On God: An Uncommon Conversation (14 page)

I remember you were there at the birth of television, and you had many theories about it and have written about it. It seems to me that the cell phone in many ways is almost equal in its power.

With television, back in the early days, everybody who felt positive about it was leaving the full effect of commercials out of the equation. TV commercials did something wasteful to the American people. They introduced the expectation that your powers of concentration were required to suffer a series of hits (interruptions) through every hour that you watched.

         

You've made it clear that, to your mind, ideation may be closer to the Devil than the Lord—which made me think, what about language, which is perhaps the most complex and subtle creation of intellect? Where does language fit into this discussion?

Language does not come only from intellect. Language is the marriage of intellect and the senses, whereas technology is often divorced from the latter—plastic, for example. Most electronic machines are not agreeable to employ. Think of the cast-iron vise in an old-fashioned cellar workshop. It makes cranking sounds as you use it, and you do get a feeling as you tighten its iron jaws whether the piece in the vise is being held properly, not being crushed and not too loose. You obtain very little of that with technological machines. Usually you are reading dials, and your eyes might even find a little play in the subtlety of the needle. But you can't ask technology to enrich your physical reactions. Whereas language does come out of the senses. Half of language is onomatopoeia. We are drawn to different languages by their qualities. I love German for its guttural vibrations on one's larynx and French for the emphasis upon the nose, the centrality of the nose. I love English for the mannered postures available to your voice and Spanish for the fire you can feel within it—ditto for Italian with its sense of bravura, Hebrew for its primitive roots. All such reactions come from our senses. So I separate technology and language—they exist at opposite poles of the intellect.

         

I've never heard you speak philosophically about language.

Well, I had all sorts of theories years ago, but I never came to grips with it. I do have these notions still. I think certain consonants have associative qualities. I would say that in English, “r” almost always has to do with anger, rage, ire, fury, redness, roar. “L” may be related to love—lassitude, leisure, likelihood, languor, libidos, luxury. “S”s are sibilant. They suggest displeasure, sinuosity. I tried to make up a rule for all the consonants, but “r,” “l,” and “s” are the easiest. “B” is almost always impact—“b,” “k,” you know: “break.” Sounds that implode upon your ear tend to have relations to “b,” “k,” “f.”

         

Well, what is the relationship between God and the Devil to language?

That's beyond me. But, look, animals come close to speaking. I had a dog fifty years ago, a standard poodle, immensely bright. I always felt that his greatest pain, his soul-suffering, came from his inability to speak—because dogs, in my opinion, do have souls, and in fact, parenthetically, there is one very large but unascertainable notion that in karma we may go back into the animal chain again. Who can know? In any event, this dog was extraordinary. He made searching sounds in his throat, trying to speak to me, sounds you couldn't begin to spell out. I could make them for the tape recorder, but no one could transcribe them. And that dog wanted to speak. So I think in a certain sense, God was discovering language through the eons of evolution and the sounds of His animals.

         

All right, here's my last question. Have recent geopolitical events reaffirmed or undercut your theological beliefs? I mean, has the reelection of George Bush confirmed your belief system?

I've felt from the word go that George Bush is one of the Devil's clients. And every time he feels that Jesus is talking to him, count on it: Satan is in his ear. One of the Devil's greatest talents could be to speak like Jesus. The war in Iraq has been steroidal for America. So in that sense, yes—I think the Devil may be winning right now in America. But it's still coming down to the wire.

VII

Intelligent Design

MICHAEL LENNON:
I know you've been thinking about Intelligent Design, and I have, too. But aren't you an unlikely person to find credence there?

         

NORMAN MAILER:
Why?

         

Because it's a pet theory of the Fundamentalists.

Novelists can't afford to be ideologically bound, even if, in practice, we are. Many of us do tie ourselves up by way of style. Take Henry James or Hemingway. Both were fabulous stylists, but they paid for that huge achievement by being able to write only about certain matters. Their style locked them into narrower modes of perception. As I've said often enough, Picasso had a huge influence on me. For him, style was not a part of one's person but a tool to use for making a particular attack on reality—different tools for engaging different kinds of complex reality.

This said, let me admit that I come to the question of Intelligent Design with, once again, no great cognizance of the subject. On the other hand, the premise behind these interviews is that I won't be embarrassed by my lack of knowledge. Theologians—no matter at what high level they cerebrate—are trapped, as I have suggested, by their already-received religious systems. They are obliged to do their thinking with ideas they are not all that free to change. So theologians build the innovations in their philosophies by way of mental gymnastics, particularly when it comes to All-Good and All-Powerful. And, no surprise, they avoid many questions they cannot begin to confront.

The recent tsunami comes to mind. What was offered for explanation by religious spokesmen was that God is a great mystery. His ways are unfathomable. One more time, they were hiding behind the Mystery.

As is obvious from these interviews, my feeling is that God strives to find a better, more well-adapted creation than His latest design. Remember my earlier remark that the dinosaurs, at one point, may have been a large part of God's élan. He had dared to create this immense animal who might be able to rule the jungles, the mountains, and the plains. Then, He came to discover that He had misdesigned it. Back to the drawing board. God, like us, makes mistakes. I must say that if Intelligent Design is being welcomed by Fundamentalists, they are asking for considerable trouble in the future.

         

Well, I don't want to say they invented the idea. It's been around since the eighteenth century, when the world was conceived to be virtually a clock, it was so perfectly designed. Intelligent Design grows out of the Enlightenment.

Perhaps I have a misunderstanding of what is meant by Intelligent Design. I can only speak of it on the basis of my own comprehension. Does it not offer the notion that there is an element in existence that occasionally inserts a more advanced design into an ongoing evolution? I do deem this to be apt for what I am talking about. Because, yes, I do think that God is always looking to make existence better, more finely designed. And in corollary to that, God looks to improve on His errors.

         

Can't you see how such ideas can lend support to people opposed to evolution? Intelligent Design shows the hand of the Creator.

Yes, but that doesn't make Him an All-Powerful divinity. Fundamentalists have no understanding of an artist. As they see it, the Creator saw it all at once, did it perfectly (in a week), and brought it out. Lo and behold, it's been perfect ever since. He never failed once. We're the patsies. We ruined it by not keeping our noses clean enough to breathe in all of God's laws and directions. But according to them, God's design was perfect from the start. The Fundamentalists are charging full speed into a profound contradiction of themselves.

         

Here is what I understand to be the position of present-day Intelligent Design. It would say: We don't know exactly which processes of natural selection, mutation, and evolution are directly related to the Intelligence used to create the world, but we are saying that what does exist out there in nature bespeaks the presence of an Intelligence behind it at some level—maybe at some removes back. But it is certainly opposed to those Fundamentalists who would say God created the world in one instant six thousand years ago. Intelligent Design people do say that evolution cannot explain all the appearance of design that we see in natural life. Intelligence had also to be involved.

It certainly makes great sense to me that Intelligent Design is one of the elements in evolution. What I find comfortable, even agreeable about it as a notion, is that if we do have a God who created a universe as manifold as ours, how indeed could it have been done without Intelligent Design, without having notions that this is where to go here, this is how to change that now? The other element present, which I must emphasize over and over, is that if God is not All-Powerful, His creations went out into an existence that didn't necessarily receive them with generosity. In many circumstances, God might well have had to say to Himself or Herself, “I didn't anticipate this.”

         

Tectonic plates—

Exactly. How much simpler to assume God didn't expect that disaster. He was aghast.

         

Or, to engage the argument, the tectonic plates are just another example of the randomness and the chaos of the universe.

But the Artist works to extract order from chaos. I would not even say that chaos is a lack of order. Chaos is a mix of sets that are too complex and too disparate to be ordered within the onlooker's consciousness. If you will, each element in chaos can have its own set of laws and processes, but that organization comes into conflict with another set of orders, and they are incompatible. They erode each other when they do not tear each other apart. I also would postulate Malign Design. By which I would posit forces not at all congenial to God's concepts of creativity. How do I arrive at this? Because nowhere in existence do you find a free ride. Anything that comes along that seems wonderful in the beginning meets opposition, encounters enjambments. Sooner or later, a forward motion is stunned, hindered, or stopped.

         

Do you then espouse a theory of Intelligent Design that has imperfect design?

The new design can be excellent until it runs into chaotic elements that could not be anticipated.

         

That's imperfection.

“Perfection” may not be the word to use here. Sometimes you see creatures in the universe who are so exquisitely designed that the moment one speaks of Intelligent Design, you say, Of course! Orchids, snowflakes, panthers. Evolution, by trial and error, could not have produced some of the more beautiful forms we see in the animal world. Racehorses. Certain dogs. Even if we find most insect forms repellent, nonetheless, when we look at them under magnification, we can see the extraordinary work that went into their development. It becomes harder to believe that evolution said, “Yes, the six joints on this particular leg will have curves as wonderful as scimitars because this is the only way this species can survive.” It is easier to believe that the limb was designed for beauty as well as for function.

         

You know the cliché: You put a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters—eventually one of them will produce
War and Peace
or
Hamlet.

Go to a computer for that. The number is too vast to be interesting.

         

Let me give you another refutation of Intelligent Design—

I'm listening.

         

In the vastness of the universe, there are billions of stars and solar systems and galaxies. By our limited knowledge, of the ones we've looked at, not one comes close to having the basics to design a universe—that is, the water and rain, the flora and fauna that went into creating our amazing, complex organic system. There's nothing like that anywhere else that we can see in the universe. Couldn't it be we're just a fluke of the cosmos? In so vast a universe, with so many possibilities, finally there is one planet that developed out of the equivalent of megabillions of monkeys pounding out
Hamlet.

But I would call that an argument
for
Intelligent Design. Because we find nothing elsewhere that works like anything on earth—all the fineness of detail we have here—I see that precisely as a powerful argument for Intelligent Design.

         

What, then, is the function of all the other stars and galaxies?

All we can say with any authority is that in our solar system, the earth seems to be the only planet that is now alive with creatures. So it may be that other gods—conceivably gods more powerful than ours—have had large failures. It is possible that the earth succeeded in accomplishing something other planets were unable to exercise. Given the limited powers of astronomy today, there seem to be no near galaxies that are comparable. But there may be. There are so many possibilities. All we can begin to say is that it seems reasonable to posit a god for our universe.

         

For our solar system.

For our solar system. It may be that this God failed with other planets, prior to the earth. I won't even begin to approach that. I will repeat that it is far more difficult to comprehend the complexity of our existence if God does not exist—because then we are back to the monkeys writing
Hamlet,
and that is hard to believe. It is much easier to suppose that
Hamlet
is a part of human design. And if it's not—if it did take trillions of monkeys to produce the equivalent—what a waste. There has to be the assumption, along with everything else, that existence is moving toward a goal and therefore lives within the boundaries of an economy. It is also possible that existence itself, in the deepest, most cosmic sense, is in peril. Of necessity, therefore, it is moving forward. It is as if we will have a rendezvous with extinction if we do not reach a certain period or place by a given time, as if indefinables have to be achieved in order to protect the continuation of this existence.

This is what I would term reasonable paranoia, by which I mean that one can try to think about it without diving into dire declines or flaming into manic outbursts. But if there is some footing to this last assumption, then Intelligent Design is a crucial part of it.

         

Fine. I want to take a chance with our discussion. You tell us that if you think at all like a philosopher, it is because you have been a novelist all your life. Splendid! I want to see what you can do with a parallel that's apparent to me. Novelists, after all, create worlds.

We do try to. Some of us. Sometimes.

         

Good. Let's take the notion of Intelligent Design in relation to the novel.

Well, as I did say before, true artisans like Henry James and Hemingway gave themselves over entirely to design. It's as if their works were put together to live entirely by themselves. Perhaps, as creators, they felt less need to look for support in the breath and raw facts of existence.

         

All right. Let me take another leap. Is there any relation between your assumption that Intelligent Design is confronted and altered by existence and your disdain for plot in your novels?

That's a good question. But before I get into it, let me say a word or two about James Joyce. Unlike Hemingway and Henry James—who are not only great novelists and avatars of Intelligent Design so pure that their works, once designed and fashioned, tend to live by themselves—Joyce, to the contrary, plays at the very edge of chaos, which is why it is very hard to get near to Joyce. A common reflex is to look to avoid all that. But Joyce did undertake to organize whole areas of chaos.

         

I don't want to lose my point. In many essays, many interviews, you have said, in effect, “I don't worry about plot. Plot is much less important to me than character.” You always have a storyline, but your plots are not—

They're not clockwork.

         

No. So I've wondered if for you to have a plot that is neat and tight and ordered would run counter to your ideas of metaphysics.

Good. Plot, if you will, is Intelligent Design. It is interesting to me—and I thought about it a lot in the years I wrote
Harlot's Ghost
because the CIA is a perfect example of plot—that is, Intelligent Design—coming into contact and conflict with the world. The reason I don't like plots to prevail is that they don't allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos.

Borges offers brilliant models to underline this risk. Borges wrote five-and six-page short stories that start with incredible plots. Then the plots get shattered. All in five or six pages. Incredible stories. He, like Joyce, was fascinated with making attacks on the nature of chaos. Borges showed us for all time—talk about a novelist's novelist! He said to us: “Look at what you're all doing. You take yourselves too seriously. You miss the fact that once a plot is shattered, life still goes on. Another species of life begins and you have to deal with it.”