How can it be known that what I call knowing is not really not knowing and that what I call not knowing is not really knowing?–Chuang Tse as translated by Lin Yutang
Yesterday, on the CNN website, Penn of Penn & Teller published a response to an appearance he made with English muckraker and ethical train wreck Piers Morgan. It seems that Morgan had challenged Penn’s atheism (“How did you get here?–God.”) and libertarianism (“How do we, as a society, help the poor?” “I don’t know. I’m a libertarian. I don’t believe in society.”), and Penn sought to clarify what the philosophical underpinnings were to his beliefs.
The underlying theme that Penn came up with was the phrase “I don’t know.” He claims that he is an atheist because he does not know, which is fine, except that people who claim to not know about such matters are usually referred to as agnostics. Atheists, by definition, claim that they DO know and know with absolute certainty that God does not exist and that the observable universe is all there is. Like all other fundamentalist faiths, atheists deal in certainties rather than possibilities and are offended that anyone could deign to disagree with them. For atheism is a religion, of a sort, and its adherents believe fiercely in an Old Testament straw man (sometimes gussied up in the annoying and condescending guise of “The Flying Spaghetti Monster“) that they can easily refute. Any subtler concept of the transcendent than an old white guy sitting on a cloud chucking thunderbolts does not exist for them, which is part of what makes them so annoying and dull.
I don’t claim to have any answers in this area. I find the term “agnostic” to be too confining. I do wonder, though, where, in that ball of all matter that scientists say preceded the Big Bang, was life? And why life at all? This is not meant as proof of anything for there can be no proof. Since we live within the constraints of space and time, how can we conceive, truly, of anything that might transcend space and time? We end up in a very tricky area in which saying that we know there’s something is wrong and saying that we know that there’s nothing is wrong. We can’t even be certain that our universe isn’t a cell on the tip of a hair of a creature whose universe is a cell on the tip of a hair. And that each of our cells doesn’t contain a universe as well. There comes a point at which we are faced with a mystery, a mystery that we try to resolve and discuss through various religions and approaches. Sacred books are attempts to discuss the undiscussable, and they work as poetry and not as prose. The problem encountered by fundamentalists and literalists and atheists is that they try to read poetry as prose and get lost in the attempt.
And so Penn gets lost. He thinks (and I do not doubt his sincerity in the slightest) that he thinks he does not know. He actually thinks that he does know and so calls himself an atheist. If he really didn’t know, he would just stand in awe of the mystery.
Libertarianism is also, in my opinion, a sort of religious belief. The god of the libertarians is called No Government, and he is a harsh god who admits no idolators and who sees any communal actions through the machinations of government as the only sin. To a libertarian, anyone who does not believe in No Government is fallen, an apostate who may be reclaimable, but only through an unquestioning belief in libertarian orthodoxy.
And again, Penn claims to have gotten to this point by not knowing. And yet, again, libertarians by definition think they DO know. They know that government is bad, always and forever. There is no doubt, there is no question. Penn doesn’t know that he knows, but he knows well enough to tell everyone what he knows.
People certainly have a right to be libertarians; I can see its charms and occasionally agree with its propositions. However, it’s too narrow for me and too dependent on having a single idea explain a vast, multifaceted, and subtle world. It has the appearance of intellectuality, but is anti-intellectual, shunning, as it does, questioning and nuance. Perhaps we could live without government, which is the libertarian utopia, but what would such a world be like? How would we build a road or pave a sidewalk? Would everything come with a price tag on it? Would it be possible to build the Hoover Dam? What I really don’t like about libertarianism is that it attacks the concept of community, and, like it or not, we are a communal species. We come together to form bands and tribes and towns and cities. It is our nature. And all of those groups (and any group, really, with more than three people in it is going to develop some sort of structure for leadership and administration–in other words, a government) have governments and always have. I doubt there has ever been a time in human history in which people lived together without there being some overarching structure to make the decisions and plot the strategies. And at no time in human history has there not been some communal vehicle for caring for the sick and the aged, for making sure that all were fed and the children tended. There are theories about the evolutionary advantage of altruism, but I make no claims to be an expert. I’m also not a philosopher, but I believe that Kant and Schopenhauer had some thoughts about altruism and community.
As for me, I saw a fellow yesterday afternoon, a homeless man who appears from time-to-time near the place where I get groceries. I had a few extra dollars in cash, so I folded them up, approached him, and offered them to him in the least condescending way I could think of. He thanked me and took the money and shuffled away. And as he thanked me, I saw the damage that will never be undone. He is a wreck of a human being, lost on the shoals of modern life. I nearly cried, and should have were I really a man. And I knew, in that instant, that my few dollars would not save him and that the tragedy lay in living in a society that saw this man, this human, as mere detritus. Alone as an individual, I could do nothing. My help was so insignificant as to not be help at all. Charities and their most devoted contributors had not saved him. Perhaps the community as a whole could help him and those like him, but we cared not to. Too many think it is not the government’s business. Not its purpose.
I remember reading in the local paper when I was in high school about a school board meeting at which an old man complained about funding various after-school activities for students. “I don’t have any school-age children,” he shouted. “Why should my taxes go up?” And I thought, “Because a kid who is involved in an after-school activity isn’t thinking about breaking into your house because he’s bored or unhappy.” I thought then and think now that we must look past the narrow borders of our own immediate concerns and see that, as Jacob Marley said, “Mankind is my business.”
So, Penn is free to believe what he wishes. I do not seek to convert him from atheism or libertarianism, but merely wish to show that his purported “not knowing” is not not knowing at all.
