Santa is a hummus thief!!

I stumbled out of bed late one Friday and sat down in the reggae bistro Abu Dhubbie for a hummus, thinking that I could share my lunch with a good book.  I was just settling down when a drunk, homeless-looking woman wearing a Santa hat waddled over to the outermost table in the restaurant and blinked her glazed eyes a few times at the spread of food before her.  Before anyone knew it, she had scooped her hand into the bowl of the closest diner, taken up a helping of hummus, and smeared it all over her lower face in the process of shoving it into her mouth.  The diner immediately stood up, appalled and confused.  Santa nonchalantly sat down in his chair and continued slurping the hummus straight out of his bowl. 

Nobody seemed to know what to do.  The woman’s actions were so beyond anybody’s experiences that even the waitstaff merely continued about their business, perhaps hoping that she would eventually disappear.   But she did not disappear.  As the rest of the diners at the table stood up and backed away from the table in something between disgust and outrage, the woman simply appropriated their bowls too, dipping her hands at leisure into four people’s meals and leaving everyone around her perplexed.  After what seemed like quite a while of this, one of the waiters finally approached her and tried to persuade her to leave.  They argued for a bit until the woman swiped a glass off the table to shatter on the ground, and then very profusely apologized and tried to help clean it, creating more of a scene in the process.  Finally, with beige slop still dripping from her face and her hands, a table’s worth of diners standing and glaring at her, and the whole restaurant hypnotized by her strange antics, she poured leftover goop into a grocery bag and then ambled away.  A waiter came around afterwards with a bottle of Arak and poured everyone free shots.  It was a little something to help us forget the reality that had just been unremittingly shoved in our faces.        

I strolled afterwards to a coffeeshop to do some computer work, but I had trouble concentrating.  The woman’s behavior had captured my mind for the day.  It was a strange mixture of hilarious and weird and just sad.  Perhaps all of our desires begin like this woman’s, unbounded and uncouth and uninhibited.  Most of us have merely been taught to keep enough within certain boundaries that when we take what we want, we do it in a way that seems ‘cultured’.  Free as this woman was from usual mores, she simply acted her fantasies.  She just sat right down and dipped her face and hands into people’s bowls because the food looked appealing to her.  Certainly, to get to this place in her life, she must have experienced several varieties of hell.  But in some sense her actions were more honest than those of the rest of us, who are able to obtain enough of our needs through acceptable channels that we can pretend that we’re ‘different’ and ‘civilized’, but who probably would act in the exact same manner if our usual support systems were cut out from us.  Or would we?  Is there a way to know how we would act under such circumstances?  Are we driven fundamentally by base desires, or by some higher aspirations?

I read a fascinating perspective on this in Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning.’  Frankl was a psychiatrist and philosopher who spent several years in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust.  During this experience, he developed a new school of existentialist psychotherapy called Logotherapy, the basic tenet of which is that the basic human psychological need is a sense of meaning.  In his book, he describes how within minutes of entering his first concentration camp, every external trapping that had been part of his self definition—his clothes, his valuables, his hair, the typed manuscript of his unpublished life work in psychoanalysis—were unceremoniously stripped from him.  From then on, he lived in a terrestrial version of hell. 

During this years-long ordeal, he came to realize that even these circumstances couldn’t suck the humanity out of some people.  Amidst the squalor, sickness, filth, cold, constant discomfort and backbreaking labor, certain prisoners became even crueler than some of the camp guards, while others displayed almost unbelievable strength of spirit, even giving up morsels of their own food to others who were sick or dying despite the perpetual state of starvation under which they all suffered.  One woman proclaimed to Frankl, as she was dying, with tears in her eyes, that despite the fact that she had lived a very wealthy and comfortable life beforehand, she was unboundedly grateful for the chance to live, and die, in the concentration camp.  She explained that without being forced to experience this, she would never have achieved the spiritual heights that she did there.  She would have lived and died a trite existence, never appreciating anything real, and would have felt empty both during and at the end of it all.  What a striking proclamation!! 

In Frankl’s philosophy, this woman had led a fulfilled life, because she had achieved a full sense of meaning.  This is, he concluded, people’s underlying psychological purpose.  If you can choose your own destiny, seek meaning by creating or appreciating art.  If your destiny is forced upon you, seek meaning by embracing, and transcending, your suffering.  Either way, meaning is the basic necessity that makes people tick.  Perhaps it is a profound lack of meaning, a loss of faith that there even can be any meaning, which leads to behavior like that of the woman in the Santa hat.  When satiation of basic needs is all that is left, and society is capable of offering nothing of value to you, why not just take what you want, breaking all of the rules that the majority of us honor?  But then, even in a concentration camp, we can see that some people do find dignity and meaning although their circumstances clearly are not serving them.  Some people give up their bread although they are starving.  What could drive a person to do such a thing??

I’ve found it interesting having conversations about these types of issues with friends of mine who are scientists.  It seems that many scientists feel that there is no such thing as meaning; there are merely impulses in the brain that give pleasure, and those that give displeasure, and a fulfilling life is one in which the pleasurable impulses are optimized.  I find it interesting that people can be so adamant about a particular, materialistic interpretation of reality.  They don’t allow for any fundamental meaning to the word ‘meaning,’ and use ‘logic’ and ‘science’ as justifications for this.  They are as sure in their worldview as fundamentalists of any given religion are in theirs.  ‘Feeling good’ and ‘feeling meaning’ are categorized blandly beneath ‘utilitarian desires,’ and optimization of personal utility becomes the reigning paradigm of human behavior. 

Sometimes I discuss these same issues with friends who are religious, and I encounter such a different perspective that it is surprising that they and the scientists all carry the same neurological equipment.  The idea of meaning, or faith, tends to be so assumed by these folks that it is indeed axiomatic to their approach to the world.  You can’t disprove an axiom by logic, because an axiom is one of the statements with which logical proof begins.  Science to these folks is a belief system that is useful, but fundamentally subservient to the deeper order imposed by their religious understanding.  Scientific or logical inconsistencies in these beliefs just mean that the science is incomplete or is describing merely a subset of the full, richer reality.  My religious friends might suggest now a moment of prayer for those unfortunate scientists, who have been so willfully driving their heads into the sand.

What I believe scientists sometimes forget is that science can disprove (although it is limited even in this!), but it can never actually prove anything.  Science relies on observation, which is often incomplete, and logic, which as a system is fundamentally flawed, and cannot be applied completely and consistently to something even as simple as natural numbers, much less our universe (look up Godel’s incompleteness theorem if you disbelieve me).  Science builds within paradigms, which are eventually shown to be incomplete and in fact wrong, leaving some items that were once ‘certain’ again completely open to new interpretation.  In all of this, scientists often proclaim (most unscientifically, since they have no proof of this) that the objective reality we can probe with our instruments is the unique reality; this despite the fact that nobody in the history of the world has ever experienced anything but the subjective.  They feel that the relationship between the objective and the subjective is unimportant, because if we have a functional view of how the objective alters the subjective, then questions of ‘what is the subjective’ become meaningless.

In this I think the religious folks have appreciated something correct in the human experience—that the subjective matters.  However, too often, the logical extrapolation of these beginnings leads to belief in very specific and un-provable ‘truths,’ many of which come from books that are to be taken without question.  These books, which could be interpreted mystically (and thus in a way not incompatible with other such ‘books,’ or other philosophies in general), are often instead interpreted literally.  Literal interpretation of scientifically implausible events pits science against religion, and causes both to suffer.  What is science without meaning?  What is religion, debated and spread via technology that could only have come from the rigorous approaches of science, that denies science?  And how on Earth is it possible that people actually view the world through such diametrically opposing perspectives?

Human experience is confusing enough that perhaps the only axiom we should employ is that we should be willing to question all of our axioms.  If we are willing to look at what we believe, and then to systematically question each of these beliefs in context of all of the experience we have amassed in our lives, then we have a chance of seeing more clearly. 

Most scientist types would say that this is exactly what they’ve done—that they’ve sloughed off all the inconsistent religious stuff in favor of the more logical approach—but I don’t quite believe them.  I feel that it’s an easy way out, just as is believing without question in the words of a book.  The entire artistic and spiritual side of existence is entirely ignored by these scientists, or subsumed (I believe inappropriately) into the ranks of utilitarianism.  To say that there simply is no meaning, to deny or to minimize the very feelings that have led people to form the extravagant religious structures that exist, is to ignore a huge part of what it is to be human. 

The truth must be somewhere in the middle, a philosophy that acknowledges the full range of human experience, morality, emotion, and art, in addition to being completely consistent with our universe.  Like the logic of natural numbers, every completely consistent scientific interpretation of reality that I’ve heard always leaves out certain un-approachable problems.  Why are we here?  What does it mean to be conscious?  How can we square our subjective experience with the world about us?  What is meaning?  How do we judge morality?  The trouble is, these un-approachable problems are some of the very most important and interesting problems to humans.  To pretend that these problems simply don’t exist, because they are not relevant or describable by science, misses the point.  We don’t fundamentally need answers to scientific questions; we need answers to human questions.  If science says that those questions don’t exist or are stupid because they don’t fit into the framework of science, than that simply means that science has failed us. 


So Dear Santa,

Thank you for stealing those peoples’ hummus.  Thank you for guiding my mind down this strange rabbithole.  Perhaps we will meet again one day; perhaps we will not.  But either way, I will be hoping that you can find your own type of happiness or meaning.  If not, may you at least find some more hummus. 

-Matthew