One of the things that I’ve been thinking about and writing about over the last several years is that while the Age of Faith was supplanted by the Age of Reason, we live in a time now when most thoughtful people no longer believe in reason. Although there are still some dead-enders like Sam Harris, E. O. Wilson, and others, the Enlightenment rationalist project is dead, and we’re living now in the Age of Whatever. The battle between the new atheists and the traditionalist Christians is an argument that no longer makes sense. Rigidly traditionalist Christians are hanging onto forms and ideas that no longer have any life in them. Dead-ender rationalists are deluded if they believe that human reason is a trustworthy guide to navigate in a world that makes little or no rational sense. Both sides argue positions that are irrelevant for helping us understand what we're actually living through at this time.
That's why The Leftovers captures the Zeitgeist in a way that probably makes no sense to either rationalists or conventional Christians. It tells a story that assumes the official narratives that shape traditionalist Christianity and modern materialistic rationalism have no real legitimacy. The post-modern (or no-longer-modern) moment is one in which the culture has been stripped almost completely of any collective sense of culturally legitimated meaning. We're in the Age of Whatever, and in it everybody believes pretty much whatever they want. And people either believe uncritically in what they were taught as kids for want of anything better to believe in, or they find some other community, cult, or ideology that better meets their needs. But for a lot of people those options simply don't work; they don't fill the emptiness that follows from realizing that everything is random and pointless. And so for them there's substance abuse or the Virginia Woolf option. This mood of apocalyptic pointlessness that characterizes the Age of Whatever provides the landscape for the story The Leftovers wants to tell. Anything goes, and so why not some anomalous event like the inexplicable simultaneous disappearance of two percent the world's population.
Nobody, except the diehard rationalists, cares whether what he believes is objectively, provably true or not; for most of us what matters is what works, and it works if it meets some basic emotional need. If it works, it’s true, or true enough. We’re satisfied with the ‘truthiness’ of things, to use Colbert’s coinage. If it feels right, it is right. There’s some legitimacy in trusting one's gut or instincts, but some people have more trustworthy instincts than others.
I think that's because people have different qualities of soul, and some people just have higher-quality souls, and others have pretty low-quality souls. High-quality souls embrace a full-spectrum humanity--nothing human is alien to them, and so I think that the basic characteristic of a high-quality soul is its relative lack of alienation, If by alienation we mean a level of divorce or disconnection from what is most deeply real. And the more deeply real that grounding connection, the higher the quality of the soul, and the higher the quality of the soul, the more capable the human being to navigate in a world that makes no sense, that has no legitimating nomos.
Yeats recognized this apocalyptic state of affairs when he talked in his famous poem about the worst being full of passionate intensity and the best lacking all conviction. And I think that’s the disordered apocalyptic mood that The Leftovers channels: a sense that there is no place to get a foothold, that nothing makes sense, that there are no big answers.The old sense of order that we derived from Faith or Reason no longer has any real legitimacy, and so the 'best' no longer have a foothold to resist the worst, and for this reason the best often lose in those conflicts where the worst must be resisted. The "best" in The Leftovers are people like Kevin, Nora, Jill, and Erika precisely because they have no foothold, and yet refuse the easy solutions that would give them one. They are 'better' than Evie, Laurie or Tommy, because those three needed the easy answers provided by cultists.
There is another category of character represented primarily by Matt, and on a secondary level by Michael (Evie's twin brother), Virgil, and Isaac. They are in their different ways men of faith. By 'faith' we mean a capacity to be intuitively attuned to a transcendent order of being that others who lack faith have no sense of. Faith isn't about believing in implausible or impossible propositions; it's a way of knowing or having convictions without the evidence of the senses and often without a legitimating narrative. Someone like Matt doesn't really understand any better than anybody else what's objectively happening, and yet there is a deeply grounded subjective conviction in him that guides his choices.
In the beginning the show wants us to see Matt as a fanatic or a fool, but in the end we find out he was right about the most important things. Matt is a Job figure, and like Job, no matter what awful stuff happens to him, and plenty does, he refuses despair. He knows something and regardless of the 'common-sense' evidence that seems to contradict it, he refuses to give up on what he 'knows'. The deeply poignant episode "No Room at the Inn" presents his insane sanity as a counterpoint to John Murphy's sane insanity. John is the rationalist dead-ender who thinks he has a firm foothold in what reason and common sense tell him. His foothold is in delusion that his clinging to prevents him from hearing the truth people tell him that don't fit his construct.
Associated with the postmodern mood is the idea that the laws that govern the world are not really laws; they’re simply things we’ve made up, social constructions, provisional stories we tell ourselves to give some order and meaning to our lives. Even scientific "laws" are provisional and must adapt when anomalous events like the departure occur that cannot be explained by the old religious or scientific legitimating rules. and we find out by listening to the TV in the background that science has no explanation for it. If science or religion can't explain it, then it's understandable that many people will "feel safe" by joining a group that has way of explaining it, even if the explanation is the pointlessness of everything.
The nihilistic approach is embraced by the Guilty Remnant (GR) and also by people like John Murphy and his daughter Evie, who we find out near the end of Season 2 has not disappeared but has joined the GR. For John and Evie Murphy, there are no miracles in Miracle. For the Guilty Remnant, there is no family. There is no meaning. Nothing matters. Everything, like the broken pencil in the knock-knock joke Meg tells Evie, and Evie later tells John, is pointless. The GR and John and Evie refuse to be deluded, and they insist that those around them not be deluded. If they think you are deluding yourself, they will do whatever they can to disabuse you of your illusions. They will burn your house down; they will shoot you; they will stage their disappearance; they will tear your delusional little town to pieces.
But, according to the show, these prophets of meaningless are mostly wrong. On one level, though, they’re right. They are right that after the Sudden Departure things cannot go back to normal. They are right that there is no such thing as the kind of storybook miracles that you hear about in Sunday school, the kind that make a kind of pious sense—there are no miracles of that kind in Miracle. If you are looking for that kind of miracle, you will be disappointed.
While the show embraces the nihilistic, depressed, disoriented contemporary zeitgeist as its point of departure, it wants to take us further than that. It wants to take us on a thought experiment that points to another way of understanding everyone's experience of disorder. While John and Evie don't believe in miracles, the show does, if by a miracle you mean the intervention of a higher order of being into the ordinary day-to-day operations of a lower order of being. If you don’t believe a higher order exists, then miracles are theoretically impossible. If you do, then theoretically they are possible.
Maybe anomalous interventions like this happen all the time, but unless we're people like Isaac, Virgil, or Michael, we just don’t notice because the lens through which we look at the world filters the evidence out. But once in a while the evidence is so dramatic that it can’t be filtered or denied. And so when we have a dramatic event like the "sudden departure" that exposes how the old rules no longer have explanatory power, people have to deal with it--you can't go on as if it didn't happen and that its happening hasn't changed everything. October 14 is not just about the collective experience of the loss of friends and family; it about the loss of any vestigial sense of meaningful order--its about the collapse of meaning.
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Existentialism, as we normally think of it—Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, etc—is a reaction to the collapse of the legitimacy of the modern Enlightenment “progressive” project that defined the "old order". Existentialism's energy and its attraction for many people in the post-WWII era lay in its rejection of large, alienating, dehumanizing, rational, "modern" systems that organized governments, corporations, and other huge society-ordering institutions into technocracies with well-intentioned, but insanely sane experts, the best and brightest. And so much of what they touched because it was sanely insane made things humanly worse, even if there was "data" that indicated they were getting better. The Beats and later the New Left and the anti-nuke and anti-war movements arose to counter the sane insanity with counter-cultural movements that developed very much within the existentialist vein.
The postmodern thinkers, particularly French guys like Derrida and Lyotard, owe a lot to that stream of existentialism. A key theme for them is to deconstruct all “grand narratives”. Grand narratives are the stories cultures or societies tell that give meaning and purpose to the people who live in them. Religions are founded on grand narratives. The rationalist Enlightenment project is or was the dominant grand narrative of the West until it started to unravel in the wake of WWI in Europe. Postmodern deconstruction is usually designed to make you see the hidden power agendas that lie behind these narratives and to understand which group benefits most from sustaining the narrative. I think The Leftovers is very much attuned to this thought milieu. The people of Jarden have a narrative that's based on its having been spared, and so it follows that it is therefore a place of miracles. John and Evie Murphy are having none of that. They are the deconstructionists: there are no miracles in miracle; there is only disappointment for those who think there are.
They, and Meg's faction of the Guilty Remnant, are on a mission to deconstruct the "miracle" narrative. And for the first half of the second season, it's an open question whether John and Evie are right or whether Matt, who believes that Jarden is a place of miracles, is. In the finale, we find out that Matt was right and John/Evie were wrong. Whatever the show's viewers may think, the show clearly sides with the insane sanes. The sane insanes are sane by virtue of their remaining entrenched in what had been a legitimized narrative. They are insane by virtue of their profound alienation from the Real because they refuse to adapt to new aspects of it that don't fit their obsoletized construct. The insane sanes are are 'insane from the the POV of the old formerly legitimate but now obsoletized rationalist and religious narratives, but sane because of their ability to adapt to the Real as it reveals itself in ways that transcend and deconstruct the old narratives.
We are insane to the degree we are living in constructs that estrange us from the Real; we are sane to the degree that we live in constructs that are well adapted to the Real. We are incapable of living without constructs, but some constructs are "better" than others.
Existentialism in its post WWII expression leans mostly toward ontological nihilism and/or toward debunking the alienating narratives that have captured naive consciousness of the people in the society around them. But existentialism traces back to Christian thinkers like Kierkegaard and Dostoyevski in the mid to late 19th Century, and neither of them were naive. Christian existentialism and Buddhism, which is a distant cousin in the development of existentialist themes, have, I think, been a powerful influence on themes developed in The Leftovers. Christian existentialism also has an interest in critiquing groundless grand narratives, but it does so in order to more effectively disclose a true narrative, which is found in the gospels. The gospel narrative itself is not immune to being coopted by alienating grand narratives. Indeed, it has been frequently expropriated by elites to support an agenda that has little to do with the deep, subversive truth the gospel narrative wants to tell. For the Christian existentialist, pious, treacly, Christian narratives that support magical thinking are deeply alienating. However, non-alienating narratives are a possibility for Christian existentialists, and the foundational narrative for overcoming the deep alienation that universally afflicts the human condition is depicted in the gospels.
[Digression: I loved the scene where Nora is listening to some Christian talk radio show while she's tending to the baby, and the preacher is telling a caller that his wife isn't ready to love yet, and she won't be until Jesus fixes her. Nora walks over to the radio, picks it up, and smashes it on the floor, and then says, "Fix that, Jesus!" I think this points to the way that religious language has become impossible to hear.The problem with religious language and religious texts lies in the way they can simultaneously obscure and disclose. Most of us have heard that kind of pious, platitudinous language so often that whatever might be true in it has become encrusted with misinterpretations that have made it all but impossible to hear on its own terms. But because it is often misinterpreted or misappropriated does not mean that those are the only possibilities.]
Martin Luther King was deeply influenced by the Christian Existentialists and by Gandhi’s application of what is really a strategy grounded in the love-the-enemy spirit of gospels. Central to the thinking (or theology) behind the nonviolence of the Civil Rights movement as worked out by MLK and James Lawson was the refusal to dehumanize the enemy. Violence is intrinsically dehumanizing, and so even in the face of their suffering violence the activist's refusal to react violently is a refusal to become less human by committing dehumanizing acts. But this refusal also creates the conditions that might make it possible for the violent racist attacker to awaken to his own sleeping humanity. Sleeping because of the way he had been acculturated into the sin-saturated, racist grand narrative that supported the dehumanizing institutions of the Jim-Crow south. The racist dehumanizes others because he has been absorbed into a dehumanizing culture organized by a dehumanizing grand narrative. To be dehumanized is normal reality for those asleep in a dehumanizing grand narrative. But the difference between the Christian existentialists and the more nihilistic branches of existentialism lies in that the former believe there is a deeper, dormant humanity that can be awakened. If you don't believe there is a deeper humanity sleeping in the enemy, then you don't believe there is a deeper humanity in yourself either, and so that justifies an ethic of eat or be eaten. Frantz Fanon is right, MLK and Gandhi are wrong.
So The Leftovers takes this idea of non-violent confrontation by using the Guilty Remnant as a kind of nihilistic parody or counter-image of the Civil Rights movement. In Perrotta's book on which the HBO series is based, the GR were a more traditional Christian fundamentalist apocalyptic cult. But perhaps through the influence of Damon Lindelof, his co-writer for the TV series, the HBO GR is a cult whose mission is to spread the gospel not of salvation but of pointlessness. Like the Civll Rights movement, the GR wants to awaken those who they believe are asleep to the deep truth, but the truth for the GR is nihilistic: our existence is ontologically random and pointless. All grand narratives that seek to provide answers are false, the only true narrative is that there is no meaningful narrative because there is no point, that everything we think has meaning or gives life meaning is a made-up story we tell ourselves to keep us from being distracted from the harsh, unbearable truth that everything is pointless, random, and cruel.
And so people who join the GR do so because they have accepted the pointlessness of their own lives, and find a sense of purpose and meaning in joining with others who know the harsh truth and have a mission to confront and convert others who cannot bear to face it. Their mission is to prevent those who want to move on, resume their normal pre-departure routines, to retrieve their old meaning-generating narratives about family, God, patriotism, whatever--as if nothing happened. But the GR are having none of that. For them something huge happened, which was the definitive disclosure that everything is pointless and meaningless, and the GR mission is to make sure that everybody learns that lesson. Meg continues the logic of the counter-image to the Civil Rights movement. Meg, like those blacks who wearied of non-violence and broke off from the non-violence of the earlier civil rights movement after 1968, looked for ways to be more militantly aggressive. Meg is to the old-guard GR as Angela Davis is to MLK. [I am open to developments in Season 3 that might make the GR into something more than a nihilistic cult, but so far there's very little evidence of it. They're right--people need to wake up; they're wrong that everything is pointless.]
The show finds the GR interesting and its response to the departures plausible and important—Patty, Meg, and Evie are all compelling, believable characters, and while (I think) it rejects their nihilistic interpretation of events, I think the show also wants to affirm that the GR are correct--things cannot go back to the way they were. Lindelof and Perotta want to lead us in a thought experiment into a possible future story that draws on unconventional esoteric traditions that claim to know something about the spiritual world and the afterlife. But whatever might be the plausibility of these esoteric themes, it comes back to the existentially grasped truth that cuts down to the only thing that matters in the end, which are the bonds of love and loyalty that hold us in communion. The existential truth of Erika's love for her daughter, of Matt’s love for his catatonic wife, of Nora’s love for her adopted baby, of Kevin’s desire to be with those he loves—that kind of love trumps everything—even death. That’s as Christian existentialist as it gets. In the season 2 finale Evie's confrontation with her mother on the bridge makes clear that she thinks she understands something that her mother does not, but it is Evie who doesn’t understand something that her mother does, which is that love has the last word. That's something the Garveys in their different ways have come to understand. We'll see in Season 3 whether John and Evie Murphy can learn it.
Randomness, pointlessness, and cruelty are very real parts of our “existential” experience, but so is love, and in the end love does have the last word, and our ability to love and to receive it is the deepest expression of our dignity as human beings, and it's the force that in the long run deconstructs all false, alienating grand or petty narratives. That’s my take on the Season 2 finale. And that's why some people found it weak--it sounds too much like that preacher Nora was listening to who talked about how we need Jesus to fix things. The problem with the real truth, the kind that we actually have some access to, is that it's not something to be sought on mountain tops or in extraordinary epiphanies. Some people, like Kevin, do have extraordinary experiences, but they're not necessary, because the same thing that reveals itself in the extraordinary reveals itself in the ordinary if you have the eyes to see it or the ears to hear it. If you don't, then you might as well join the GR--they at least have the courage of their convictions to live their truth to its logical conclusion. But that's true of all fanatics--they take a partial truth and absolutize it. What makes them fanatics is not the partial truth they understand, but everything they leave out.