“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward.” This is a quote from the movie, The Experimenter, part of my pandemic movie-thon.
When I googled the quote’s source, I found Soren Kierkegaard, a Christian philosopher, who Wikipedia calls the father of existentialism. Why did Kierkegaard’s aphorism ring so true? Because in the present, experiences bombard the senses with such velocity it’s hard to decipher their significance. But as a memoirist, patiently recalling episodes of my life, it’s much easier to decode the meaning of events and see how my personal story fits into the saga of my era.
The Experimenter, set post WWII, is about American scientist, Stanley Milgram, who performed experiments that examined what people do when their conscience conflicts with evil authority. Milgrim was the son of eastern European immigrants who fled the Holocaust and hoped to find evidence that the Nazis’ obedience to Hitler was a fluke. However, his results pointed to the contrary. Participants were asked to test a person in another room, and shock them with ever increasing volts when the unseen person got the wrong answer. The unseen person was in on the experiment and not, in fact, shocked, but responded with, escalating gasps and groans as the fictitious volts climbed. Most of Milgrim’s subjects shocked the other person at levels beyond what they knew to be safe. Few were able to stand up for what they knew was right when pressed by the authority in the room to continue.
The implications of these experiments are, of course, ghastly. Our built-in need to please and follow authority, can be grossly perverted against our better instincts.
Another biopic in my movie-thon was Rebel in the Rye, about J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye. How many of us remember Holden Caulfield from ninth grade English, Salinger’s privileged, adolescent, character disillusioned with the world’s hypocrisy? The movie chronicles the author’s progress as a young writer, and at a critical point in Salinger’s development, his mentor asks, “Do you write to show off your talent or to express what’s in your heart?”
This quote was a zinger for Salinger.
His response was to write what was real, and it propelled him to fame as prince of The New Yorker and onto publishing his iconic novel. Holden Caulfield’s sarcastic voice, filled with angst and pessimism, somehow captured the zeitgeist of a generation who, after the horrors of WWII, even wondered if God was dead.
Unfortunately, clamoring fans drove Salinger into the life of a recluse in Cornish, New Hampshire, and after two more slim volumes, he never published again.
In the midst of this pandemic, when we’re all literally living in the valley of the shadow of death, I realize it’s not enough to write what is real. I want my pen to also offer hope, so we don’t all go off the deep end like J.D., journaling his anger and disappointment in mankind in service to no one but his own sanity.
In the light of Milgrim’s experiments and the history of the holocaust, mankind is a huge disappointment, and certainly human authorities have proven hideously hypocritical and corrupt. But God is not dead.
Reviewing the movie of my own life, I see I have no more ability than Milgram’s subjects to overcome temptation. And yet so much about me that was lost or damaged has been reclaimed by the love of Christ.
I’m not a famous scientist, philosopher, or author, but I have this equation taped to my desk:
Zero plus infinity always equals infinity.
So, when I look back and see I am nothing special, I remember that with Jesus as my everything, I can move forward through anything.
