Requiem for Cyclops

There's a pale romance to the watchmaker God
Of Descartes and Paley; He drafted and installed
Us in the Apparatus. He loved to tinker;
But having perfected what he had to do,
Stood off shrouded in his loneliness.
--Robert Lowell


And so we continue the discussion of "the random crapshoot" vs. "Everything happens for a reason."

A few postings ago, I was discussing this thorny (and most likely, never-to-be-resolved) philosophic question with regard to the unexpected (and unlikely) reunion after 17 years of myself and the woman who recently became my second wife.

I began my earlier posting ("Omphalos Eve") with a reference to my old friend and former roommate, Jeff Bertolucci, who many years ago spoke out as a firm advocate of "the random crapshoot:" nothing, in this view, ever happens for a reason. It just happens. The random crapshoot seems to lead to one of three assumptions: (1) God is not responsible for what happens in this world or (2) God does not intervene directly in what happens in this world, or (3) There is no God, period.

Of course the random crapshoot addresses the age-old question that has been a thorn in the side of theologians for all those old ages: Why does evil exist in the world? Why do bad things happen to the innocent? The firmest of religious believers wrestle with this question. After 9/11, at the televised prayer service at Washington Cathedral for the victims of the terrorist attacks of that day, Billy Graham admitted that, although he had been preaching for 60 years or so, when people asked him that question, Why Do Evil And Suffering Exist In The World, even he didn't have an easy, facile answer.

Which brings us to the story of Cyclops the kitten: www.livescience.com/animalworld/060111_ap_cyclops_cat.html

Bloggers and e-mail swappers were going nuts this week over the story of Cyclops, the one-eyed kitten. Born December 28 in Portland, Oregon, the kitten was the subject of a series of bizarre digital photos posted on the Internet by his owner. They showed the tiny animal, who indeed appeared to have only one eye, wide-open in the middle of his head, like a blank, staring marble. He had no nose, just that one large eye. A lot of people assumed it was a hoax. Snopes.com, the website that debunks "urban legends," was immediately alerted.

But it turned out not to be a hoax after all. Little Cy, as he was called during his 24 hours of life (he died the day after he was born) did indeed have a rare condition whose gnarly name I'm not going to bother going and looking up again. Its result is one eye, usually where the nose is supposed to be. The condition has occurred, though very rarely, in other animals besides cats. (News reports didn't say whether there had ever been a human case reported.)

Cy's owner was a model of compassion. Rather than simply let the strange-looking little creature die, she tried to save him. She nursed him all night, feeding him milk with a tiny syringe, but to no avail. As so often happens with little ones severely deformed at birth, he died quickly.

But Cy's death presents us, in microcosm, with the very question we have seen addressed so many times in macrocosm. 1755: an earthquake in Lisbon, on a Sunday morning when everyone's in church, no less, kills over 50,000 people. Voltaire writes a satiric poem, using the occasion to take the optimists of the world to the woodshed. 1939-45: The Holocaust. Boxing Day, 2004: a tsunami in south Asia kills more than 100,000 people. Just last month: an earthquake in Indonesia decimates a village, even as its Muslim inhabitants are crying out "God is great!" (Jeff didn't let me miss that one.)

And now, the death of a one-eyed kitten. Why was Cyclops born a "cyclops?" Why was the little guy born with just one eye in the middle of his head, and doomed to die in 24 hours? Why are human babies sometimes born conjoined, or blind, or deaf, or missing limbs, or with Down's Syndrome? Why do chromosomes go crazy? People go crazy for all kinds of obvious reasons. The space shuttle broke up on re-entry, killing its entire crew, because of poor maintenance. But why does nature itself sometimes seem to jump the tracks?

Whatever the ultimate answer, the "watchmaker God" of Descartes and Paley (and Newton) was debunked long ago. The universe is a place of ellipses, not circles. Geometry is a manmade art: There are no squares or rectangles in nature. My father was born with a jaw too narrow to accommodate all of his teeth--his teeth came in crooked. I inherited this from him: my teeth also came in crooked. Nature did her duty, but perfection wasn't on her palette. I was also born missing one pectoral muscle. I'm an approximation, not an ideal. Most of us are. You might look at Pamela Anderson and think she's perfection, but just wait until she opens her mouth and starts blathering about the civil rights of chickens. Something missing there, obviously.

So poor little Cyclops was the victim of a universe that sometimes (actually, often) does things cockeyed. Sometimes a little cockeyed, (me) sometimes a lot cockeyed (a Sunday morning earthquake in a major urban center.) Of course when Voltaire wrote his poem, no one knew anything about plate tectonics. Now San Francisco lives in fear, not of a divine malign, but of the next fart geology might choose to issue forth.

Which raises yet another question: has science managed to make the universe any less frightening a place? The answer, up to a point, would be yes. Medical science in particular has made us a bit more comfortable in the cold cosmos. Once upon a time, and it wasn't that long ago, the word "Cancer" meant the same thing as "Death sentence." Now certain types of cancer are highly curable. We're living longer (though not necessarily enjoying it more.) Are we smarter? Some argue that our species is every bit as ghost-and-demon haunted as it was when our ancestors were painting cave walls and thought pregnancy was caused by the north wind. Freud was a devoted atheist, but his version of Blake's nether sky was as dark as any vision of St. Augustine: our inner lives are nothing but a swamp of fears and anxieties. Psychoanalysis is passing out of fashion, and after a century has cast very little light on anything (which may have contributed to its passing out of fashion.)

What we ultimately have to ask ourselves in the ongoing debate about the random crapshoot vs. everything-happens-for-a-reason, most lately on display in the form of the argument over intelligent design in nature (or its lack) is this: do we want to know? Atheists and believers have this in common: both think they have the answer. Christians believe that there is a God, and that nature has a purpose; atheists are just as convinced that there isn't a God, and that if nature appears to have a purpose, well, that can be explained away with Darwin and neuroscience. But if either side ever actually won this debate, what would the result be? In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, (whose progenitor, author Arthur C. Clarke, is a confirmed atheist, and who called the film, at the time it was made, the first multi-million dollar religious movie) scientists dig up an artifact on the moon which represents the first concrete, unassailable evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe than earth. Right away, it becomes a hush-hush affair. The natural affinity that government bureaucracies have for secrecy notwithstanding, the technocrats of 2001 recognized the tremendous potential for "cultural shock and disorientation" in the words of one of the film's characters, inherent in the discovery.

In other words, do we really want these big questions answered? What kind of value would life continue to have if God's existence, or non-existence, and the argument from design, or its opposite, were ever established in indisputable fact? In his silly song Imagine, the late John Lennon tells us that a world consisting solely of illusion-shorn atheists would be a happy playpen of brotherhood. Without God, we would have no alternative but to love, love love one another. Yeah, right. And Josif Stalin was the Best Friend of Soviet Children. Religion doesn't have a good track record for promoting global brotherhood either, but it's naive to think the atheists would run things any better. They'd just come up with different reasons for cracking your skull.

Literally. In North Korea people caught with Bibles have been known to have their heads crushed by steamrollers. Imagine that, John. In 1949 Max Erlich published a novel entitled (appropriately enough for our purposes here) The Big Eye. An astronomer discovers an asteroid on a collision course with earth. This baby is so humongous it's going to wipe us all out. We're toast. In a plot twist intended to force the point home, when the asteroid gets close enough to be viewed through the Palomar telescope, it turns out to resemble...a gigantic eye. The eye of death, staring straight at us! The astronomer puts out the word that this celestial object is going to destroy the earth in the hope that certain doom will force mankind to come together in the kind of existential group-hug that Lennon dreamed of in his ode to a world of atheistic socialism. Guess what? The opposite happens: instead of a brotherhood of death, The approach of The Big Eye touches off an orgy of riot, pillage, robbery, rape and general hell-raising.

So why are we still all here? Seems Erlich's astronomer lied to the world in the (misguided) name of peace--The Big Eye turned out to be a near-miss, not a hit. Why no other astronomer on the face of the entire planet thought to double-check his mathematics is never explained.

Nevertheless, I imagine that, for the forseeable future, the universe will go right on being capricious and appearing to pay us no never mind. The watchmaker god, shrouded in his loneliness, will seem as ineffectual, (perhaps indeed as helpless) as the ghosts shown to Scrooge on Christmas Eve, trying to intervene in human affairs for good, but unable to. Believers, whistling in the dark, will go on saying with a shrug that the ways of the Lord are mysterious. My friend Jeff will go right on touting the random crapshoot, and e-mailing me whenever some particularly grotesque example of nature-run-amuck flattens or drowns a village.

But, as Arthur C. Clarke himself said of the tale told in 2001, "the truth will be far stranger." Cyclops, rest in peace.