The Bricklayer, the Atheist, and David Foster Wallace
‘The myth, says Wallace, is that there’s even such a thing as Believer and Atheist, with where you happen to fall on this spectrum being a matter of personal choice/worldview, with each side harboring equally valuable perspective, with what we call Liberal Arts Intelligence being this sort of flat genre of moral relativism in which both guys are equally right. “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life,” says Wallace, “there is actually no such thing as atheism.” There is no such thing as atheism because there is no such thing as not worshipping, with worship being too deep-down and swampy and eternal and human an action to just intellectually Switch Off as if fiddling with a light. In regard to what/how we worship, we actually do have a choice, says Wallace. When we’re not-so-conscious, in our “default setting,” not really paying attention, exhausted and disinterested and checked out, the things we worship, the things we gravitate toward, become those things that eat us alive. For the Alaskan wilderness atheist, what is worshipped is an idea—the mirage of absolute knowledge, of self-sufficiency, of center-of-the-worldness. It’s an idea that twists a story of potential gratefulness and humility into a surface-smooth shrugged-off story worth not much of anything: “all that was was a couple Eskimos.”
In the story of the atheist we see unconscious worship take the shape of the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. He takes bite after bite of his worldview, becoming gradually consumed by the picture of the world he’s drawn for himself. There is nothing on this path, says Wallace, but repetitive, entrenched suffering. This is the freedom to be “lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms,” entirely removed from the more important, gratifying, and hard kind of freedom that involves “attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”’
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