Weekly Thoughts 8/19/23

I saw Blue Beetle this week, and it’s great! It’s really fun and has a lot of great action. There were times where I thought the humor was a little broad – like, not that that can’t be the writer(s)’s voice, but there are a few bits that feel more like safe choices to me rather than a stamp of personality. But that’s whatever, in the end; they’re well-executed and fun bits. The real missed opportunity is with the development of Carapax. We see glimpses of what he goes through, but there could have been more throughout to make him a stronger character. That aside, the story was solid and the themes were strong. I liked how they used the DC lore incorporated into the movie. And there were a few things they did that went harder than I would expect of a big corporate movie. I’m not saying, “Welcome, Comrade the Blue Beetle movie,” but the “big obvious villain” moment in the beginning is a pretty standard statement for the military-industrial complex, and the film wastes no time justifying why we should think the military-industrial complex is evil. I like that. There’s a mid-credits scene, not too far in, and it’s not vital. More importantly, there’s nothing that says this movie has to or cannot happen in the DCEU we’ve seen since Man of Steel, nor anything that would bar this movie from being a part of whatever Gunn has cooking up. I’m excited to see where, if anywhere, this movie leads in the future.

So, one time, in high school, I was working on a project in world cultures class. Now that I think of it, I don’t remember the details of the first assignment…oh well. I was working on it with a classmate who was curious about why I’m an atheist, and I guess tried to gently push me towards checking out religion. The thing that sticks out in my memory is that I said something about finding it interesting to research mythologies and gods, and she asked if that was because I was looking for something. And like, first thought: No. Second thought: Kinda? I’m not interested in gods or worshipping anything; I don’t think there’s a secret order to the universe, a grand plan, a tinkerer in the shadows, and the idea that there would be goes against my values. At the same time, like it seems most humans have been throughout our existence, I am interested in the intangibles in life, the things that we cannot explain with our physical senses alone.

The universe is a spooky place, and I understand why there is a focus in the post-Enlightenment West on what we can see in front of us. The tools of science can’t properly discuss or engage with anything that isn’t physical in nature. There have been attempts over the past few centuries to look into things like vital forces and psychic phenomena, all to no avail. They may truly not exist. But I have to wonder if the attempt to keep focus on what’s real and physical pushes out our ability to discuss and understand something that we don’t have the tools yet to study. It’s like how we were all taught in school that all oral records are untrustworthy and had us play a game of telephone to prove it, when in reality oral history isn’t a game of telephone, is highly reliable in terms of transmitting stories, and is currently gaining recognition in the West as an actual resource for understanding the parts of the world we trampled on. Just because it doesn’t fit the box doesn’t mean we throw it out.

I realize a lot of what I’m saying is projecting, to an extent. In my own life, I’ve dealt with issues of focus that I deal with primarily with sheer willpower. I tell myself what’s important and what’s “right” or “real,” and try to cast off everything else. What can I say, I’m a brute force person. It makes it a lot easier to deal with what’s in front of me and to keep track of what I need to know, but it also closes off a lot of avenues of thought and has kept me from being able to enjoy and embrace things outside of what’s known or accepted. I could easily be wrong about how I view and describe the Western tradition in that sense, because it’s largely a map of how I have dealt with nonscientific ideas; or maybe I’m right about it, and that view has been instilled in my own thinking. A third option, to sound reasonable. I’ve mainly been able to explore more spiritual and esoteric ideas through storytelling, and over the years I think I’ve gotten a better idea of what things I do believe in and what things I don’t. Bigfoot is definitely real, or at least once was. The Patterson footage can’t be fake, and the many sightings of such a species across the world and time have to be based on something. I assume there’s no notable population left, and we’ve been spotting the dwindling, dying members of a species of hominid megafauna, the most tragic and relatable victim of the Quaternary extinction. I’m still not sold on ghosts or alien abductions (to the extent that’s “spiritual”), but I am more open to ideas about psychic and vital forces. Something makes us alive and not dead, right?

That being said, I’m also not saying the answer to that question has to be anything akin to a religion or spiritual system. I’m not interested in what knowledge of this thing we call a “soul” or “life force” means about how we should live or the meaning of life. That’s a personal experience, a question we should ask as a group but not require for everyone to adopt the same answer. When we get into that realm, we get into the politics of organized culture and the social forces that keep them in place; the brute force, like that which I use on myself, that we all use on each other to stay in line out of a sense of allegiance to an ideology, doctrine, or practice. I’m interested in a larger view of the world that’s more accepting of outside ideas, equipped with a gentle, “enlightened” approach to the simple fact that the world isn’t fully understandable and may never be.

I’ve observed a tendency, as described by many others, for people to accept what they’ve been presented with as “normal” without question, without wonder. It’s why the majority of people who grew up believing in some version of the universe with a god or two find the idea of a world without that divinity empty or sad; to them, the world would be missing something important and central. It’s also why people tend to react to scientific explanations of the world like an annoying nerd has leaned over to them to say, “Um, actually, it’s not that special, so stop acting like it is.” But that’s not what’s going on. There are so many things in the scientific world that function in a similar manner as religious faith, with a lot of important differences. Like, in science class, we’re taught that there are four fundamental forces in the universe, most visibly gravity and magnetism. We have all kinds of formulas and such to explain how they work and relate to one another. I think there are even some who’ve formulated how those forces came about, for however solid those ideas are at the moment. This is all backed up by what we can see and verify about the world as it exists, which is the key and very significant difference between science and religious faith. And yet, at the end of the day, we just have to start from the premise that the world we see exists with certain factors, because otherwise we can’t go anywhere. It’s starting from a place of, “This is just how it is.” Starting from the more literal, real factors of the world is a lot more solid and reliable an explanation for the universe than, “What if a big, bearded guy in the clouds,” and I’m not saying otherwise. I just think it’s fascinating how there’s a level where we have to have faith in our senses and experiences, how far that can take you, and yet how far we have left to go.

And nothing about that explanation of the universe makes magnets any less cool. They pull stuff through the air! Isn’t that crazy? Things just fall, you know? Just because we know how rainbows form doesn’t make them any less beautiful, moving, or personally meaningful. They’re the quintessential natural art piece that helped to inspire our first artists to put form to their own expression. There’s a level to humanity where the criticism that science can’t explain everything comes from our frustration with our own ignorance. Someone’s giving us answers, we still don’t have all the ones we want, and we get mad that there’s a gap. That’s why part of the experience of life is to simply have faith that you’re still moving down the right path in the face of that ignorance.

It’s still visible in scientific theory, too. “Dark matter” and “dark energy” are just things scientists assume exist, because otherwise the models we have for the universe wouldn’t work; the “darkness” is our ignorance. You can see people downstream from the scientific literature, like sci-fi writers, treating it like a baseline fact to discuss something fictional and fantastical. But like, why? For all we know, everything we think about the universe is wrong, and there is no missing matter or energy to begin with. The fact that serious people who know as much as there is to know about the physical workings of reality are plugging in assumed variables, especially of the magnitude of dark matter and energy, is really wild, if you think about it for a second. And if you look at research into quantum mechanics, we observe that particles are connected by…something…and mirror each other instantaneously, as if they are one. Some early consciousness research has come across evidence for people’s consciousnesses connecting in this way, through quantum entanglement. From what I understand, it’s all preliminary and not yet at a point to be taken the same way as theories of gravity. But if true, what does that mean, and how is that different than superstitions about psychic phenomena and spirits? Like, not saying ghosts are quantum entanglement here, it’s just really fascinating to wonder about how that possibility in reality – which exists on a level we can at least scientifically theorize about – opens up a road to understanding the mind or “soul” as something that goes beyond what we typically consider physical. It’s a lot more serious than the days of orgone, the odic force, and mesmerism, and yet it at least feels like a modern, scientifically valid successor to that kind of esoteric thinking. Like the Western scientific tradition could one day reverse engineer the sorts of spiritual ideas from across human cultures that it once shut out, discredited, and at times outright attacked.

And for my mind, there’s still a lot of value in things that really are ghosts in our machinery. Like, take the personal journey of Shuri in Black Panther 2 as an example. She starts off the film insisting that the ancestral plane isn’t real, and that any visions of the dead are mental constructs. By the end of the movie, she has come to accept the reality of the ancestral plane. Her journey is motivated by personal experience and positive outcomes: She went to the ancestral plane and come out of it with a greater sense of purpose and satisfaction, therefore she believes in all the religious ideas she was raised with. It’s easy for me to see how that is meant to relate to a “sad” loss of spirituality and religiousness in the West, and perhaps in the African-American community specifically (given the movie it is, though I don’t know my own butt from anywhere on the subject), and how the answer is to embrace God. The movie even includes an opening scene where Shuri says she’ll only believe in Bast if she saves her brother. Putting aside for a moment that in the MCU afterlives are literal physical places where souls go when they die, it’s a pretty stale portrayal of the atheist experience. That we’re all just embittered lost lambs who got mad when God didn’t deliver for us, and that using physical or psychological explanations for the world removes all higher meaning and wonder. As if everyone is born with religious faith, and something has to happen to get rid of it, which further necessitates rejoining the flock. It’s easy to see that as a justification for maintaining social order through a soft force, using people’s tragedies in one area to tie them to a way of thinking and living in all areas.

The whole thing ignores a more fundamental question: Who says that “mental construct” isn’t meaningful? Who says your own emotions and experiences lack value because they aren’t directly related to a literal deity, which you then have to worship and follow all the edicts of? For all you know, your God is a mental construct in itself, a name you gave to a particular experience and story of the world created to piece together the darkness, so maybe don’t go painting an entire worldview lacking it as purely depression and grief. The sterile language of a “mental construct” hides the moving fact that throughout all our lives, we build entire worlds with our thoughts and memories, and that we leave an impression in the worlds of others, impressions that continue on after death and lead to new impressions in still other worlds ad infinitum. The first caveperson to help someone up off the ground when they fell is still reverberating in every act of simple, uneventful kindness we experience and perform in our lives. Don’t tell me that isn’t meaningful because there’s no cosmological bully standing over my shoulder telling me that if I don’t act kindly to others, I’ll be burned for all eternity. Our choices are our own, justified by many things including assumed authorities, and they’re informed by countless connections, both purposeful and not, from every person we’ve ever met.

What I just described can be compared to quantum theory, too. It’s said that any two particles will entangle as soon as they make contact with one another, and this connection includes every particle that the two particles are already connected to, forming a quantum network. This network collapses over time, and collapses more quickly the more particles are involved. New networks can be formed as easily as old ones break down. This sterile language describes a phenomenon where all particles in the universe, from one unimaginably distant end to the other, are constantly being connected, disconnected, and reconnected together as one single entity, over and over, for all of time. Just one little touch, a bounce of a photon hitting an atom in your body, and you are connected to the light source, as well as every atom that photon hit, and all the other atoms those atoms are connected to, and every atom and related atom every other photon from that light source, and on and on, until you are one with every star, galaxy, and nebula in the cosmos. Every second, a countless number of times, we become one with each other and the universe itself. As the theory currently goes, at least. No God required for that massive hit of spiritual awakening, and you can do with it what you will.

I could keep going on, but since I have been rambling long enough, I’ll leave you there. The world is a crazy place, and nothing can do it justice. Just like how in religious conversion, the first step is to give up control to a higher being, we can all open ourselves up to the bigger gap in our own knowledge and experience and, instead of falling into despair, take a leap of faith with a smile and a laugh.