Looked at in a certain way, writing programs is mostly an epic battle against complexity. It doesn’t take long for any reasonably ambitious project to get too big to fit in any one person’s head, and, once it’s reached that stage, it never gets any better. Because complexity is a tide that never goes out. Once you’ve written an air traffic control system, it’s not like the next air traffic control system you write is going to be easier. Just the opposite. It’ll probably be orders of magnitude harder.
But things can be massaged into a state of obscured complexity — which is to say, perceived simplicity — by good abstractions. These days, if you want to establish a connection to a server somewhere, you don’t have to know anything about the details of TCP/IP, or packets, or networks. You just say connect and — poof! — magic happens.
Which brings me, oddly enough, to God. Or gods. There was a time when gods were stand-ins for the bewildering complexity of the world we live in. When the giant yellow ball in the sky disappeared for several terrifying seconds in the middle of the day, or mountains exploded and smothered entire countries in ash, or oceans rose up and drowned continents — it was a lot easier to abstract all of that stuff away behind a vaguely ubiquitous and all-powerful god than speculate on the actual mechanisms that caused it. Or even know that those mechanisms exist.
Before monotheism cornered the market on faith, the relationship between things we didn’t understand and the gods we worshiped were pleasantly direct. You had gods of oceans, gods of war, gods of beauty, storms, death, fertility, etc. So — if the river didn’t swell at the appointed time and your crops withered, you didn’t have to worry much about the mechanics of that cataclysm. You had a god to blame, or curse, or beseech.
And — far more importantly — you didn’t have to face the pitiless amorality of a world that lets things like that happen. When that ancient ruined farmer asked why the river decided to lie fallow a year, I’m pretty sure it would have been easier for him to believe that he’d displeased the river god Hapi. because the alternative is that it happened for no reason at all. The notion of existential meaninglessness is far more terrifying than the anger of invented gods. Gods have intelligence, and will. If they’re good, they can be appeased. If they’re bad, they can be opposed. Either way, you can do something about it. We’re just not equipped to deal with the notion of a giant void of intent at the core of the universe — this well of uncaring absence that we live in isn’t something we can fight, much less defeat. There’s nothing to fight. It’s like declaring war on rain. What good can it possibly do?
Anyway — eventually, the welter of targeted, domain-specific gods (shallow abstractions, all) collapsed into a series of one true gods. And then those monolithic gods began to experience their own, internal contractions, as the puny hu-mans they oversaw began to figure out the whats of their world. We don’t need a god to explain eclipses anymore. We know what makes the ground shake, and we understand that bolts of lightning are massive discharges of static electricity, not divine javelins. Religion is fighting desperately against this encroachment of rational thought into its domain, but it’s a losing battle.
Gods are still relevant, though, and probably always will be, because science and rational thought can’t really help with the why. Why does disease devour so many people every year? Why are there so many homeless children? Why do people starve? Why are there wars? Why do we die?
God answers those questions. Or rather, he doesn’t answer them, he abstracts them away. We aren’t meant to understand all of these horrors as individual, random, disconnected events, he tells us. It’s all part of a plan — a plan that isn’t disclosed to us, that will never be disclosed to us, and that we couldn’t possibly understand even it even if it was. We don’t have to understand it. When our fathers die, and we ask for a reason, god says because I wish it to be so. There’s no need to ask the next logical question, because we’ve left the realm of logic. We’ve entered the divine.
So I guess the analogy I started all this out with is kind of crappy. Divine abstractions aren’t like programming abstractions at all: they’re meant to conceal the things we don’t know, not simplify the thing we do. We needed Helios not because we didn’t want to think about the chemistry of the sun, but because we couldn’t. By the same token, we need a God to tell us that our lives have purpose and meaning not because we don’t want to go to the trouble of finding it ourselves, but because there’s nothing to find. No purpose. No point. No meaning.
Which is to say: the delicate scaffolding of meaning is something we have to invent, and erect, and maintain. And we often to do it through the medium of an omnipotent, all-seeing, inscrutable, irascible god. God may smite us every so often. He may give devils free reign, burden us with laws that contradict our deepest desires, inflict disease and sorrow and death. But he’s there, an oasis of intent in the center of a dark, uncaring void. And he has a plan.
One of the reasons I find the Adam and Eve myth so odious is the role to which it implicitly consigns women: second-fiddle organisms made out of the master sex’s cast-off rib parts. That’s one interpretation, anyway — but, given the way that women are treated in the rest of the Bible, it’s almost certainly the intended one.
However, there is another way to look at this. When you study the male form — with its various unsightly protuberances, its poor attention to design, its pitiless sublimation of form to function — it becomes clear that men were basically a little bit of divine throat-clearing before the main event. Which is to say: if you interpret the arrival of womankind as the introduction of Homo sapiens 2.0, with the worst design decisions corrected, and the unsightliest bugs excised — then the myth becomes a little more palatable, and a lot more accurate.
Most of what I do on this blog is bitch about stuff, which means that when I mention Apple or macs or iPhones, I’m generally complaining. Which is unfortunate, and misleading. I’m a fairly recent convert to the church of Jobs, but — like most people who come late to their zealotry — I’m about as die-hard an Apple fanboy as you’re likely to meet. To me, Apple doesn’t just make beautiful things: they represent a commitment to an aesthetic of fundamental, unstinting, pervasive beauty that’s pure down to its core. Do it right, all the way through, all the time. Find the perfect balance between artistry and practicality. Never compromise, and never settle for success, and keep your laurels barbed, so that you’re never tempted to rest on them for very long.
Steve Jobs is the core of that aesthetic. If you’d told me 10 years ago that one of the primary deities in my personal pantheon would be a CEO of a giant company, I would have tittered mercilessly at you. Nevertheless, it’s inescapably true that Lord Jobs has a palace (a tasteful, minimalist palace) on the upper slopes of my inner Olympus, and I don’t think he’s going anywhere any time soon. Which isn’t to say that I’m unaware of his flaws. Quite honestly, I’m not sure if I could take the pressure of actually working for the guy. But I fervently believe that he’s more or less the entire reason that Apple is the way it is.
If you were looking for a way to crystalize the Jobsian essence — the hubris, the hope, the drive — you couldn’t do much better than the commencement speech he gave at Stanford, back in 2005. Every so often, when I feel like my priorities have gone completely out of whack, I go back and listen to it. This is maybe one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard — and, if I wasn’t a member of the forgotten Generation X tribe, with all of the self-conscious irony-soaked doomed hipsterism implicit thereof, I’d call the core of it (which I quote extensively below) absolutely fucking inspirational:
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Amen, Lord Jobs. Amen.
I’ve been having a really hard time thinking of anything to write here lately, so I’ve decided to give the reigns to some guest bloggers. First up: God. Let’s all give him a warm welcome.
I was down in purgatory practice-smiting some fake cardboard sinners when one of the Purgatoricals (I call them schmucks, for short) swaggered up to Me and asked if I was God. I said yeah. He said prove it. Normally, I would have just ignored him — schmucks are cranky bastards, as a rule — but I smiled and told him that I don’t traffic in proof. Proof is for young gods who haven’t figured out that faith and doubt are a lot more powerful that miracles. But he just sort of snorted. “I’m not asking you to heal anyone,” he said. “I know you’re way to busy blowing stuff up for that. Just turn some water into wine, ok? I’ve got some water right here.” I didn’t answer. “Ok, how about beer. Turn it into beer.” I turned away. “Ok, Kool-Aid. Can you do Kool-Aid?”
And he went on this vein, more or less, for a very long time. I stopped listening after a while. But the guy kept going, babbling on in this really needling annoying voice. I think anyone else would have turned around and punched him, but I try not to get angry, as a rule. Universes tend to explode when I get angry, and you wouldn’t believe how long it takes to clean that kind of thing up.
But then more schmucks started gathering, and pretty soon there was a little crowd of them, shuffling around and glaring at me. “Hey God,” said a snotty little teenager schmuck with a pierced nose. “Nice dress.” I looked down at my robes, back up at him. I was too shocked to say anything, frankly. I could have turned all of them into flaming cockroaches without even thinking about it. They had to know that.
And then they spread out in a ragged circle, and three of them stepped into the middle and started doing the Garden of Eden skit. I groaned. I’d seen the skit before, of course — I can see everything, for one thing, and it’s pretty popular in purgatory — but no one had ever dared to actually do it in front of Me before.
It seemed like it was going to be a pretty standard performance: there was a girl schmuck holding an apple, and a guy schmuck looking sort of stricken, and another guy schmuck dressed in a sheet — who was supposed to be Me, I guess.
“Eat it,” said the girl schmuck, shaking the apple in the guy schmuck’s face.
“No!” said the guy schmuck. “God told us not to!”
“Think about it,” said the girl schmuck. “He created this whole place, right? He made the ground you’re standing on, the trees, the air, the animals. He made this apple. He made you. Am I wrong?”
Guy schmuck shrugged.
“So why would he make you, and then make this tree, which we’re not supposed to eat from, and then tell us about it?”
“He’s God.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s a statement. A non-germane statement.”
“I don’t know why, ok? We’re not supposed to know why.”
“Because it’s a test, dolt. He could have made us completely incurious, but he didn’t. He made us want to eat the apple. Ok? He wants us to eat the apple.”
“Then why’d He tell us not to?”
“To see if we had any actual initiative. To see if we’re worth keeping around. Besides, it tastes good. Just eat it.”
The guy schmuck took a bite. “Mmmm,” he said. “Knowledge.”
And then the Me schmuck made his entrance, clomping into the scene with his chest puffed out and his elbows swinging, which isn’t how I walk at all. “How dare you!” he said. “How dare you eat this apple I gave you and made you want to eat and then told you not to eat! You’re doomed, and so are all your children!”
“What’s children?” said the girl schmuck.
“Oh, you’ll find out,” said the Me schmuck, and rubbed his hands together and sort of cackled.
I’d had enough. “Stop!” I boomed, in the big God voice, and they stopped, and tried not to look scared. They didn’t quite pull it off. “Do you people have something you want to say?”
“I think we just said it,” said the girl schmuck, sheepishly.
I should probably have been angry at that point. But I wasn’t. I was just tired. “Look,” I said. “I made some mistakes early on. I think that’s pretty clear. But I’ve done so much since then — I made rainbows, fjords. I made love and sunsets. I made Shakespeare and Jesus.”
“And death, and pain, and evil.”
“I stand by death,” I said. “I tried immortality early on, but it didn’t work out. You took everything for granted. Pain I’ll own up to. I can’t figure out how to make it all work without pain. But evil — evil is your doing.”
“Us?” said the girl schmuck. “How could we possibly create evil? We just figured out how to make ziploc bags.”
“And that’s another thing — this idea that evil is a sort of gas that floats around and attaches itself to things. Evil is what people do.”
“You made Hitler,” said one of them. “You made Stalin.”
“I made them, but you filled them up with their hatred, and then you let them get away with it. Did I also make the people who looked the other way when the trains to Aushcwitz rolled by? Did I make the people who ran the gulags?”
They looked up at me, cow-eyed. They weren’t getting it.
“You people got a bum rap. I’ll admit it. I thought I could give you free will and shield you from its consequences. I was wrong. Maybe I should have ended the whole thing right then and there. I could have reached down and pinched off Adam’s head, and — blam! — no more humanity. Would that have been better?”
They didn’t have an answer to that. Or not an answer they were willing to own up to.
“I’m really tired of being blamed me for your bloodlust, ok? It’s just cowardly. You put words in my mouth to justify the violence you approve of, and invent devils to explain the violence you don’t. Take some responsibility for yourselves.”
They mumbled at each other. A few of them seemed abashed, but the rest just looked annoyed.
I sighed, and turned away. It was all so pointless. Maybe I should just wipe all of you out, start over. But I made a promise, a long time ago, and I try not to break my promises. Besides — chances are, you’ll do the job for Me, sooner or later.
I thought about doing a little bit more practice smiting, but My heart wasn’t in it anymore. So I went back to heaven and lay down for a while.
You people give me a headache.