1. A Personal Memoir?
A little while ago I mentioned that I have a lot of books: so many, in fact, that I have run out of places to put them and decided, therefore, that, for the most part, I would stop buying new ones and would start rereading books from what is, effectively, my own library.
One of the first books I chose for this journey through the bookshelves of my past was ‘Notes from Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: a quite extraordinary book in which Dostoyevsky creates a Christian allegory through which to conduct a debate on the subject of free will and materialistic determinism, which I don’t think I really understood during the winter of 1974/75 when I first read it, but which so impressed me on second reading that I decided to write an essay on it, which you can find here.
Since then, I have reread a number of very good books which I am pleased to have revisited, including ‘Earthly Powers’ by Anthony Burgess, which I regard as one of the best first-person semi-autobiographical historical novels I have ever read. None of them, however, has inspired me quite enough to want to share my thoughts about them with the readers of this blog… until now! My reason for trying my hand at literary criticism once again, however, is not because ‘Slaughter House Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut is in the same class as ‘Notes from Underground’ but because, while being equally as extraordinary, it is probably one of the most insidious books ever written. It draws us in with its quirkiness; it ensnares us in its non-chronological labyrinthine structure; it lulls into a false sense of security with its understated gentleness; but, most of all, it captivates us with its sheer cleverness: an attribute that is most clearly made manifest by the fact that, on the surface at least, it would appear to combine a personal memoir of the second world war with a work of science fiction, which most people would generally assume to be impossible.
After all, a personal memoir is supposed to be factually based. The author’s memory may be unreliable at times with the result that he or she may get some of the facts wrong. But that is not by design. A work of science fiction, on the other hand, is actually intended to present us with a largely imaginary world.
Nor is the dissonance this creates entirely dissipated by the fact that, on first reading, the book would appear to be divided into two parts: a main part, which is written in the third person and is about the strange life of Vonnegut’s central character, Billy Pilgrim, and what appears to be an introduction or preface, which is written in the first person and is about Vonnegut’s struggles to actually write the book. This impression is significantly undermined at the end of this apparent introduction, however, when Vonnegut makes two rather odd statements. Firstly, he tells us that after numerous unsatisfactory drafts, all of which he threw away, he finally finished the book, which is something we already know. After all, it is the book we are actually reading. It would have been far more helpful, therefore, if he had told us what the impediments to him finishing it had been and how he had overcome them. But this he doesn’t do. Then he tells us that the first line of the book is ‘Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time’, which seems even more odd, not only because there doesn’t seem to be any reason why he would tell us this but because ‘Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time’ is actually the first line of the second chapter of ‘Slaughter House Five’ as it is actually printed. This is because the first section of the book is not labelled as an introduction; it is labelled ‘Chapter One’ or, rather, just ‘One’, in that Vonnegut does not use the word ‘chapter’ in his chapter headings.
Of course, it could be argued that Vonnegut’s intention in telling us what the first line of the novel is is to make it clear that the first numbered section is, indeed, an introduction and not part of the actual novel. But then why didn’t he just label it ‘Introduction’? Unless, of course, that’s not what it is: a possibility which, I have to admit, I didn’t even consider when I first read the book in the summer of 1974. Like most people, I simply took what seemed to be an introduction at face value. Having read it a second time, however, I now realise that, when it comes ‘Slaughter House Five’, nothing should ever be taken at face value: a realisation which, when it hit me, actually led me to look up Vonnegut’s biographical details on the internet to check whether he was even in the army during World War II. And, sure enough, he was part of a reconnaissance unit which was captured by the Germans in the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge, after which he was duly shipped off to Dresden, where, along with other American PoWs, he was quartered in a disused abattoir designated Schlachthof Fünf – Slaughter House Five – in the deep subterranean meat locker beneath which he and his fellow PoWs took shelter during the fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945: an act of pointless destruction by the allies which, again on the surface, would seem to be the main focus of the book.
Just because what Vonnegut tells us about his time as a PoW generally accords with the known facts about his life, however, does not mean that everything he tells us in his ‘introduction’ is equally factually based. At one point in what he describes as his struggles to recount his experiences in Dresden, for instance, he tells us that he telephoned an old army buddy, Bernard O’Hare, who was also a PoW in Dresden, in order to get his opinion on how the book should be structured. In particular, he tells us that he asked Bernard what he thought about making the execution of a certain Edgar Derby the climax of the book, the implication being that Edgar Derby is not just a character in Vonnegut’s novel but someone both Vonnegut and O’Hare knew in real life and whose absurd execution for salvaging a miraculously preserved china teapot from the rubble of a bombed-out building they both witnessed.
The problem with this very natural interpretation of what Vonnegut tells us, however, is that, whatever else he may have been, Edgar Derby is a character in the novel we are reading and a rather important one at that. Being a high school teacher in civilian life, he is older than the rest of the PoWs housed in Schlachthof Fünf and adopts a somewhat paternalistic attitude towards them, especially the hapless Billy Pilgrim, whom he befriends. Billy Pilgrim, on the other hand, is as hapless as he is precisely because he has become unstuck in time, a rather fantastical notion which only makes sense in a work of science fiction, which rather implies that his existence is entirely fictional.
Not, of course, that mixing fictional and real life characters in a novel is entirely without precedent. Vonnegut also tells us, however, that the Edgar Derby in his novel is a devoted husband and father who spends a lot of his time writing imaginary letters to his wife in his head, a very specific detail about Derby’s inner life about which Vonnegut could not have known if, as PoWs together in Dresden, he had merely observed him from the outside. Of course, it is not unknown for writers to embellish characters they have taken from real life with additional habits and traits foreign to the person on whom they are based. But if Edgar Derby had indeed been a real person, what would his wife have thought about Vonnegut using her husband in this way, especially as he does not even change his name, something upon which Vonnegut’s publishers would surely have insisted.
If the character of Edgar Derby is as fictional as that of Billy Pilgrim, however, what this also means is that the telephone conversation between Vonnegut and O’Hare in which they discuss Edgar Derby’s execution is also fictional, as the character Bernard O’Hare, himself, may well be. In fact, as soon as one teases out one thread from this interwoven fabric, the whole thing begins to unravel, raising the question, therefore, as to what purpose this supposed introduction to the novel is actually intended to serve: a question which, had we ever raised it – which most of us did not – Vonnegut clearly wanted us to answer by focusing on a key passage towards the end of the introduction in which he describes taking his young daughter and one of her friends on a road trip to visit Bernard O’Hare and his family in Pennsylvania, the primary purpose of which is to allow Vonnegut to continue trawling O’Hare’s memories of Dresden.
Assuming that the character of Bernard O’Hare is a fiction, however, so too must this whole episode be, along with the character of Kurt Vonnegut within it, as becomes patently obvious as the episode unfolds. For no one could be as naïve and insensitive as Vonnegut presents himself as being while, at the same time, so astutely describing the rather strange behaviour of O’Hare’s wife, Mary, who makes her displeasure at Vonnegut’s visit felt as soon as he and his little party enter her home. After ushering the two men into the kitchen, where they have to sit at the kitchen table rather than in the comfortable leather armchairs in O’Hare’s study, she more or less orders her own children to take Vonnegut’s two girls upstairs to play and watch television, making it clear that she doesn’t want any of them listening to Vonnegut and her husband talking about the war.
Not that there is much chance of that, as O’Hare insists from the outset that he doesn’t remember very much, when what he really means, of course, is that there is not much he wants remember. As a result, the two men quickly lapse into an awkward silence while they listen to Mary stomping around in the adjoining living room, clearly very unhappy.
Nor does Vonnegut have to wait very long to find out what’s he’s done to make her so mad at him. For he is fairly sure that it is he who is the cause of her wrath, not Bernard. And he’s right. As her anger reaches a crescendo, she storms back into the kitchen to vent her fury at Vonnegut, not just because he has come there to dig up memories her husband would rather remain buried but because of something more primal. ‘You were just babies’, she says, ‘when you went to war. Like those upstairs’, to which Vonnegut has to admit that she probably has a point, both he and O’Hare being just boys, fresh out of school, when they enlisted. ‘But you are not going to write it that way, are you!’ she goes on. ‘You’ll pretend you were men and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’
The fictional Vonnegut, of course, is both stunned and slightly cowed by this, not because he was planing to write the kind of book Mary has accused him of planning to write but because, up until this point, we are supposed to believe that he didn’t know what kind of book he was going to write at all and that it is Mary’s outburst that lifts the scales from his eyes. This, however, is quite clearly a fiction. For when ‘Slaughter House Five’ was published in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam war, Vonnegut had already had twenty-five years to forge his opinions on war and certainly didn’t need a blast of Mary O’Hare’s anger to help him make up his mind on the subject. It just makes for a better story. It only works, however, if the revelation Vonnegut is depicted as having in Mary O’Hare’s kitchen is then made clear. The only idea which Vonnegut and O’Hare subsequently discuss, however, is that of The Children’s Crusade of 1212, in which children from Germany and France were manipulated into travelling to Italy, from where they were supposed to be shipped to the Holy Land to convert the Muslims to Christianity, but were actually shipped to Tunis to be sold as slaves.
As such, this clearly resonates with Mary O’Hare’s angry statements about old men glorifying war and sending babies to their deaths. The only problem is that, despite Vonnegut choosing ‘The Children’s Crusade’ as the subtitle of his book, there is absolutely nothing in the main text of the novel that relates to it in any way.
In fact, trying to find any connection between the strange life of Billy Pilgrim and any of the subjects Vonnegut writes about in the introduction is actually very difficult. One possibility, of course, is that one could view Billy Pilgrim’s becoming unstuck in time as a metaphor for the ways in which wars change those who fight in them. Indeed, we get a strong hint of this earlier in the introduction when Vonnegut tells us that his first job after leaving the army was as a reporter in Chicago, where he covered a story about a lift operator who was crushed to death by his own lift. When he gets back to the office, the stenographer to whom he dictated the story over the telephone consequently asks him how he managed to stay so calm in the face of something so horrific. ‘It must have been a terrible sight’, she says, to which he replies that he saw far worse things during the war.
One of the worse things he tells us he saw in Dresden was a group of school girls who had been boiled alive in a water tower. During the fire-bombing, they had climbed up into the tower to escape the fire storm below and had got into the water because they thought it would both save them from being burned and keep them cool. It didn’t.
Later on, in the main body of the novel, he then describes how, when the American PoWs came up from the meat locker beneath Schlachthof Fünf the following day, the sky was still black with smoke, the sun a little pink dot trying to poke its way through. The whole city, which had once been one of the architectural jewels of Europe, he describes as looking like an eerie moonscape, with hardly a single building still standing. Even more shocking is the fact that 135,000 people were killed in Dresden in just that one night, nearly twice as many as were killed by the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For the PoWs, however, the worst was yet to come. For with so many people dead, they were naturally put to work digging out bodies from under the rubble, most of them in cellars where they had gone to shelter while their houses burned down above them, but which became super-heated by the fire storm, killing those entombed within them. Within days, as a consequence, the miasma floating above Dresden became so putrid from the decomposing corpses that many of the PoWs became seriously ill from retching, with the result that the Germans had to bring in soldiers with flame throwers to finish incinerating the bodies where they lay.
After such experiences, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that many soldiers returned home profoundly changed by what they had been through and were consequently unable to reassimilate into ordinary life, which they now found themselves observing from the outside: detached, remote… a bit like Billy Pilgrim. The only problem with this interpretation of Billy’s symptoms, however, is that his almost constant state of disorientation and confusion didn’t start during the war; he is described as having always been like this. What’s more, his condition makes him more or less immune to the kind of psychological trauma other soldiers suffered, not only bringing into question whether Vonnegut’s book could really be about the effects of wars on those who live through them, but raising the question as to whether it is actually about war at all.
After all, the only reason we have for believing that this is a book about war – and more specifically about the fire-bombing of Dresden – is that, throughout the introduction, Vonnegut constantly tells us that it is. If we look at the main body of the novel, however, events in Dresden only occupy a couple of chapters towards the end. If we accept that the introduction is as much a work of fiction as the novel as whole, moreover, it begins to look as if the purported subject of the book might also be a fiction and that the purpose of the introduction is therefore to serve as a source of misdirection of the kind magicians use on stage to draw our attention away from what they are actually doing. The question, therefore, is what Vonnegut is actually doing or, more specifically, what ‘Slaughter House Five’ is really about.
2. The Tralfamadorians
Another reason for doubting whether Billy Pilgrim’s coming unstuck in time is a metaphor for some kind of war-induced PTSD is that, when he returns home from the war, he resumes his training to be optometrist as if nothing had happened to interrupt it. In 1948, he admittedly suffers a brief and unexplained mental breakdown, but even if this doesn’t prevent him from completing his studies – finishing third in his class – and marrying the daughter of the owner of the optometry school, who duly sets him up in business as an optometrist, at which is he is very successful. Over the next twenty years, as a result, he and his wife are able to enjoy the kind of comfortable American middle class lifestyle depicted in Hollywood films of the 1950s and 60’s. They have two children – a boy and a girl – a nice home and a new Cadillac every other year. In fact, Billy Pilgrim couldn’t have been more ordinary if he’d tried.
It is not until 1967 that three things happen which completely change his life. Firstly, he is one of only two survivors of a plane crash over Vermont, which leaves him with serious head injuries requiring major brain surgery. Secondly, his wife dies of carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of a traffic accident which she, herself, causes while rushing to the hospital to be at Billy’s bedside. Then, to cap it all, he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.
Of course, there will be some who may suspect that his belief that he was abducted by aliens might have something to do with the brain damage he suffered as a result of the plane crash, especially as no one else knows anything about his abduction. This, however, he explains as being due to the fact that the Tralfamadorians are able to travel in time as well as space, with the result that, even though he spends several months on Tralfamadore, being studied in a kind of zoo for captured alien species, when the Tralfamadorians finally return him to earth, they do so at a point in time that is only a few seconds after he was abducted.
Not, of course, that the question as to whether Billy Pilgrim ‘really’ was abducted by aliens or whether he developed this delusion as a result of brain damage is one that gains very much traction in a book in which just about everything is subject to multiple interpretations. What is far more important is the effect that what Billy believes to have been his abduction by aliens has on his life, partly as a result of the abduction itself and partly as a result of what the Tralfamadorians teach him. For they are not only able to travel in time but actually experience time in a way that differs significantly from the way in which human beings experience it. For instead of experiencing it lineally, as a series of moments, each one following the one before in a sequence which extends infinitely into both the past and the future, they see it all at once. What’s more, they can move about in it, selecting which moment they want to inhabit.
This therefore makes them effectively immortal, not because they live for ever – they don’t – but because having visited the last moment of their lives, which they can do an infinite number of times, they can simply go back to some other moment in their lives. Because they experience all time as present time, what’s more, they not only know when their own lives come to an end, they even know when and how the universe, itself, comes to an end. In fact, they actually cause it when a Tralfamadorian test pilot, testing a new rocket fuel, presses a button to start the engine of his space craft and causes the universe to blink out of existence.
Billy, of course, asks them why, if they know this, they don’t stop the test pilot from pressing the button, which the Tralfamadorians find very amusing. In fact, they find it so amusing that they flock to the zoo at precisely that moment to hear him ask the question again. The answer, however, as they try to get him to understand, is because the test pilot always presses the button, has always done so and will always do so. The moment is simply structured in that way. To the Tralfamadorians, however, this is not a problem because they can simply avoid inhabiting moments in which bad things happen and inhabit, instead, moments in which good things happen, like listening to Billy ask hilarious questions.
After long and careful consideration, to Billy, this seems like a very enlightened and intelligent approach to life. He, however, has a problem which the Tralfamadorians don’t have. For although travelling through time to reach Tralfamadore also seems to have given him the ability to travel in time, unlike the Tralfamadorians, he is not able to control it or choose which moments in his life he visits. One moment, he’ll be walking through a door in 1958; the next, he’ll be back in the Ardennes Forest in 1944. This keeps him in a constant state of anxiety, which he describes as like being an actor with permanent stage fright, never knowing which part of his life he is going to have to play next. This also explains why, throughout his life, he has always appeared to others as somewhat shocked and confused, looking around him in a daze as if wondering where he is. It also explains why he has always been extremely passive, a mere observer of the world rather someone who is engaged in it, and why he has always attracted bullies, people who see his passivity and lack of agency as weaknesses of which they can make fun.
Nor does it help that, unlike the Tralfamadorians, most of the moments in his life he randomly revisits are precisely those he would prefer to avoid: like the time his father tried to teach him how to swim by throwing him into the deep end of a swimming pool; or the time he was being beaten up in the Ardennes Forest by a bully called Roland Weary, who might have beaten him to death if the Germans hadn’t intervened and taken them both prisoner; or, of course, the moment he and his fellow American PoWs emerge from the meat locker beneath Schlachthof Fünf to find the once architecturally beautiful city of Dresden reduced to a moonscape under a blackened sky.
What this also suggests is that, even before his abduction by the Tralfamadorians in 1967, when his ability to travel in time is initially acquired, he has actually been time travelling all his life, a strange form of temporal paradox which is further confirmed by the fact that he knows in advance when the Tralfamadorians are going to abduct him and actually goes out into his garden to greet them. Like them, he also knows when and where he is going to die and does nothing to prevent it. Indeed, he actually walks into it. For he is assassinated in a convention centre in Chicago in 1976, having gone there to give a well-publicised lecture on the Tralfamadorians and time travel, which alerts a Chicago gangster called Paul Lazzaro to his forthcoming presence in Chicago, enabling Lazzaro to hire a hitman to shoot Billy for an offence Lazzaro wrongly believes Billy committed in 1944.
At this point, of course, you may be wondering what Billy is doing in 1976 giving public lectures on time travel and the Tralfamadorians, something which his daughter, Barbara, believes is another symptom of his brain damage. Having experienced his own death multiple times, however, and each time having jumped to some other point in his life, Billy decides that he wants to teach all his fellow human beings what the Tralfamadorians taught him: that death is not something to be feared, that it is just one moment in a life one eternally continues to inhabit.
In this, of course, he is wrong. For even if his abduction by aliens and his travels in time are real, and not symptoms of the injuries to his brain he suffered in the plane crash, he acquired his ability to travel in time by being abducted by the Tralfamadorians, which means that other human beings, who are not abducted by the Tralfamadorians, may not have the same ability and may not jump to another point in their lives when they die. To Billy’s followers, however, this is not something they choose to consider. They rather choose to believe that, when they die, they will jump to another point in their lives because this is what they want to believe.
That is to say that what Billy actually creates is, in effect, a new religion, one in which those who believe in him are promised eternal life. And if that sounds familiar, it should. For just like Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’, ‘Slaughter House Five’ can also be read as a Christian allegory, in which the Christ figure, Billy Pilgrim, suffers all the horrors and pains, traumas and torments of all human life, but transcends them through his fatalistic acceptance that that is just what life is. Like the Tralfamadorians, he understands the futility of asking ‘Why?’ when what exists cannot be explained and must simply, therefore, be endured. At one point, he even tells his followers when and where is going to be killed, to which they respond by shouting ‘No’. But then he tells them that if they cannot accept this, then they have not understood a single word he has been telling them.
3. Heaven or Hell?
The problem with Billy’s new religion, of course, is that while it may liberate its followers from the fear of death, it has moral consequences which Vonnegut does not even address. For if one really believes that one is condemned to go on reliving one’s life for all eternity, one has to be very careful what kind of life one makes for oneself, especially if, like Billy, one cannot control which parts of one’s life one jumps to after one dies. The problem is that this doesn’t necessarily mean that those who subscribe to this belief will devote themselves to living rich and fulfilling lives or even lives of continual pleasure. For while they may desire to create a heaven on earth for themselves, which they can then enjoy throughout eternity, given the kind of terrible things that can happen to people in this world, they may be far more driven by the fear that they may accidently create an eternity in hell for themselves: a fear which could make them so risk averse that they may not be able to do anything at all.
In this regard, I am reminded of another novel in which ‘time’ is a major theme, ‘The White Hotel’ by D. M. Thomas, which, as far as I can remember – not now having a copy of the book to which I can refer – is about a young Jewish opera singer who is referred to Sigmund Freud for analysis because she is suffering from chronic psychosomatic pains in her left breast and ovary. In line with his standard methodology, Freud duly attempts to identify some trauma in her past that would explain these pains, but fails to do so, at least to her satisfaction. For the one thing Freud does not consider, of course, is that the trauma may not lie in her past but in her future.
In 1941, however, she is captured by the Germans and taken to a place just outside Kiev called Babi Yar, where, along with thousands of other prisoners, she is made to strip naked and line up on the edge of a ravine, where she and the other prisoners are then machine-gunned, a mode of execution which results in one bullet passing through her left breast and another through her left ovary. The way D. M. Thomas describes it, it is one of the most horrific scenes in all literature, made all the more so by the fact that, although she topples into the ravine with all the other victims, she is not dead, only wounded, and is actually killed by the hundreds of naked bodies which subsequently fall in on top of her, crushing the life out of her and burying her alive.
Given D. M. Thomas’ particular vision of how time sometimes operates, with the future sometimes affecting the past, she is not, of course, condemned to relive this experience over and over again for all eternity; she is merely haunted by it throughout her life. Imagine how terrified one would be, however, if one actually believed in Billy Pilgrim’s new religion and feared that something like this might be one’s own fate. One can imagine that some people might even take their own lives to avoid it.
Of all the negative consequences that could possibly flow from believing in Billy Pilgrim’s new religion, however, this one is relatively mild compared to what could be brought about by the possible existence of a group of people who not only believe in Billy’s religion but so hate another group of people that they are willing to make the lives of this group hell so that they will, indeed, have to relive them for all eternity. They even build concentration camps where they work and starve these people to death over as long a period as possible, so as to prolong their suffering, and inflict on them every form of cruelty imaginable.
The good news is that, despite the existence of a real historical parallel, this is probably one of the least likely consequences of believing in Billy’s new religion to actually occur. In fact, it is far more likely that a widespread adoption to this belief would actually reduce the amount of cruelty in the world. I say this because the hate-filled vindictiveness which drives the imaginary concentration camp guards in the above scenario differs significantly from the values and beliefs which determined the behaviour of real concentration camp guards in places like Auschwitz, most of whom were not sadistic killers who inflicted suffering on people for the sake of it, but merely did what they were told because they largely accepted the propaganda they had been constantly fed that these people were sub-human vermin who had to be eradicated for the good of society. It does not excuse them, of course, but, for the most part, they did not believe that they were evil or that what they were doing was evil. Indeed, it is this that makes the Holocaust so dreadful: that it was ordinary men and women, like you and me, who largely carried it out.
This, however, could not be said in the case of anyone who deliberately inflicted suffering on others because they believed that this suffering would be repeated throughout eternity. For anyone who did this would surely have to know that what they were doing was both evil and irrational. For they would also have to know that the hell they were creating would not just be for their victims but for themselves as well. For they, too, would be trapped in it forever, endlessly repeating the same acts of cruelty for all eternity, thereby turning themselves into what most Christians would describe as being quite literally devils: something which no sane person would surely ever choose to be, not least because there can be no forgiveness or absolution for those who commit atrocities which have no prospect of ever coming to an end.
More to the point, a devil is not what most of us want to be. Most of us like to consider ourselves at least halfway decent human beings, a characteristic of being human which thus highlights the real flaw in Billy’s new religion. For while the Tralfamadorian belief that all time is present time means that nothing can be changed, most of us want to believe that we can not only choose the way we act but the kind of person we are.
In this regard, ‘Slaughter House Five’ can thus be seen as a vehicle for the same debate between free will and materialistic determinism we find in ‘Notes from Underground’. The only difference is that Vonnegut and Dostoyevsky are on opposite sides. For while, at the end of ‘Notes from Underground’, its unnamed narrator sacrifices his own interests in order to avoid inflicting himself on another human being, thereby exercising free will, Vonnegut would argue that, like the Tralfamadorian test pilot who presses the button that ends the universe, both of these events are entirely determined and thus involve neither freedom nor choice.
In fact, Vonnegut’s determinism – or the determinism that results from the Tralfamadorian view of time – lies at the heart of any interpretation or assessment we make of ‘Slaughter House Five’. For what Vonnegut does not seem to have understood is that it actually results in a contradiction within his overall message. I say this because what makes the Tralfamadorian view of time so liberating, of course, is the fact that, if nothing can be changed, then nothing we do really matters, from which can be derived the central nihilist precept that nothing matters at all except the knowledge that nothing matters. This is because it is this knowledge, that nothing matters, that sets us free from such values and social structures as those which have led men to fight and die in wars since the beginning of time. After all, if nothing matters, then there is nothing worth fighting and dying for. The problem is that our liberation from traditional roles and values further implies that we have the freedom and ability to act outside and contrary to these roles and values. That is to say that it implies that we can choose to live in a different way. Indeed, it is this vision that made Vonnegut a hero on university campuses all across America throughout the 1960s and 70s. Not only does this contradict the entire deterministic world view from which this whole line of reasoning flows, however – which means that there has got to be something wrong with it somewhere – but its adoption raises questions with which we are still struggling today. For if our new freedom from traditional roles and values allows us to now choose how we live our lives and, hence, who we are, the question this poses, of course, is ‘How do we want to live our lives and who do we actually want to be?’
4. Meaning & Identity
Indeed, it is this question, which, today, is usually posed in terms of meaning and identity, that is the primary legacy handed down to us by the 1960s, not because, at some point in the 1970s, we all started reading Kurt Vonnegut, but because, in 1960, the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approved the release of a safe and reliable oral contraceptive, which, as many predicted, led to an inevitable decline in traditional marriage and a weakening of the once very distinctive roles of husband and wife that men and women traditionally played. This, in turn, then led both men and women to question more profoundly their purpose in life, a very destabilising process which has almost certainly affected men more deeply than women.
I say this because when a man was the husband of his wife and the father of his children, he not only knew who he was, but this very identity bestowed on him various responsibilities. It was his duty, for instance, to provide for his family, to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, duties which gave him a very clear purpose life and imbued it with meaning. By no longer inhabiting these roles – or, at least, not to the same extent – both men and women have therefore had to define both their identity and their purpose in life in other ways.
One of the most obvious of these, of course, is through their careers which have become more and more important, especially to women, as family roles have declined. Indeed, it is probable that most of us now define ourselves far less in terms of our place within a family and more in terms of our position within the working world. The problem with this, however, is that most people simply do not have careers that are important enough to carry the full burden of life’s meaning. Many of us pretend that we do, of course, and our employers pander to our need to be of significance by giving us fancy titles; but most of us know that the world wouldn’t come to an end if we didn’t turn up for work tomorrow.
To compensate for this, of course, many people simply throw themselves into their social lives, not least because being a member of a particular social group confers on one a certain group identity. The problem with this, however, is that most social groups are either based on shared activities and interests, or come about merely as a result of people being at the same school together or drinking in the same pub. Even if people didn’t just drift away to go to university, for instance, or to take up a new job, social groups are therefore essentially ephemeral and, as we get older, tend to become little more than nostalgic relics of a distant past.
The few close friendships most of us have do, of course, last longer and are thus more meaningful. The problem here, however, is that what usually makes a friendship meaningful is the role friends play in supporting us in other areas of our lives, especially our careers and marital relations. Without problems to discuss and other people to moan about, friendships therefore tend to become more like routines or habits, providing us with someone with whom we can go out and have a drink rather than sit at home watching TV.
That’s not to say, of course, that this is a bad thing. Friends certainly make our lives a little less empty. But they don’t provide us with the purpose in life our families use to, making it hardly surprising, therefore, that, as marriage and the family have declined, more and more people have sought to make their lives meaningful by taking up a social or political cause, which, because such causes usually involve some sort of group activity, also provides the participants with an additional group identity.
The problem with basing even a part of one’s identity and purpose in life on a social or political cause, however, is that it tends to have three very unfortunate consequences, both for the individual concerned and for society as a whole. Because choosing a cause to which to devote oneself is also a choice of one’s identity, and because one wants to think of oneself as a good and righteous person, the first of these unfortunate consequences is that the choice of a cause is essentially a moral one, which means that anyone who opposes one’s advocacy of that cause either doesn’t know what they are doing, and is therefore stupid, or knows full well what they are doing and is therefore immoral. This, however, is extremely divisive. For if one believes that another’s opposition to one’s cause is due to either their stupidity or their immorality, it is very difficult to tell them that, while one disagrees with their views, one respects their right to their own opinion. Not being able to agree to disagree consequently makes it very difficult to part on amicable terms.
The second unfortunate consequence results from the fact that, if one’s belief in a particular cause is central to one’s identity, then anything that threatens to undermine that belief is effectively an existential threat to oneself. This therefore makes rational discussion of the belief very difficult if not impossible. For whatever factual evidence or rational argument another puts forward in opposition to one’s belief, in order to protect oneself, one has to resist it at all cost, most commonly through aggressive denial.
In 1989, for instance, James Hansen, then Director of NASA GISS, told Congress that, due to global warming, Artic summer sea ice would be a thing of the past by the end of the century. Apart from normal annual fluctuations, however, the amount of Arctic summer sea ice has remained more or less constant for the last thirty-seven years. It is very doubtful, however, that any climate change activist would accept this as evidence that their beliefs about carbon dioxide and global warming are wrong. They will far more probably dismiss the undiminished presence of Arctic summer sea ice as disinformation and accuse anyone who repeats it of either being stupid, for believing such lies, or a climate change denier and hence immoral.
The third unfortunate consequence of basing one’s identity on a political or social cause then consists in the fact that, unlike roles assigned to us by society, roles or identities we choose for ourselves require constant validation. If I am a father, for instance, I may continually question how adequately I perform this role, but I will not question the validity of the role itself, not because the role of being a father is the inevitable consequence of a biological fact, as may be thought, but because normative social rules often carry as much weight as biological imperatives.
I say this because, up until around 11,000 years ago, most human societies were matriarchal, which meant that fathers were not recognised as such and played no role in bringing up their children. Unlike the role of a child’s mother, therefore, which has a fairly obvious biological basis, the relatively recent role of the father would appear to be largely a social construct, which requires constant social reinforcement, usually in the form of intense public censure of any man who shirks his paternal responsibilities, in order to be maintained. In accepting those responsibilities, therefore, traditionally, men didn’t need society to validate their choice because society didn’t really give them one.
Of course, it will be argued that this just shows how tyrannical traditional roles and values were and how much we have gained by freeing ourselves from them. It may be doubted, however, just how much more tyrannical traditional roles and values were than the values and behaviour demanded by many of today’s activist groups, which can be highly censorious of anyone who deviates from current orthodoxy and absolutely scathing of anyone who actually leaves the fold. This is further compounded by the fact that causes we choose for ourselves tend to be less grounded in everyday life than responsibilities which are thrust upon us, like looking after small children, where keeping them safe and contented is demonstrable evidence that we are doing something right. Choosing what kind of food we should eat to save the planet, in contrast, is always going to be subject to shifting opinion, with which individual members of a group can easily fall out of step, thereby bringing even more censure on themselves.
What makes this even more pernicious, however, is the fact that if one’s identity is dependent on membership of a cause-based group, one may well feel that one has no choice but to conform to the group’s current orthodoxy, not because one is truly convinced by it, but because refusing to conform may well mean being cancelled and therefore stripped of one’s identity. The result is that members of the group come to think and believe what they are told to think and believe in a way that is entirely without substance. They will deny this, of course. They will scream and shout and vehemently affirm that they really do believe what they say they believe, but this, of course, is because to do otherwise would pose an existential threat to who they believe themselves to be.
Not, of course, that Kurt Vonnegut can be blamed for any of this. He wasn’t to know that our abandonment of traditional roles and values in the 1960s would lead to today’s nihilistic nightmare. But Dostoyevsky knew. Writing a hundred years earlier, he knew that the materialist determinism of the 19th century would not only lead nihilism but to the collectivist ideologies of the 20th century, which ultimately led to the gulags and the concentration camps and the fire-bombing to Dresden in February 1945. So, instead of writing ‘Slaughter House Five’, perhaps Vonnegut’s time would have been better spent reading ‘Notes from Underground’.
