The "Meta" : Marx, Magic Tricks, and Santa Claus

I remember going to my public library when I was in early elementary school and watching a magic show that they put on for free. The magician, of average skill, performed tricks like transporting a handkerchief, having a floating ball, or the perennial deflating wand. While most normal children were probably enjoying the show,  I was obsessed with understanding how the tricks worked. The following day, I returned to the library to check out more books for the summer reading program and to inform the librarian (ironically, my future co-worker) that I had figured out all of his tricks. I was a bit pompous growing up.

But I did the same thing with any musical or theater production- whenever there was a costume change, some flash powder, or some cables in play, I inevitably left the context of the play and fixated on how the actors got that to work. I was also the kid who figured out in first grade that Santa Claus didn't exist because there was no possible way that he could travel to every single house (the majority of which, coincidentally, did not have chimneys) in the span of a single night given the bounds of time. There was no explanation of how it was done, and so it was absurd in my young mind.

We have an innate desire to know what something really is, an explanation on the "meta-level" of why something is. I think this is the root of philosophy, of science, and of curiosity in general. But one of the fundamental errors we make is to conflate an explanation of "how" with an explanation of "why." Instead of envisioning the broader context, we find the explanation in reducing things to the simplest possible terms. Look at Freud- he argued (per se) that every aspect of human decision was determined by sexual desires. Look at Marx- mankind can be defined by their work, their resources, and the relations that people form with them. Look at any modern psychological or physiological theory- everything can described and defined in terms of microbiology, which is described in terms of chemistry, which is described in terms of physics. The evolutionist (or reductionist, more broadly) thinks that the answer to why is the answer to how.

This is backwards, and intuitively so. If I were to ask why we have acid in our stomachs, it would be a bizarre answer to tell me that it's there because the stomach lining pumps out HCl with other enzymes on a regular basis. Instead, the answer ought to be because the acid breaks down our food so that we can digest it and be nourished from it. An answer of "how," which inherently looks down, can never really answer "why," which always looks up. The description of how something functions is of great epistemological use, but only because it has a function, and a function is inherently a question of why something exists. Think about erotic love- B. F. Skinner would have you think about it in terms of sexual drives, positive and negative reinforcement, and socialization. C. S. Lewis (read: the right answer :) would have you think of it in terms of marriage, family, and society.

Consider a more interesting case: fiction, and literature at large. When you read fairy tales or Santa Claus, there's something implausible at the surface, and further explanation is needed. Because we don't see elves running around snatching up babies or Santa dropping off toys, we can either see that they're the product of German housewives trying to instill moral lessons to their children so that they behave, or that they convey a more general truth about the way the world is, that righteous living is rewarded, courage and friendship are valuable assets, and that justice will ultimately be served. Even though I have weird intuitions about truth and beauty (I'll have to do a blog post on that sometime), I think the latter explanation is truer to what we want.

The same is true of the Bible. We can either treat it as a religious text that came about hodge-podge through the centuries and reflected cultural values and basic human fears, or we can treat it as a divinely inspired text that changed and influenced people's cultural values, fears, and very lives. We can opt for the "how" explanation, and reduce it to the product of human society, or the "why" explanation, and see its function for conveying divine revelation.

In the end, the "why" explanation takes us deeper into the realm of reality than the how explanation, even though this is counter-intuitive. We want to think that the physicist is connected to nature in a way that the philosopher cannot. Yet when we consider life, consider our place and thinking in it, I believe that the physicist says many things that are not obvious or forseeable. The "how" explanation, at the end of the day, is very strange, very foreign, and not really the basis of our experience of reality. Yet the philosopher explains things in a way that we simultaneously never thought of and yet instantly recognize as being the way the world is- he reveals something we already knew, where the physicist reveals something we could have never known intuitively. This intuition, this "Platonic remembering," is the root of how we understand reality (whether you think so or not-I'd love to hear your thoughts though). And, though I would love to delve deeper into this and dissect it, I can merely say that this is why (not how) we intuitively look for and consider the upward question of "why" and not the downward question of "how" to be meaningful.