The Kryptonite Conundrum

Here’s a short segment of George Carlin’s comedy routine about how bad religion is …

I showed this clip in one of my online classes today at Homeschool Connections.  The class was on the War Poets, the poets who expressed the great disillusionment brought on by World War I and their participation in the horrors of the war.  Not only the War Poets, but most of Western society became deeply cynical after the Great War - quite understandably so.

Carlin’s monologue above is a perfect example of cynicism.  It’s funny because it’s true - as far as it goes.  I said to the students (who are growing up in a bubble-wrapped environment, children of Super Catholic parents, “protected” from this kind of pop culture) … I said to them, “This is an example of how people talk about religion, especially on the internet.  You will run into this.  How would you respond to the things this man is saying?”

The students threw out doctrinal responses to what they perceived to be George Carlin’s doctrinal errors.  Of course they did.  This is what I would call the Kryptonite Conundrum.

What is the Kryptonite Conundrum?  Well, there are die-hard fans of Superman or Spiderman or Star Wars and similar series of movies or novels or comic books who freak out if there appears to be an internal inconsistency in the extended mythology.  For instance, if White Kryptonite turns Superman into a frog in Action Comics #101, but then turns him into a Salamander in Actions Comics #112, fans go ballistic!  Back in the 70s, they would write letters to the editor of Action Comics, and the editor would reply with some sort of contrived patch to fix things: “Well, it’s true that White Kryptonite turns Superman into a frog, but Off-White Kryptonite turns him into a salamander!” 

Problem solved!

But not in real life.  

For instance, one might take the disagreements over the Catholic doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary as examples of the Kryptonite Conundrum: disagreements over the internal consistency of a system, without regard to the real-life corollary or referent indicated by a symbol that occurs within the system.  Once the Perpetual Virginity of Mary is established as doctrine within the Catholic system, then defenders of the literal interpretation of the doctrine must explain away the Scriptural evidence to the contrary, in order to shore up the system.  And so White Kryptonite becomes Off-White Kryptonite or Ivory Kryptonite or Cream Kryptonite.  The goal is to protect the system, or what Eric Voegelin would (if the system is merely fictional) call the Second Reality.

A Second Reality is a false, imaginary reality produced in order to avoid the difficulties of the First Reality, which is the reality we all live in.  Voegelin pointed out how Hegel and Comte and Marx all labored to produce Second Realities, elaborate systems of thought that bore no relation to First Reality, except where the two overlapped.

For instance, the belief that Trump is the Second Coming of King Cyrus and that Trump is still secretly president because he won the 2020 election is an obvious example of a Second Reality, a mere fiction set up in place of truth.  These things bear no relation to First Reality, or to what you might simply call “reality”.  There are, however, overlaps.  You could discuss with such a Second Reality’s True Believer the parts of his system that overlap with First Reality: for instance Trump’s role in funding the development of a COVID vaccine; this is factual and is one of the few facts from the First Reality that are accepted by the True Believer as part of his Second Reality.  But you cannot argue with the True Believer within the Second Reality itself.  That would involve you in the futility of the Kryptonite Conundrum, disagreeing over inconsistencies within a fictional man-made construct.

And so you cannot answer George Carlin with arguments that are valid only within the Second Reality that he is rightly ridiculing.  You cannot answer objections to doctrine that shores up a system with other doctrine from within that same system.  If Christian doctrine is degraded to a point where God is indeed taught to be an invisible man in the sky who has a list of ten things that you should not do, and if you do any one of those things, he’ll send you to suffer in eternal torment because He loves you (and by the way, He needs money) … if that’s the Second Reality of the Christian System, then all you can do is agree with Carlin’s bold and funny take-down of such nonsense.

But what does such “Carlin-ian” cynicism leave out?

It leaves out the mystery of existence, for one thing - which is something that religion is supposed to be addressing.  It leaves out the great challenge of life, which I quoted in my last post: "the quest for the truth of the right order of existence and for living justly in accordance with that truth".  Insofar as any religion is avoiding that noble quest, and substituting a Second Reality in place of that quest, then that religion is worthy not only of ridicule, but of contempt.

And so, in the midst of World War I, warfare and life itself seemed to the War Poets to be a mere exercise in futility.  As Wilfred Owen (who was killed in that war) wrote …

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

… “The old Lie: It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.”

Indeed, if all wars were as apparently meaningless as World War I or Vietnam or Iraq, if all self-sacrifice for one’s fatherland were a mere absurd and mistaken action taken because of the prompting of an Old Lie, then indeed such patriotism is as empty as the risible religion critiqued by Carlin: the religion of an invisible crank in the sky who can’t handle his cash flow.  

Owen’s poem works and affects us because we know that “glory” should be more than “desperate” and self-sacrifice is only ennobled if it is founded on something other than an Old Lie.  The symbol “glory” refers to something real outside the corrupt Second Reality; to allow it to refer only to the vainglory within that crooked construct is to be arguing about what color Kryptonite produces what mutation of Superman.

Cynicism, for all its worth, has its limits, but of its nature it indicates something beyond itself, outside of its disillusion.  

Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary defines the word YEAR thus …

Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

… a wonderfully cynical definition! - but one that points beyond itself; this is not all that a year should be.  The joke is funny because of the gap between what a year ought to be and what a year often is.  In fact, the humor that informs George Carlin’s bit about religion is that he’s telling a truth that ought not to be the whole truth.  Religion is indeed often what Carlin says it is; but that’s funny because it falls shy of what it claims to be and what it ought to be.

Siegfried Sassoon, another of the War Poets, while continuing to lambast the Lie, includes something beyond the Second Reality; or at least presents a glimpse of its overlap with the True Reality we live in …

'Jack fell as he'd have wished,' the mother said,

And folded up the letter that she'd read.

'The Colonel writes so nicely.' Something broke

In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.

She half looked up. 'We mothers are so proud

Of our dead soldiers.' Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.

He'd told the poor old dear some gallant lies

That she would nourish all her days, no doubt

For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes

Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,

Because he'd been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how 'Jack', cold-footed, useless swine,

Had panicked down the trench that night the mine

Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried

To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,

Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care

Except that lonely woman with white hair.

In Sassoon’s poem, the War is still based on lies, lies which (in this case) cover for human cowardice and panic, and the mother of the fallen soldier takes solace in a fiction … but no one else seems to care “except that lonely woman with white hair”.

The mother’s love somehow transcends the mere lie; her caring for “her glorious boy” (who is not so glorious, and is merely “blown to bits” in his panic) may not “redeem” the futility and shame of his death, but at least brings into this systemic lie, this Second Reality, this domain of deception, something beyond mere fatuous selfishness.  Glory may be a sham, but a mother’s love is real … even if deluded in fundamental ways.  I think there is, at least, a hint of that transcendence in the poem.

Yesterday on Threads someone was complaining about her treatment in and by the Catholic Church.  A ton of people added comments that agreed with her and that told stories that trumped hers.  One lone commenter said, “I used to be non-Catholic, but then I came home to the Catholic Church!  Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider how you are reacting?”

And I thought, O Lord! A Super Catholic (a Revivalist-Catholic, an Evangelical-Catholic, an EWTN-Catholic-Answers-Catholic, a Scott-Hahn-Peter-Kreeft-Catholic, an ostentatious-Catholic), one of the Catholics I spent two decades with.  In that circle, to “come home” is cult-speak for converting to, or returning to, the Catholic Church.  It is a thought-stopping cliche, meant (in this case) to shut down debate online.  But it is a Kryptonite Conundrum, a critique from within a system that the original post’s author would not accept.  It makes no attempt to engage the reality of the author’s experience; it merely asserts a symbol that arises within the system and that refers back to the beliefs of the system, a system the original post’s author has already rejected.

But of course that symbol has been co-opted.  To “come home” is to arrive at a mysterious destination at the heart of human longing.

Here’s Sassoon again, many years after the Not-so-Great War, after he became Catholic … 

Outcast and unprotected contours of the soul,

Why in those hallowed minsters could they find no

home,

When nothing appeared more unpredictable than

this—your whole

Influence, relief, resultancy received from Rome?

Sasson finds this longed-for home in Rome, the Roman Catholic Church.

But “home” in Sassoon’s poem is not the trite thought-stopping cliche that it often is within the Revivalist cult.  

In the same way that the symbol “glory” refers to something real beyond itself, and beyond the vainglory of the crooked system that gave us WWI (the false glory fed to ardent children); in the same way that the symbol “religion” should stand for something beyond the corrupt and insipid institution critiqued by Carlin; in the same way that “year” should be a symbol for something more than 365 days of disappointment, so the symbol “home” stands for something real though transcendent, something never fully discovered in this lifetime, even by God become Man.

And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. - Luke 9:58

Jesus, like all of us in a sense, is homeless.

Or, as GK Chesterton said, speaking of the temporary inn, the stable, in which the child Jesus was born …

For men are homesick in their homes,

And strangers under the sun,

And they lay on their heads in a foreign land

Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,

And chance and honour and high surprise,

But our homes are under miraculous skies

Where the yule tale was begun.

***

To an open house in the evening

Home shall men come,

To an older place than Eden

And a taller town than Rome.

To the end of the way of the wandering star,

To the things that cannot be and that are,

To the place where God was homeless

And all men are at home.

I did not become Catholic 24 years ago to “come home” - which is a good thing, for I did not find a home within the Catholic Church.  Instead, I found something more like homelessness; not glory, but vainglory; not the quest for truth but arguments over the color of Kryptonite.  

And yet … and yet …

I know what Sassoon means.  I know what Chesterton means.  I even know what George Carlin, Wilfred Owen and Ambrose Bierce mean.  I suspect you do too.

This life is more than the mere systems we construct, the mere hostels that we call homes, the mere Second Realities we pretend are really real.  

There is something beyond all our petty “old lies”.