Those were Robert Browning’s words; certainly they aren’t mine. In recent years, my usual response to “How are you?” has been: “Old.” It’s the most succinct description of how I feel, physically. We go through most of our lives, the lucky ones do, without being too concerned about the minor diseases and injuries that limit our capacities for brief periods. Time, plus a competent doctor and the right medicine, heals most wounds and temporary ailments. But then comes age and a series of afflictions that are qualitatively different in that there are no cures, no roads back to full health. What you look for instead in a treatment is a way to alleviate the symptoms and slow the process of degeneration. The best you can hope for is essentially a stay of execution.
Two such mounting disabilities that began rather early for me were deafness and arthritis. Deafness, of course, can strike at any time or even be present at birth, but is generally associated with age. My own trouble became noticeable before I was seventy. I soon acquired a hearing aid for my right ear, then another for my left ear. Now the right ear is beyond help and the left requires bigger and more elaborate amplification devices with separate transmitter and receiver. And though I have a wireless infrared system for TV-watching and moviegoing, my powers of comprehension are increasingly limited to unaccented English delivered with little or no background noise—a pair of requirements that is scarcely ever met in either medium.
The various problems of old age have piled up with remarkable rapidity. I have arthritic spurs that, despite more than one operation, have left me walking with two canes, and my atrial fibrillation has produced a “silent” heart attack. To contend with these and other symptoms, my daily medical intake includes Zocor and niacin for the cholesterol and Coumadin, an anti-coagulant formerly used as a rat poison, for my circulation. (The rats bled to death but human doses are measured at a much lower level). The benefits of some of these drugs are hard to appraise, but it is a reasonable assumption that without the cholesterol reducers and a low-fat diet, my heart would have stopped working long ago like my father’s and brother John’s.
So I am resigned to being a cripple for the rest of my life. A deaf cripple, that is. A deaf cripple with a heart condition. Yet there is a sense in which I don’t really feel old at all. Part of that must come from my lifelong sense of being the youngest in whatever group I was involved with. In grade school, at Andover and at Princeton, I was always one of the very youngest in my class. I was one of the youngest to be published in a national magazine, probably the youngest city news reporter in New York, the youngest Hollywood publicist and, when Budd Schulberg and I wrote some scenes for A Star Is Born, one of the youngest writers ever to see his work on the screen. I was twenty-two when my first child was born, and I believe I was the youngest to receive an Oscar for screenwriting in addition to being the youngest of the Hollywood Ten. Anyway, my image of myself is pretty much the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. Even bent over and leaning on my canes, I am taken aback when I tell people my age and they don’t act surprised—which they almost never do. And although if anyone asked me about my prospects, it would remind me that a fatal ailment could show up any day, such a thought doesn’t enter my head spontaneously. In fact, I often catch myself engaging in unrealistic long-term planning: Should I take advantage of the bargain rates by renewing my subscription for three years not just one?
Another reason I don’t think of myself as an old person is that I don’t have the sense of being superfluous or in somebody’s way. I still do the same kind of work I’ve always done and I don’t feel any less adept at it. I do have a short-term memory problem but long-term memory, which you need for reminiscences, is largely intact though it sometimes takes longer to tap into.
When I was young, I believed in the ability of people to organize themselves in their own interests by also in what seemed to me to be the larger interest of humanity. I thought we had at least the possibility of putting our fears and our superstitions behind us in the interests of creating a better world. When people ask me if I think we could ever end up with a new version of a Red scare—a nationwide purge of dissidents and a blacklist— my answer is usually no, not at least in exactly the same way. But perhaps nothing has surprised me more than the return of the irrational to our political and social life in the form of fundamentalist religious fervor. I tend to think that the strongest threats to the First Amendment now come from the efforts to censor the content of movies, television, art and the Internet that spring from the Christian Coalition and other right-wing religious groups.
Theologians maintain that it is possible to prove the existence of God. This can be done, they say, by two methods. One, known as the First Cause Argument, is based on the premise that every existing thing must have a cause, and every cause, a prior cause. So either you look back on an endless chain of causes or you hypothecate a first cause that does not require causal explanation. In which case you have presented an argument where the conclusion disproves the premise. The second method, the Argument from Design, was very persuasive indeed before Darwin and the theory of evolution. Thomas Paine, the great prophet of the American Revolution, and other eighteenth-century rationalists called their religious faith Deism. For Paine, the existence of God was a fact proven by the unimaginable beauty and wonder of creation; the story of Jesus, on the other hand, was not supported by credible evidence of any kind beyond the probability that there was such a preacher and that he was executed under Roman law for sedition. There was no eyewitness evidence or even hearsay on the virgin birth or the resurrection, or on Jesus’s intention to found a new religion. The various and contradictory accounts of his ministry were written by members of a later generation who never cited the sources of their information. Most important of all to Paine, the whole theology of redemption served no purpose except to justify and enrich “a religion of pomp and revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.”
Paine and other Deists, however, maintained that the evidence of design in the universe was too strong to doubt that it had been created and set in motion by a supreme intelligence called God who then let nature take its course without further divine interference.
The concept of evolution changed all that. For most scientists, the origin of species by the combination of chance and necessity called natural selection was far more plausible than the idea that God created thousands of different insect species with a separate purpose in mind for each and placed (to borrow a figure from Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker) a hundred billion planets in his universe so that on one he could locate a species in his own image and blessed with an immortal soul.
Today, there is a gross anomaly in what is known, perhaps prematurely, as the civilized world. In the words of Sir Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize for determining the structure of DNA:
The Western culture in which most living scientists were raised was originally based on a well-constructed set of religious and philosophical beliefs. Among these we may include the idea that the earth was the center of the universe and that the time since the creation was relatively short; the belief in an irreducible distinction between soul and matter; and the likelihood, if not certainty, of a life after death. These were combined with an excessive reliance on the alleged doctrines of certain historical figures, such as Moses, Jesus Christ and Muhammed.
Now the remarkable thing about Western civilization, looked at in the broad sense, is that while the residue of many of these beliefs are still held by many people, most modern scientists do not subscribe to them . . . A modern scientist, if he is perceptive enough, often has the strange feeling he must be living in another culture . . . A considerable fraction of the public shows a keen interest in the discoveries of modern science, so that he is frequently requested to give lectures, write articles, appear on TV and so on. Yet even among those who are interested in science—and many people are indifferent or somewhat hostile—it seems to make very little difference to their general view of life. Either they cling to outmoded religious beliefs, putting science into a totally distinct compartment of their minds, or they absorb the science superficially and happily to combine it with very doubtful ideas, such as extrasensory perception, fortune-telling and communication with the dead.
The logical case for God is rooted in the idea of a universe with a beginning. “But if the universe were really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge,” writes Stephen Hawking in A Short History of Time, “it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simply be. What place, then for a creator?” In the Errol Morris film version of the book, Hawking adds: “And who created him?”
In the contest with superstition, science has made great strides. Yet some of the most eye-opening discoveries of my lifetime have not been fully acknowledged by a large proportion of humanity—not just by the semiliterate and overworked masses of the Third World but by the privileged intellectual elite of the First. Much of the explanation for this puzzling failure is to be found, I believe, in the persistence of a cultural phenomenon that anthropologists say distinguished the Neanderthal from the beast: religion. Its enduring power, in turn, can be largely attributed to the urge—as strong in modern as in ancient times, evidently—to believe that we are somehow exempt from the cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death that governs ever other form of life.
When I said there were no benefits to old age, I was talking about physical well-being. There are non-material rewards, and the most valuable of them is what might be called progenitorial satisfaction. You don’t do anything much—just have some children and help them grow up, and then the process continues without you. They produce your grandchildren, who in turn produce your great-grandchildren, of whom we now have four. In 1995, Frances and I were given a joint eightieth birthday party by our five children, and a whole lawnful of other relatives and descendants showed up, coming from as far as England (my daughter Ann) and Los Angeles (my son Joe). My dear friend Paul Jarrico flew in from California, too, with his wife Lia, and the presence of all these cherished people filled us with a deep sense of satisfaction. Not accomplishment, I remind myself, just satisfaction.
Frances, who is my age, was a much healthier specimen than I until 1998, when she was in a serious automobile collision that left her with a variety of injuries from which her recovery is, and will probably remain, incomplete. My doctors, too, have stayed busy diagnosing new maladies and prescribing palliatives that promise increasingly little benefit. As I come to the end of this memoir, Frances and I are both being monitored by a team of care-givers, a state of affairs we don’t much like. What disturbs us about the years (or months) ahead is not so much death itself, however, as the events and circumstances leading up to it.
I have a right, of course, not to believe in a soul or an afterlife. Why should I care if others feel differently? What does it matter to me if my neighbor belongs to one of the organized religions or expresses faith in an all-seeing and loving God?
It wouldn’t matter much if my neighbor were, in fact, complacent about my rejection of his faith. But, alas, religion imposes a duty on many of its stalwart followers to bring me around to their point of view, willingly or otherwise. Christians cite the words attributed to Jesus Himself: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”
St. Paul, among other interpreters of Jesus’s teachings, has presented those choices as the only ones open to us. If you listen to Protestant revivalists in America, you will hear variations on the same message: “God requires nothing else from you but faith in Christ and His work to save you immediately for eternity,” says an advertisement for the Church of God. “This, the only way to salvation, can be verified by reference to the Holy Scriptures, which are the unchangeable and infallible Word of God. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.”
Nothing else is required: no character references, no record of good deeds, no indication that you reached your decision after weighing the evidence of pro and con. Whatever sins, crimes, and unvirtuous conduct you may have engaged in, you are saved from eternal torture—the fate awaiting devout believers in other religions, people in parts of the world where Christian teaching is unavailable, and all those who, regardless of the noble or altruistic works they may have performed, haven’t made a formal commitment to Christ. If you believe that, you accept a God who created humans and urged them to multiply, only to condemn the overwhelming majority of them, after a mere three score and ten years on earth, to everlasting, unspeakable torment. A few years ago, Gore Vidal described in The Nation how the monotheists (“sky-godders” he called them) have promoted and sanctified racism, denigrated women and homosexuals, vilified birth control and abortion, stigmatized or criminalized the pleasures of gambling, sex, and alcohol, and distorted the intention of our founding fathers to establish a nation without religious shackles. As he pointed out, only Judaism, the smallest of the three monotheisms, doesn’t try to spread its message to the rest of the world. Once securely established, Islam and Christianity set out ruthlessly with armed might to kill or convert every infidel in their paths.
While I am naturally aware of the vast number of kindnesses and charitable acts performed by clergymen, members of religious orders, and ordinary people carrying out their Christian, Jewish, or Islamic duties, I submit that many of the same men and women, if emancipated from their worship of a supreme being, might behave the same way out of simple human brotherhood. Or sisterhood. In any case, all that good conduct is far outweighed, in my opinion, by the appalling effect that organized religion has had on the last two millennia of Western history—and what it promises for the future. There is no way to add up the death toll from the wars and massacres conducted by the two imperialist faiths, Christianity and Islam, against “pagan” peoples, against each other, and against separatist heresies within their own ranks. The genocidal extermination of the native peoples of the Americas that began with Columbus and Spain was almost always conducted in the name of gentle Jesus. So were various African and Asian slaughters by England, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Belgium.
The antagonism of religious orthodoxy toward every major scientific discovery in history is well-known. Today in America, in a time of AIDS and spreading venereal disease, Roman Catholics and fundamentalists alike stand stalwart against sex education as well as the free distribution of condoms and clean hypodermic needles. In the last decade of the twentieth century, the number of professed believers has only risen. Most of them have joined the various fundamentalist groups that subscribe to biblical inerrancy and are trying to impose on the country their rigid standards of what is acceptable in art, literature, theater, movies, and television.
But there is a reason more compelling than any of the above for exposing the fallacies of religious belief. To the urgent and overriding need to achieve zero population growth and stop destroying our environment, organized religion, Christianity in particular, presents an even more fatal obstacle than indifference. Christ’s emphasis on not thinking about tomorrow has become, with the accumulation of threats to human survival, a doctrine too dangerous to tolerate.
Expressed in its extreme form as apocalypticism, the reason we don’t have to worry about the future is that we will soon face Armageddon and the end of the world as we know it. Such prophecies produce apathy among fundamentalists toward every imaginable warning about the environment. But even when expressed in less dogmatic terms, any real faith and trust in a higher power that loves and protects humankind cannot embrace the possibility that that power would ever permit his favorite creatures to destroy their world and themselves. Why should we worry about a hole in the ozone layer when the hand of God could so easily close it before mass melanoma sets in? If we can’t figure out on our own a way to dispose of nuclear waste, we can pray to a benevolent deity to provide us with the answer. Global warming may be a problem beyond our capacity, but there are, by definition, no limits on the capacities of God. In the final analysis, even if He chose not to save the world from man-made destruction, only our mortal existence would be at stake. The more important goal of eternal life in heaven would still lie ahead.
I realize that religious individuals and organizations have joined various efforts to preserve the environment, but I don’t think believers in a God who can solve everything could apply themselves with the same grim recognition of possible extinction as could completely rational people. And by rational, I mean people with faith in that patchwork product, that supreme result of accidents and necessities on this particular planet, the human brain.
That was where Tom Paine was placing his faith when, two centuries ago, after the French Revolution, he wrote The Age of Reason. He was overly optimistic, as some of us still were in 1945, about how soon and how definitely the power of reason would triumph over mythology and superstition. I observed the two hundredth anniversary of his masterwork by recording some of the irrational convictions still prevalent in this country. Here is an abbreviated list. Each claim has a basic improbability about it. None could meet the ordinary standards of proof required in a court of law or an objective scholarly investigation. Yet each is the earnest belief of millions of Americans:
The human species was divinely created a few millennia ago in the Garden of Eden.
The movements of constellations and planets shape human character and influence events on earth.
All illness is an illusion to be overcome by the mind, not by doctors or medicine.
It is possible to foretell future events by means of palm-reading, tarot cards, tea leaves, or special powers bestowed on certain individuals.
Vehicles from other solar systems have visited our planet and sometimes taken earth residents aboard as passengers.
Certain restless dead people, refusing to accept extinction, return to their earthly premises and harass the current occupants.
Certain “psychics” can communicate with one another at great distances by some form of extrasensory perception.
The scientific term “theory” applied to evolution means that the concept is still an unproven issue among biologists.
A second coming of Christ is imminent.
No one will go to heaven who has not been baptized.
The first, microscopic, fertilized human cell already contains an immortal soul that retains a single, intact identity through all the billions of cell divisions yet to come.
A select minority of the world population, mainly in Europe and the Americas, will proceed after death to eternal bliss in heaven.
A vast minority of the world population will suffer the ghastly tortures of hell for the rest of eternity because they never declared their faith in Christ (or perhaps never heard of him).
The Pope is infallible on matters of faith and morals.
An Israelite tribe immigrated to North America in 609 B.C. and built a great civilization of which no trace remained except a set of gold plates discovered in 1822 by Joseph Smith of Manchester, New York, with the help of an angel named Moroni.
God selected the Jews as his “chosen people” and aided them in annihilating other nations of people who were equally the products of his creation.
Genuine religious fervor can produce “the gift of tongues,” enabling believers to speak and understand languages previously unfamiliar to them.
Black people are genetically inferior to white people except in areas such as basketball, sprinting, long jumping, or running with a football under one arm.
Dreams can and do foretell future events.
There never was a Holocaust.
Homosexuality is a deliberate perversion practiced by immoral men and women in defiance of God’s express command.
We, or at least many of us, have had past lives on this planet, details of which some of us are able to recall.