little magazines—without really thinking about the fact that I was putting my name on them and building a body of work. I was frequently irritated by the sloppiness of cultural criticism about evangelicalism, which was prone to cheap shots and consistently missed the point, and I saw my writing as an attempt to correct premises. I occasionally wrote about other topics, too, especially technology, which had been a longtime fascination of mine, but it was the religious criticism that began to be solicited by the big magazines.

I was often told that this work was unusual for its “nuance” and “restraint,” for the fact that it did not dismiss religious people as the dupes of medieval superstition but took their beliefs seriously. It’s true that in the course of criticizing Christians, I often found myself defending Christianity. It was not a deliberate strategy, though I can see now that many of my essays hinged on the same conceit: I simply demonstrated how believers were neglecting to live up to their own values, how they pandered to young people, allowed themselves to become political pawns, were embarrassed by the most radical aspects of Jesus’ teachings, and failed to offer a legitimate alternative to the neoliberal vacuity known as the “marketplace of ideas,” which is to say the market. At some point I had, much to my surprise, become fiercely protective of the Christianity I had renounced. The more disgusted I became by the gross capitulation of faith leaders, their sycophancy and spinelessness, their cynical marriage of convenience with a president they regarded as a pagan king, the more I came to idolize some mythically pure version of the faith that existed beneath these distortions.

It was sometime that fall, on a cold and rainy day—I remember that I was carrying an umbrella—that I was sitting in the back pew of the big cathedral downtown, waiting for the opening procession, when I heard a voice speak from behind, almost in my ear: “God can still see you all the way back here.”

Before I could turn around, he was at my side: a priest in full vestments, gesturing toward the many rows of empty pews between me and the altar. He continued briskly up the aisle, without looking back. I dutifully picked up my coat and umbrella, walked toward the front of the chapel, and took a seat among the other parishioners. I felt very exposed, sitting so close to the pulpit, out of the shadows that blanketed the back rows. This time I was not a spectator but a participant. I could not avoid saying the liturgies and prayers that I had since learned by heart, and these rituals took on a different meaning as I performed them alongside others. I felt especially moved by the Penitential Act, when each parishioner beats their breast and confesses to having sinned through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

It’s not for nothing that Christianity has a reputation for breeding self-hatred. Its doctrine holds that the human will is responsible for all the flaws of our world. This is the traditional solution to the problem of evil, the one the early Church Fathers arrived at as they tried to explain why suffering exists in a world created by an all-powerful, benevolent deity. God created a perfect world. He gave us freedom, but we rebelled, and that’s why we now live on a planet where there is sickness and death, pestilence and war, hangnails, hard drive crashes, and parking tickets, all of which are the inevitable downstream effects of original sin. It’s telling that the Greeks, who had no need to explain away evil (they never dared to believe that the gods were good), hardly recognized the will as a distinct faculty. They speak of desire, inclination, and choice, but it’s not until Augustine that you get will as pure, unconditioned volition, a will that is free to choose what is bad, a will that acts, even, against the dictates of rational self-interest. It’s arguable that this will was invented in order to defend the goodness and perfection of the Christian God.

The theology I was taught at Bible college was infused with a strong draft of Calvinism, which took the doctrine of the will a step further, into the realm of absurdity. For Calvin and the other Reformers, the existence of free will (the very thing that had been invoked to absolve God of evil) was a threat to God’s sovereignty. If he was truly the ruler of this world, then he was responsible for everything, including human action and human desire. It was impossible, I was told, to act outside of God’s will. If you spite him, it is because he made you spite him, because you are not one of the elect. Not everyone at the school adhered to this doctrine, but it was favored by the most popular professors and the smartest students, who were all young men—boys, really—who had solid, biblical names and carried briefcases to class and considered it their personal mission to defend the purity of God, to ensure that he remained simultaneously all-powerful and innocent.

You cannot have it both ways! That’s how I would put it now, but at the time I did not have the language to lodge this complaint. Instead I spent years in a recursive cycle of doubt, questioning this doctrine, then fearing that my skepticism meant that I was not one of the elect, before I finally concluded that the entire edifice of Christian theology was a twisted attempt to foist the blame for everything on human nature, rather than on the creator who designed it and who continually refused to intervene to prevent the suffering of the world. It wasn’t until after I left Christianity, in my early twenties, and started identifying as an atheist that I came to understand that the problem of free will was every bit as elusive in philosophy and science as it was in the church.

There’s a common paraphrase of Arthur Schopenhauer’s that I think about often: “A man can do what he will, but not will what he will.” Perhaps it would be more clearly rendered this way: We can do what we want, but we can’t choose our wants. We can act on our desires, but our desires themselves seem to arise without our choosing them; they are either innate or else conditioned by our families, our culture, and our previous choices. To “act freely” is merely to act in accordance with those desires we did not deliberately choose for ourselves.

Each time I think about this quote, I want to object: Isn’t it true that you can sometimes change your desires, through action or habit? If you do something long enough, like chanting the name of the Buddha or working out every day, your desires will eventually change. You’ll start to realize that you look forward to the meditative rhythm of the chant or that you’re slightly addicted to the wave of euphoria that arrives after a workout. I’ve seen this happen countless times in my own life. But resolving to develop a habit is a decision that also depends on some prior desire, one that you did not choose. And people break habits all the time, usually because some other, contrary desire has intervened.

I have been rereading Schopenhauer, alongside Simone Weil, because it’s difficult to write about the will without thinking of him—and because his philosophy offers one possible explanation (albeit a weird one) for why we so often feel at the mercy of our own desires. His “will” is not merely human volition. It’s a strange transpersonal force, a kind of cosmic breath that animates everything in existence with motive, in its broadest sense. The will nudges the planets into motion, makes magnets turn toward the North Pole, causes flowers to reach toward the sun, and gives animals the urge to eat and mate and kill. Humans, like everything else in this world, are puppets of the will and are driven by the same universal motive, which acts on us unconsciously. We think our actions are freely chosen, but we are just doing the bidding of this universal force. Schopenhauer describes the will’s relationship to the mind as “the strong man who is blind supporting on his shoulders the lame man who can see.” The blind will calls the shots, while our impotent minds confabulate, spinning stories that redescribe those impulses as rational motives. Freud insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that he never read Schopenhauer as a young man. He may have feared that admitting the influence would undermine the originality of his ideas.

Schopenhauer, of course, did a lot of borrowing himself. His cosmology was inspired by the Hindu concept of Brahman, the single, formless reality from which springs everything in existence. People steeped in Western philosophy often have a hard time wrapping their minds around the transpersonal will. But anyone who has lived through a prolonged inner struggle will recognize elements of their experience in Schopenhauer. He believed that we remain fundamentally in the dark about our urges and inclinations. The will is a reckless force that possesses us with desires that are not our own and cares nothing for our individual fates. It has no purpose, no telos. It’s just desire without end. And it creates “strife,” because to desire is to suffer and to create suffering for others.

Much like the early Church Fathers, Schopenhauer blamed the will for the problem of evil. He’s known, probably rightly, as the most pessimistic of all Western philosophers, and there are plenty of moments in his writing that offer a rather bleak view of the world. There is a passage that appears in one of the early chapters of The World as Will and Representation (1818) that has stuck with me ever since I first read it in my twenties. Schopenhauer is describing a scene from a travelogue by the botanist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, who is recalling a horrifying sight he witnessed during a trip to Java: “a stretch of ground covered with bones, extending as far as the eye could see, that he took for a battlefield.” Schopenhauer continues:

These were actually just the skeletons of large turtles, five feet long, three feet wide and tall; when they leave the sea, these turtles take this path to lay their eggs, and are then assaulted by wild dogs (Canis rutilans) which combine their efforts to tip them onto their backs, tear off the lower carapace and the small scales on their bellies, and devour them alive. But a tiger often then pounces on the dogs. This desolation is renewed thousands and thousands of times, year after year; it is for this purpose that these turtles are born.

Some people I know who have stopped drinking tell me that “nature” is their higher power, the entity to whom they surrender. I always remember this passage and think, Good luck with that.

Whereas Christian theologians see the endlessness of desire as a longing for the infinite God (Augustine: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you”), Schopenhauer, much like the Eastern philosophies he’s drawing from, insists that desire is empty and without meaning. The will is like the wheel of samsara, the endless cycle of craving that in Buddhist thought is compared to wandering or going around in circles. We are constantly vacillating between unhappiness and boredom, and nothing we desire brings permanent satisfaction. If we stop and reflect, he writes, it becomes clear that our life has been spent chasing one thing and then another, none of which has ever finally satisfied the will: “Thus…life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui, which are the elements of which it is made.”

The only way to be free from the will’s reckless cycle is detachment. Take up an ascetic life. Teach yourself not to want food, or sex, or material goods, and you will no longer be the servant of your whims. These are recommendations that Schopenhauer himself did not take. He ate hearty lunches every day at a hotel, smoked cigars, and routinely got nine hours of sleep.

At some point that spring, on one of my work trips, I was eating breakfast at a hotel, reading on my phone an article by a friend of mine about the time he’d spent with a group of Franciscan monks. In a passage describing the routines of monastery life, he included an extended quote from Weil about the double-edged nature of monotony:

Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity. The most atrocious if it is the sign of unvarying perpetuity…. The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious…. A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere. Extreme misery and extreme grandeur. It is when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.

I texted a screenshot of the passage to a friend, thinking she would like it. She replied, “Is she saying that it’s only by realizing that you’re in a cage that you can escape it?” I said I took it to mean that salvation required making peace with the cage, though I sensed that this was a simplification of the metaphor’s profundity. Weil seemed to be saying that the difference between imprisonment and salvation might come down to two different ways of looking.

I looked up the Weil quote that morning and saw that it was from Gravity and Grace (1947), the volume of her spiritual writing that I’d once put back on the shelf at a bookstore after the briefest glance at its pages. I ordered a copy that day, before I left the hotel, but when it arrived a few days later, I placed it on the shelf once again, where it remained untouched for another year. I think I sensed even then that I was not ready for it. Instead I got out my old copy of Oppression and Liberty (1955), a collection of Weil’s political writing from the 1930s. I’d read it years before and seemed to remember it being a rant about Marx. I was surprised to find how much of it was about technological automation and narratives of progress. The problem with Marx, she argued, was that there were “two men” within him: the scientific materialist who believed history obeyed empirical laws, and the utopian socialist who longed for a future of total bliss. “Loath, as all strong characters are, to allow two separate men to go on living in him,” she wrote, he used his methodology to predict “a future in conformity with his desires.”

The two men within Marx had now become two contradictory beliefs within leftist thought, which persisted in the entirely superstitious notion that blind productive forces were pushing humanity along the road to emancipation. This fantasy confused technological and economic progress with moral progress, and imagined history as a teleological journey in which the gods are on our side: “To believe that our will coincides with a mysterious will which is at work in the universe and helps us to conquer is to think religiously, to believe in Providence.” Weil was especially critical of utopian revolutionaries who believed in a future of total automation. According to this narrative, advanced technologies like “the American myth of the robot” would perform all the grunt work, everything we need would be produced by machines, work would be abolished, and humanity would live in a “paradisal” state of abundance and leisure. She felt strongly that work is what gives our lives meaning and saves us from the endless wheel of samsara. If we ever reached a point of total automation, she argued, humans would destroy themselves out of boredom and restlessness.

It was remarkable to read these passages at the dawn of what was often called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the moment when it first became clear that machine learning could automate virtually all intellectual and creative work. This was still a year before the release of ChatGPT, but within tech circles and academia, people were already discussing the rapid advances in large language models. It was the year Sam Altman published an essay arguing that in the coming decades, AI would do essentially all the work that currently constitutes human employment. “The future can be almost unimaginably great,” he wrote. All the panels and roundtables I took part in that year were devoted to discussing whether creativity was an intrinsically human experience and what the future might look like without jobs.

In order for work to be meaningful and sustaining, Weil argued, it had to demand thought and attention. This was an insight she arrived at through firsthand experience. During her work on the assembly lines of newly automated factories, she marveled at “this mental void inside me, this absence of thought indispensable to the slaves of a modern machine.” She worried that the “social machine,” the managerial class of bureaucrats and technocrats, was slowly gravitating toward unconsciousness as countless decisions were being outsourced to specialized technical criteria nobody really understood. Modern life was no longer serving human needs; it was serving the ends of the machine, and it was becoming more and more difficult to steer it in a direction of our choosing. In the talks I gave that year, I often quoted a passage from Oppression and Liberty in which she imagines a future civilization where “all human activity…was subjected right down to matters of detail to an altogether mathematical strictness, and that without a single human being understanding anything at all about what he was doing.” It never failed to elicit a sympathetic murmur from the audience.

I enjoyed giving these talks, especially the ones at universities. I enjoyed the Q&As, where students earnestly quoted Walter Benjamin and asked whether AI could one day decode the language of whales. I enjoyed the leisurely, interdisciplinary conversations that unfolded at the dinners following these events, meals that were charged to departmental credit cards and that seemed to all take place in the same airy French fusion restaurant, gatherings where everyone’s face was uplit by tea candles and we were constantly leaning over the table to hear one another over the bad acoustics. The philosophy professors who argued about whether a machine could have Dasein. The law professor who speculated about whether an AI could have generated Brown v. Board of Education. The scholar of psychoanalysis who insisted that we had finally built the collective unconscious. I enjoyed thinking alongside people who were not trying to find answers or arrive at definitive solutions, who were thinking solely for the senseless reason that humans so often think, because we enjoy it as an end in itself.

I could not help feeling on those nights that we all belonged to a dying world, one that was being rapidly eclipsed by—or rather folded into—the new order that was emerging on the opposite coast, which was more nimble and efficient and built on our IP. I occasionally did events with the new order, too, speaking at tech conferences and ideas festivals where people like me, artists and writers who harbored vague interests in technology, were put onstage beside technologists and introduced as “thought leaders.” The mood at these events was consistently manic. It was said that the world was about to be transformed beyond recognition, that anything was now possible. We were poised on the crest of a great wave of history that would either crush us to bits or miraculously carry us to shore. The strangest thing about these projections was how quickly they had come to seem inevitable, as though we were no longer at the helm of history but helpless passengers witnessing a transformation that was orchestrated by fate. The very people who were building this technology warned that it would wildly disrupt the job market, that it would be used by bad actors for unprecedented forms of cyberterrorism, that there was a nonnegligible chance (some said 10 percent) that it would destroy the entire world—claims that were undoubtedly overblown but nevertheless revealing. The tradeoffs were unavoidable—that was the bottom line. The future was coming, whether we liked it or not, it was either paradise or lights out, and all we could do was step on the gas.

At one of these events, some rogue audience member raised his hand and asked, in a calm and reasonable voice, “Who the fuck wants this technology?” The speaker, an expert on existential risk, had been enumerating all the things that could go wrong in the attempt to build artificial general intelligence. In response to the question, he explained that we were in the midst of what was known in game theory as a “perverse incentive structure.” Humanity as a whole might not benefit from superintelligence, but no single nation or corporation benefited from not building it—a problem that created a positive feedback loop. It was a rather elaborate way of expressing what I took to be the simpler answer: the market wants it.

When Schopenhauer wrote of the blind man carrying the lame, sighted man on his back, he was describing the will of nature. But it seemed to me that this metaphor aptly described our position as humans in the twenty-first century: conscious beings who are increasingly helpless against the unconscious forces that are carrying us to some uncertain destination. Weil believed that the complexity of modern life had birthed a second blind will—a global system of economic and political incentives that moved us like puppets and whose motives were not always aligned with our own. “It came to be realized,” she wrote, “that society itself is a force of nature, as blind as the others, as dangerous for man if he does not succeed in mastering it,” and which prevents us “from stamping the world with the seal of our will.” In one of her most striking metaphors, she writes, “On the whole, our present situation more or less resembles that of a party of absolutely ignorant travelers who find themselves in a motor-car launched at full speed and driverless across a broken country.”