I once got this fortune in a cookie: “It was when you found out you could make mistakes that you knew you were onto something.” It’s not the most eloquent fortune ever, but it is a lesson worth remembering.

There is a planet in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books that couldn’t see the stars, and their understanding of the world didn’t include the rest of the universe. When they finally flew out of their dust cloud and saw the stars, they were confronted with something that didn’t fit in their worldview, and they responded simply, “It’ll have to go.” The whole rest of the universe had to go, so their flawed worldview could persist.

I suppose you could understand this as some commentary on simple-minded religion. But I think it touches my own life more nearly as I observe one of my most logical and beloved friends confront the possibility that the theories he has had about some of the most important aspects of life are just plain wrong. Will he decide to favor real-world experiences, flexibility, and tangible application of his principles in the actual situation of his life? Or will he walk away from mountains of information and things of great value for the sake of preserving a theory that will probably never line up with real life? (He doesn’t read my blog, but I guess this is sortof dedicated to him. I hope it helps others like me and my friend.) Becoming an adult looks a little different for each of us. We must learn who we are, and how our greatest strengths can also be our greatest weaknesses.

Today’s entry is for the abstract thinkers:

At some point in our lives we must all realize that real life is not abstract. The real people around us are not abstract. Our real job, our real homes, our real opportunities and obligations are not abstract. The person we marry is not a generic “wife.” She is a unique individual. Models may help us conceptualize the world, but if we live as though the model is actually reality, we will look insane and hurt people and be quite bad at life. (“First, assume a spherical cow.”)

Unfortunately, contemporary society has separated people from the realness of their lives. I have a friend who sometimes says that social norms are very important because it is unfair to ask everyone to think through how to react to every situation from scratch. Not everyone is inclined to think seriously about the consequences of their actions. So if the elite class say to everyone, “Just do what seems best to you,” some people are better equipped than others to figure out what’s best. But social norms provide everyone with a set of expectations that they don’t have to think through from scratch. In previous decades, for example, folks found it easier to get married. It was like getting a job. You had to do it, and the process was much less mysterious: that girl you’re such good friends with? Marry her! Done. Happy for seventy years. Move on to actually constructing an adult life together. These days, everyone is left trying to figure out that process from scratch, without the help of being surrounded by a particular culture with expectations.

Expectations benefit those of us who are more impulsive, those who don’t like to think, those who aren’t so bright. But there’s another group who really can’t cope without social norms and expectations. And moreover, when they finally find themselves confronted by those helpful cultural expectations, they basically implode, because they’ve been stuck in their own heads too long:

The abstract thinkers.

The trouble with being an abstract thinker is that, in the absence of social norms to follow, when they are left to fill in the gaps and start from scratch, they go overboard. They run the risk of doing all the work in their own heads, at the level of theory, so that they can end up with something totally inappropriate for the real world.

They may be more inclined to trust their own reasoning and their own mash-up of ideas pulled from other theoretical sources than they are inclined to trust anyone’s actual experiences. Not their own, not those around them. They’ve used theory to form a set of rules, but those rules are necessarily simplistic. The real world requires a lot of flexibility that theory cannot account for. Go read Antigone and ask yourself if you are the character Creon.

Abstract thinkers are at risk of jettisoning massive amounts of data for the sake of preserving their theory and rationalizing their erroneous worldview. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve done it.

Well, so far, this has all been quite abstract. I can’t make it less abstract right now without telling long stories. But learning this lesson has changed my life, and I hope it can change yours.

A joke we’ve all heard:

There’s a flood. A man is watching the water rise on his street and a truck pulls up to offer him a ride away from the rising water. He refuses the help, insisting, “God will save me!” The driver pleads with him but eventually drives off without him. The water rises higher and the man has taken refuge in his home. A motorboat comes up along the now flooded street and offers to rescue him. The man refuses, insisting again that God will save him instead. The rescuers in the boat plead with him but eventually speed off to help others. The water rises higher and the man now stands on his roof! A helicopter approaches and tells him he needs to climb in or he’ll drown. The man refuses to be rescued, insisting still that God will save him. The helicopter leaves him on the roof, the water continues to rise, and the man drowns. He goes to heaven and meets God. He says, “God! Why didn’t you save me? I had faith that you would save me!” God sighs and replies, “I sent you a truck, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter…”

This joke is a tragedy. (Or, better said, a tragicomedy, as we are meant to laugh at the tragic outcome.) In jokes, everyone goes to heaven to talk with God, so the end isn’t that bad. In real life, although the calculus of salvation is complicated, this man’s failure to see and respond to the hand of God is nothing more or less than sin, refusal of God’s will, the opposite of having a relationship with God, and therefore real tragedy. (Remember, within the tiny closed universe of the joke, God’s will was that he escape the flood and live.) In the end, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, God says to the man, “Thy will be done.”

I am told that Dante wanted to call his Divine Comedy only the Comedy, without the modifier, because there is only one Comedy: God’s story of salvation. And we are all either part of that Comedy, or we are nothing. That “nothing” is tragedy: we destroy ourselves by stepping outside of God’s Comedy, by refusing God’s truth and help. They say the doors to Hell are locked from the inside. Every one of the characters in C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce who refuses Heaven is a tragic character.

I think this means we should pay close attention to the genre of tragedy and learn to recognize it in our real lives. Where we see tragedy, we see perdition itself.

What is Tragedy? Sometimes the tragic character is aware of the tragedy in some way and may not be morally culpable, as in Oedipus. But more often, maybe, the tragic character has found a way to ignore all the instructive information he has been given. The audience can see that he is going to regret his decision, but the tragic character has some strange, blind dedication to some misguided principle: his own power, his own happiness. Creon is undone by his unbending allegiance to his former decision, an edict which mandates the death of the princess Antigone as punishment for burying the body of her brother (who died while leading a rebellion). Creon refuses to re-evaluate his decision because he doesn’t want to compromise the legitimacy of an already pronounced edict. He trusts his own wisdom, rationalizing away all the many arguments he hears from his advisers, who press the issue from three different directions. Antigone explains that her actions were the will of the gods, objectively good and honorable, and a higher law than Creon’s edict. His son tells him it would be a pragmatic administrative decision to pardon her and keep peace in his city. His seer tries to show him how his decision will bring him personal harm. But Creon seems impervious to each line of reasoning. In the end, he has arranged his own undoing, and he has worked evil in the lives of others.

The joke is about recognizing what we’ve been given and responding correctly.

The principle applies to nearly every aspect of the Christian life. Grace is precisely that: a gift from God that we have to accept. A boat or helicopter that we have to recognize and climb into. God offers us good things! When we realize that and accept them, we are part of the Comedy! When we don’t, we are our own little tragedy.

Consider what God sent to Creon: He sent Antigone, He sent Creon’s son, He sent the seer. God did all He could short of bypassing free will. Then it was Creon’s job to get into the helicopter.

The Bible tells us that God gives us second chances, and even third chances, to do what is right. But He does not give infinite chances. I think this is expressed beautifully and painfully in the story Jeremiah tells about a potter. This potter fashions his clay into jars and other beautiful shapes, but the clay is flawed and breaks as he shapes it. The potter smashes it down and starts over. (The clay is a tragic character. The potter is God. The clay is Israel, and all of us, intended by God for some beautiful purpose that we frustrate by our sin.) The next scene is God telling Jeremiah to buy a finished, fired pot and take it to the gate and smash it in front of the city leadership. It is God’s way of saying, “No more chances.” The pot has been fired. If it breaks now, the potter cannot just re-work it. Endgame. It’s over.