In praise of Marilynne Robinson

Stefan Beck has a piece on the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson at Amravirumque, The New Criterion‘s web site, today. In response, I posted a review I wrote about her book The Death of Adam in 1999. “One of Robinson’s great merits as an essayist,” I note, “is her refusal to take her opinions secondhand. Her book is a goad to renewed curiosity.”

The subtitle tells us the book contains “essays on modern thought.” “Against modern thought” would be more accurate. In particular, Robinson is against that aspect of modern thought — a large and immensely influential aspect — that inculcates cynicism. We often take the extent of one’s disillusionment as an index of one’s wisdom. Robinson’s deeper purpose is to remind us of the culpable folly of such a view. For some time now, she notes, we “have been launched on a great campaign to deromanticize everything, even while we are eager to insist that more or less everything that matters is a romance.” Thus it is that “when a good man or woman stumbles, we say, ‘I knew it all along,’ and when a bad one has a gracious moment, we sneer at the hypocrisy. It is as if there is nothing to mourn or to admire, only a hidden narrative now and then apparent through the false, surface narrative. And the hidden narrative, because it is ugly and sinister, is therefore true.”

Puppet theories of human nature are always popular, partly because they are so simple, partly because they endow their proponents with the illusion of elite knowledge. How thrilling to know that human culture is really only a reflection of economic forces (Marx), that love is merely an alibi for lust (Freud), that altruism is a blind for genetic propagation (some followers of Darwin). Robinson is at her best when she sets out to expose the arrogance and reductive wrongheadedness of such scientistic versions of science. “The modern fable,” she writes in her longest essay, “Darwinism,” “is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now.”

You can read the whole review here.