The Election and the Problem of Evil
When I spotted this flag a few days ago, I assumed someone lowered it to mourn the death of democracy. Actually, New Jersey's governor ordered flags lowered to honor a deceased state legislator.
HOBOKEN, NOVEMBER 11, 2024. I didn’t plan to rant about the election in class last week. I figured my students could use a break from all their elders’ groaning or gloating. I still ended up talking about the election, obliquely, by talking about “utopia.”
This term, I said, is often invoked sneeringly; historically, schemes to create perfect societies haven’t fared well. But the concept of utopia is still invaluable. If you’re not thrilled with this world, you must have some vision of a better world, right? That better world is your utopia. So tell me, I asked: What’s your utopia?
My students imagined futures with no war, hatred, poverty, injustice; everyone has good jobs, housing, health care, education. No surprises there. A few suggested, cautiously, that maybe a utopia shouldn’t eliminate all our problems, because overcoming hardship makes life meaningful.
Aha! I said, or words to that effect. So there’s such a thing as too much happiness? A perfect utopia isn’t perfect? Let’s explore that idea by looking at theology, the study of God. If a loving, just God created us, why is life often so horrible? Why would God let good people suffer and bad people thrive?
Theologians call this riddle the problem of evil; solutions are theodicies. One theodicy comes from physicist Freeman Dyson. In his 1988 essay collection Infinite in All Directions, Dyson floats a notion that he calls “the principle of maximum diversity.”
This principle, Dyson explains, says the universe is designed to be “as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut.” Challenges include “comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death.” The best of all possible worlds can get nasty.
Psychonaut Terence McKenna arrived via massive doses of shrooms at the same theodicy. In his 1989 book True Hallucinations, McKenna says the cosmos keeps us on our toes by churning out ever-more-inventive surprises, or “novelty,” for our aesthetic delectation.
When I interviewed McKenna in 1999, he acknowledged that “novelty” includes bad stuff, like war, genocide, fascism. But McKenna, like Freeman Dyson, had faith that humanity will overcome its challenges and keep evolving in cool, unpredictable ways. Even Nazi Germany, “with its science-fiction production values and its silly rhetoric, served a useful purpose,” McKenna assured me.
The Wachowskis slipped a similar meme into The Matrix, which depicts a future in which cruel artificial intelligences harvest energy from human slaves imprisoned in beakers. Electrodes implanted in the humans’ brains keep them pacified by making them think they’re living in a simulation, “the Matrix.”
The AIs who designed the first Matrix made it too perfect, heaven-like. The enslaved humans rejected Matrix 1.0 and died in droves. The humans only accepted the Matrix after the AI’s made it less pleasant, more like our world. Ironic, right?
I didn’t tell my students why I take the life-must-be-hard theodicy seriously, but I’ll tell you. A youthful psychedelic trip convinced me that God is freaked out by being God. God created our heartbreakingly lovely, horrific world as a distraction from Her/His/Their/Its cosmic identity crisis.
On the one hand, the life-must-be-hard theodicy makes sense. If life were too easy, as my wise-beyond-their-years students point out, it wouldn’t be meaningful. Even comedies must make characters squirm, because otherwise they would be insufficiently dramatic, no one would watch.
On the other hand, this theodicy is appallingly cold. It reduces horrors like war, genocide, slavery and fascism to divine plot devices. It fosters fatalism, it makes a mockery of our struggles to create a more just, peaceful, pleasant world.
When I ran this column’s conceit past a friend devastated by the election, she stared at me, aghast. She replied, Let me get this straight, Horgan. God wanted Trump to win to make life more exciting? Are you fucking kidding me??!! Or words to that effect.
Yeah. Never mind. I’m done trying to see this election in a positive light.
Further Reading:
Drawing Pretty Pictures in Troubled Times
How Quantum Mechanics Helped Me Escape the Shitshow
Math, God and the Problem of Evil
Freeman Dyson's Disturbing Scientific Theology
A Pretty Good Utopia (chapter in my free online book Mind-Body Problems)