Marilynne Robinson’s ‘What Are We Doing Here?’ Sheds Light on Post-Truth Era

In her latest book of essays, Marilynne Robinson is of two minds about the present moment. “We have surrendered thought to ideology,” she laments in the preface. A mere 20 pages later, in the titular essay, Robinson reflects: “I know that one is expected to bemoan the present time, to say something about decline and the loss of values… But I find a great deal to respect.”

Robinson’s seeming self-contradiction comes across as thoughtful consideration of alternatives, as opposed to hypocrisy or Orwellian doublethink. It is her capacity and willingness to consider multiple, often contradicting, views of the world, which ultimately lends nuance and credibility to her philosophy.

“What Are We Doing Here?” is the Pulitzer-winning writer’s latest nonfictional publication, a carefully considered—if occasionally erudite—tome of essays, largely curated from lectures delivered at universities in the year leading up to President Trump’s election in 2016. Given the timestamps, the book’s content feels especially prescient, over a year after his inauguration. Robinson’s philosophy combats the natural instinct to hold fast to ideology. instead it encourages open-mindedness, even for the nonreligious. Wielding precision of language and an immense, intimate knowledge of theology, Robinson deals deftly with weighty polemical abstractions, those she considers sacred: science, religion, humanity, education, and above all, truth.

“I know it is conventional to say we Americans are radically divided, polarized,” Robinson’s preface begins. “But… In essential ways we share false assumptions and flawed conclusions that are never effectively examined.” These flawed conclusions, Robinson posits, are the backbone of centuries-old debates that end, with resentment and bickering, in an unproductive stalemate. The essays in “What Are We Doing Here?” strive to revivify these debates, namely that between religion and science, which date back to the Enlightenment and beyond. Robinson asserts that religion and science do not merely coexist, but inform each other. “Science departed from its origins in religion not so very long ago,” Robinson writes in “The Divine,” a lecture that she gave at Harvard Memorial Church in 2016. “If these two great thought systems are not now once again reaching a place of convergence, the fault lies with religion, which, in a fit of defensive panic, has abandoned its profoundest insights and has never reclaimed them.”

Though Robinson is well-equipped to unpack lofty academic ideas, her prose—often novelistic in its sensibilities—works best when it deals with the concrete, particularly the personal. This is the same writer, of course, whose more famous works include the likes of “Housekeeping” and “Gilead,” the latter for which she won a Pulitzer in 2005—fictional works of intense pathos and interior consciousness. Throughout the text, she maintains a relatively impermeable boundary between the critical and the personal, reluctant to delve too deeply into personal essay territory (this is, after all, a book of critical essays). But in “Slander,” the final essay and one written specifically for the book, Robinson turns away from the scholarly and toward the personal. Her language sharpens, condenses: “I saw a clip of some Fox blondie saying that our conversation proved that Obama hated Christianity,” she writes, hardly bothering to hide her bitterness. And later, criticizing what she terms “the age of the weird intrusion,” our newfound ability to rationalize our own beliefs to the point of displacing the real world: “I remember when I was a child, walking out of a movie theater and finding the world outside utterly bland and dull. Now we can all impose Technicolor fantasies on that world, if we are so inclined. Infotainment they call it.”

There’s a particular danger of living in the world of Technicolor fantasies in the age of weird intrusion, in the era of fake news and post-truth. Critical thought becomes harder. Blind consensus becomes the norm. “Consensus really ought not trump reason or preclude it, though it does, routinely,” Robinson writes. “We have allowed ourselves to become bitterly factionalized, and truth has lost its power to resolve or to persuade.”

Trying to prove humanity’s inherent virtue is remarkably difficult, yet Robinson tries. It was difficult when Robinson first delivered these speeches, in the year leading up to Trump’s election. It is difficult now, in the midst of a governmental attempt to jeopardize the status of immigrants and increase premiums for health care. It is difficult now, mere days after a deadly mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.

And Robinson understands this. She tempers optimism with reality, writing, “Nothing is simple. Absolutely nothing.” Yes, America still has work to do before it could realistically have justice and order: “The country needs to regain equilibrium and direction. It needs to recover the memory of the best it has done, and then try to do it all better.” Human nature is not uniformly good—it’s profoundly complicated. Humans have perverted language by inventing the slur (as she points out in “The Divine”). People are the propagators of wars, famines, and persecutions (in “A Proof, a Test, an Instruction”). Our power is defined by “an overhanging capability to do harm.”

Despite all of this, Robinson focuses on the human capability to do good. “Let us face the truth, that human beings are astonishing creatures, each life so singular in its composition and so deeply akin to others that they are inexhaustibly the subject of every art,” she concludes in “The Sacred, the Human.” Amidst her biting social and political critique, she steadfastly maintains a fundamental belief in the goodness of people. It’s the boldest claim of the entire book.

—Staff writer Caroline A. Tsai can be reached at caroline.tsai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @carolinetsai3.