Mosaic

I was listening to the EconTalk podcast, and host Russ Roberts was interviewing Jonathan Rauch about the ideas in his book, Cross Purposes. Late in the conversation, Mr. Rauch says something interesting. I'm going to quote him at length, to get all of the context, so bear with me:

What changed over time is that, as I got to know people of faith--Jews and Christians, especially Christians--I came to see that it's not that I'm the smart one who doesn't need the crutch of religion to go about my life and be virtuous. It's that I'm the one whose missing out. That they have a dimensionality, a depth to their life. Call it spirituality, call it faith, or call it what to them it is, which is the belief in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and all that flows from that. But, that gives them access to a side of human life and a way of being, and something very deep in ourselves that I don't have access to. I just don't.

So, I feel that I'm in the position of someone who is maybe colorblind. I function perfectly fine. I'm happy being who I am. Please, Christians, don't line up trying to convert me. It won't work. And yet, I am aware that I'm missing out on something. It's like I'm not a parent, same thing. I have a full, and rich, and happy life, and yet I am aware there's a fundamental part of human existence that I don't share.

As someone else who is both not religious and not a parent, I get where Mr. Rauch is coming from, but I don't have the same sense of having missed out on something. Mainly because I understand that being religious, or being a parent, carries opportunity costs, just like anything else, and I spent the time I wasn't worshipping a deity or raising a child to do other things that were important to me.

The thing about passing on activities that a lot of people engage in, like religion, or parenting, is that one can see this really large group of people who are all doing the same thing, and all getting the same thing, and clearly understand what one isn't getting. And I think that this is what leads Mr. Rauch to compare his atheism to colorblindness; he sees it as an uncompensated loss. And I think that a lot of religious people, especially American Christians, feel that this framing is to their direct advantage, and so would make the analogy themselves.

But for me, it's closer to trading the ability to see color for the ability to echolocate. Okay, maybe I can't tell the difference between a blue plate and a green one, but I can locate the couch in pitch darkness, and that's pretty useful in its own way.

Part of the problem may be the Anna Karenina Principle, namely that, as Mr. Tolstoy put it: "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Applied to religion, it creates large swaths of people who have specific experiences and worldview in common, but a number of people for whom these things are much more unique. To go back to my earlier analogy, if my atheism has given me the ability to echolocate, another person's lack of faith has left them with the ability to see x-rays. And perhaps a third has an unmatched sense of touch. It's more difficult to look at such a diverse group of people and pick out one thing that they all share that can be held up as something that other people lack.

In the end, I don't see myself as having missed out on anything. The potential for human experience is vast; there's no way that any one person can take all of it in within the span of a single lifetime, which is all any of us have. Like Mr. Rauch, I am perfectly happy with the choices I've made and the paths that I've walked. I simply don't feel myself to be somehow less than for not having done as others have.