The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (19 page)

This ubiquitous expectation that life progresses toward a pinnacle moment of revelation—a moment where wisdom will be attained in the full understanding of why those jarring roadblocks were placed where they were along the highways of our lives—can be especially frustrating when we’re caught in the grips of serious suffering. An especially vivid (and painful) glimpse of such a case is portrayed in John Gunther’s poignant memoir,
Death Be Not Proud
(1949). In this book, Gunther, an acclaimed journalist and author, chronicles his seventeen-year-old son Johnny’s struggle with a malignant, furiously growing brain tumor. The boy was apparently something of a prodigy. He was Harvard bound, with aspirations of being both a mathematician and a poet; by sixteen he had developed a correspondence with Albert Einstein about a revision to the theory of relativity. In a diary entry written shortly before his death, Johnny wrote these simple but profound lines: “[My new] philosophy: Get yourself off your hands. Happiness is in love. Accept disappointments. Relieve oneself by confession of sins. I am growing up at last.”
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For a boy with such extraordinary insight, sensitivity, intelligence, and creative ambition, it seemed uncannily cruel to his father that the cancer should be eating away at the very core of all these singular gifts: his brain. Gunther reflects,

As the rather depressing song by Kansas goes, we really are “dust in the wind.” And it’s a breathless wind, at that. But it doesn’t matter. With the possible exception of a few especially lucid occasions, such as the one we’re engaged in now, nobody really sees their lives this way. We can squint our mind’s eye so that the glare of our subjective biases is reduced, but in general we’ve evolved a powerful set of cognitive illusions preventing us from sustained moments of clarity. Even when one feels robbed of meaning (as in the case of those who view their misfortunes as contaminative sequences) there’s still the presumption that meaning
should
be there, that it all
should
work out in the end, and that everything
should
one day make sense and be revealed to us. When it doesn’t happen this way, we feel cheated, our emotional limbs flailing about wildly, grasping for answers. As William James said in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), “The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with.”
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You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who understands this better than David Chase, the Emmy Award–winning producer and creator of the HBO television drama
The Sopranos
—a dark but humorous offering centering on the everyday tribulations of Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini), the head mafioso of a New Jersey organized crime syndicate. When Chase wrapped up production in 2007 on his immensely popular six-season run of the show, he ended the story line in an unprecedented and, as it turns out, controversial way.

The final scene of
The Sopranos
takes place at a local diner. It’s a consciously everyday scene: silverware clinking in the background, a group of Boy Scouts at a nearby booth, a young couple in love out on a date, and other urban banalities. Tony is shown waiting impatiently for the rest of his family to arrive, flipping idly through song choices on the tabletop jukebox—eventually selecting Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (1981), which plays for the remainder of the scene. His wife, Carmela Soprano (played by Edie Falco) arrives, and the two look disinterestedly over the menu and roll their eyes over their college-age daughter’s appointment with her gynecologist. Soon their teenage son A.J. (played by Robert Iler) sits down at the table and bickers with his father while daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) is shown having trouble parallel parking outside. Throughout all this, the camera periodically steals away ominously to a man at the counter who seems to be looking over at Tony—presumably a hit man. The man gets up and goes to the restroom, a waitress delivers a plate of onion rings, Meadow finally manages to park her car and presumably comes into the restaurant, Tony looks up, and—cut to black. The End.

Many fans were outraged. Some cursed their unreliable television sets or thought that their cable had gone out. It just seemed so…
unsatisfying
. But, defended Chase, so is life—and that’s the point. Human lives aren’t the equivalent of complete, grammatically correct sentences; the period can come anywhere and anytime, even in the middle of a mouthful of onion rings as presumably happened to Tony Soprano. And as we saw in Chapter 4 on the oxymoronic fallacy of “being dead,” death in real life doesn’t even offer the comparative luxury of a cut-to-black scene. Four months after the finale aired, with the audience still fuming, Chase decided to finally address his critics in an interview published in
The Sopranos: The Complete Book
(2007). When asked why people seemed so intent on getting closure on the story line and whether the abrupt ending was really just a big prank, Chase answered,

Chase, like other television producers, finds himself in the very godlike role of Master Narrator. And the audience’s frustrations with his ending reveal their strong need for an edifying climax, something that wraps everything up in a revelatory way. Even if the camera had shown Tony Soprano being shot in the head, or having a massive stroke, or even a nuclear bomb obliterating New Jersey—anything but this incomplete sentence used to end the Sopranos’ story—viewers would have had more closure than what they got. Many people flocked to the show because of its gritty, lifelike dimensions. But, in the end, the story was perhaps a little too lifelike for them.

Narrative psychologists believe that we secretly portray ourselves as living out a sort of preauthored screenplay—much like the fictional stories we read or see on television and in the movies—one with the promise of an intelligent narrative climax that will eventually tie all the loose ends together in some meaningful, coherent way. These hidden expectations may not come to the surface until someone we love drops dead on the kitchen floor of a brain aneurism, is hit head-on in a fatal car collision on the way to pick up the kids from soccer practice, or even falls off a bridge. “Yes, man is mortal,” wrote Mikhail Bulgakov in
The Master and Margarita
(1967), “but that’s only half the trouble! The problem is that he’s unexpectedly mortal, there’s the trick!”
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Then, suddenly, we become ravenous for meaning, disoriented by the blazing clarity of disorder. No matter how much we profess to know differently, such events strike us in the gut as a fundamental violation of how life works.

That we privately see ourselves as characters in our own life stories raises, of course, the more intriguing question of just who we think is writing the script. Many life-changing events are thrown at us by chance circumstances beyond our control rather than caused directly or even indirectly by us. For religious people, the identity of this enigmatic author isn’t implicit at all; it’s obviously God. But even atheists occasionally lapse blatantly and unknowingly into this overt pattern of thinking. For many believers, God is a passive god, an entity that lets things happen to us rather than one that deliberately punishes or rewards us—but this still means ascribing to Him the intention not to act. Still others believe that God is incapable of causing misfortune, but rather He can only observe; so when children die, sweet old ladies are raped, and earthquakes hit, He gets just as sad and angry as we do.

This was the theme of Rabbi Harold S. Kushner’s best-selling book,
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
(1981). Kushner, who wrestled with his own religious beliefs when his young son was diagnosed with the rapid-aging disease progeria, tells us that God sowed the seeds for all Creation, including those that led ultimately to the evolution of human nature, but (as we’re told in the book of Genesis) then He “rested,” which in Kushner’s opinion means that God could no longer intervene, because nature took on a life of its own, with laws that couldn’t be circumvented. What’s more, God might not have even completed the job. “The world is mostly an orderly, predictable place, showing ample evidence of God’s thoroughness and handiwork, but pockets of chaos remain.”
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Whatever your particular theological view, all such theories invoke, in different doses, your theory of mind, and all inevitably have something to say about the relation between these two natural bedfellows: morality and this-worldly pain. In any event, it’s very hard to shake that mysterious sense that someone or something is keeping watch over us. Something that is emotionally invested in our moral behaviors, our feelings, and, ultimately, our ability to understand our own stories. Something that, well,
cares.

As a nonbeliever, Cindy Chupack, one of the lead writers and producers of another acclaimed HBO television series,
Sex and the City
, is reluctant to say that God has had anything to do with her success. Yet in a 2009 interview with
Psychology Today
magazine about how she’s managed to cope with her own failures and disappointments in life, Chupack betrays a cognitive processing style that shares much in common with the believer’s worldview. And the common denominator is a generous helping of theory of mind in interpreting these illusory “trials”:

Chupack has had her own share of hardships. When her husband came out of the closet after two years of marriage in her midtwenties, Chupack was devastated. The ensuing years were rocky ones and included, as she puts it, awkward bouts of “kamikaze dating,” an endless series of embarrassing conversations with relatives, and a renewed appreciation of her friendships with other single women. All of this, of course, was perfect fodder for her later hit television show:

Chupack isn’t the only nonbeliever who, perhaps without even realizing it, sees inherent purpose in a life that she otherwise believes is inherently purposeless. In a series of studies published in the late 1990s in the
European Journal of Social Psychology
, psychologists Albert Pepitone and Luisa Saffioti reported that a significant proportion of young adults culled from the relatively nonreligious Netherlands, as well as a communist organization in Italy, while rebuffing a belief in God, nevertheless deferred to fate when interpreting stories that contained a “salient life experience” over which the central character had no control, such as running into a long-lost relative in some obscure, faraway place. There’s still a Master Narrator seen in such “meaningful coincidences.” Fate is really just God stripped of His identity but retaining His storytelling abilities.