As If

Last week a friend reminded me of a commencement address delivered 5 years ago by David Foster Wallace in which he talks about the most valuable gift of a good education is the ability to make responsible and reasoned choices about what to think about. To introduce his point, he tells two goofy little stories.

The first: "There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the !@#$ is water?"

The second: "There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: 'Look, it's not like I don't have actual reaons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out, "O God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me."' And now in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. 'Well then, you must believe now,' he says, 'After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. 'No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.'"

After which, Wallace says:

"Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere...do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Ples there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogamatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a cloase-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.