I was rewatching “Breaking Bad” recently. No dissenting from the general consensus here - it’s a great show, but in my opinion, not as great as “Better Call Saul,” which is probably one of the finest pieces of entertainment ever made, a true modern masterpiece, Shakespeare in the guise of a sleazy lawyer. The reason for this superiority, for me, is that Saul/Jimmy is a far, far more interesting protagonist than Walter White, and despite Saul/Jimmy frequently doing the wrong thing, you’re often rooting for him to succeed in spite of that. In fact, I would argue that every character in “Better Call Saul” is incredibly interesting, while “Breaking Bad” falls down, in my view, on how much you grow to hate its protagonists – Jesse I hated right away, because drug-addicted slackers are objectively contemptible, and Walter I started out feeling bad for, but then really started to despise fairly early on. Of course I understand the audience isn’t meant to love Walter White by the end – that he’s a completely irredeemable villain, but there are many irredeemable villains I generally love. But what I tend not to love in any character is cowardice.
One of the reasons “Breaking Bad” is so good is that Walter starts out as a figure that the audience pities because of his illness and failures in life, but as the show progresses, it reveals that these failures are largely of his own making. He has a victim complex where he believes that he was tricked into selling his company, and if he just hadn’t done that, then he too would be a successful and respected scientist. He blames Gretchen and Elliot for tricking him, and therefore his misfortune is the fault of others, which he can’t be blamed for, while throughout the show, we come to realize that he’s largely the master of his own destiny, and brings misfortune upon himself because he constantly runs away from success, and refuses to take responsibility for his own actions. It takes his brush with death, his cancer diagnosis, for him to truly have the courage to take action, evil and horrible action, but action, for the first time in his life. He becomes the feared drug lord in order to overcompensate for his cowardice in never trying for anything in his life. But the core of the character remains the same, which is what makes him a well-written character. A lot of people who defend bad writing often point to characters who shift completely and explain it away as “character development.” But character development involves keeping the core of the characters the same, or at least building on something that was already there, not just changing a character into a completely different person. It’s common to excuse terrible writing by saying it’s “character development,” when it’s literal transformation into a different character, but that’s a rant for another time!
Anyway, the reason I’m focusing on “Breaking Bad” is because one of the moments that really struck me upon rewatching it is Walter trying to rationalize his drug manufacturing and distribution. There’s an early scene where he’s discussing what a human being is made up of with Gretchen, and she suggests a soul, and he replies that he can’t see a soul anywhere in his equations of chemistry and matter that make up a human body – he is a materialist at heart, a man who believes if he can’t see it, it’s not there. And in “The Fly” episode (which is directed by Rian Johnson, and you can tell because it’s largely a waste of time!), Walter says the following about his wife:
“She just won't understand. I mean, no matter how well I explain it, these days she just has this... this... I mean, I truly believe there exists some combination of words. There must exist certain words in a certain specific order that can explain all of this, but with her I just can't ever seem to find them."
This is Walter White, the man of science, who believes that if he can just explain it right, if he can find the proper verbal formula, that his wife will no longer be repulsed at his actions in manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine. His belief is that there is some formulation of words that, when uttered, will transform an objectively immoral and reprehensible action into something good and understandable, like a magic spell transforming an ugly duckling into a swan. This is striking because it says a lot about the rational, scientific mind, the mind that believes it can rationalize any action.
You can see parallels to this in hubristic scientists throughout classic literature – Dr. Frankenstein, for instance, who believes he can create a new man from the parts of dead men, but doesn’t believe this creature has any need for human love or empathy, so much so that he abandons it instantly after creation, and then seems shocked when it turns into a murdering monster.
You can also see this in “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” – the doctor in that story wants to turn animals into humans by torturing and twisting them so thoroughly that they become some creepy simulacrum of humanity. The narrator is kept awake at night hearing the screams of creatures in torment as they are vivisected, and when Dr. Moreau explains his position, he rationalizes it thus:
“For it is just this question of pain that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.”
Moreau believes that pain, and the aversion to causing pain, is a primitive emotion that animals feel, but that humankind is destined to overcome by rationalizing it away. He advocates for the use of intellect over empathy – things may look and feel horrible, but they can be good if they lead to greater scientific understanding. Of course there is some justification for this belief, but the truth is, nobody can rationalize away pain, and nor should anyone want to. There is a necessity for primitive instincts, instincts that prompt us to want to help when someone is suffering, and to want to shield and protect the weak. But there is no rational basis for this instinct – the purely intellectual position would be to remove the weak from the gene pool so that humanity as a whole becomes stronger, and mercifully end the lives of those suffering in a humane way (and you can read all about the Fabian Society, of which H. G. Wells was a member, and their position on eugenics, to see how they rationalized and promoted that appalling belief.) The intellect can rationalize inflicting pretty much any horror upon humanity, but it’s certainly not desirable that it should. And yet, if your belief is only in science and rationality, and in the futuristic march toward scientific progress at any cost, I don’t see how you can not rationalize that. The belief in ethics must be based on some other kind of metaphysical belief, of the belief in the individual being of innate value and worth. And I don’t see how that belief can be separated from some kind of religious framework.
We live in a rational age and, certainly in the West, religion has been on the decline. But the religious instinct is, I believe, innate in mankind, and once we dismiss an irrational belief in the supernatural, we cling instead to irrational beliefs in the natural world. This seems obvious looking around at the world today, and seeing all the insane, supposedly rational beliefs that people hold – take your pick depending on your political and social lens. The common atheist hypothesis that freeing people from superstition will inevitably make them more rational seems grossly erroneous to me.
So why would this be? Well, as I said, I believe there’s a religious instinct in people, a natural instinct for worship seeking some kind of divinity. You kill one religion, and another one rises to take its place. In our modern era, I think we are witnessing the rise of God as Man, or God as Self. We identify God as something we create and worship within us, or in something mankind has created, such as science. We devotedly believed “Science” could save us from the COVID plague, and we worshipped the vaccines and public health officials who gave us the Science – this was particularly exemplified when the governor of New York gave a sermon on the vaccines to proselytize her belief in them. There is even a belief that Science will soon be able to save us from death itself - transhumanism works to try and make humanity immortal, to try and make us into our own gods, because God is eternal. I believe the inevitable alternative to an external god is the worship of an internal one. And I believe that is far more dangerous.
Social media in particular encourages us to look inward, to examine our multiple identities and find labels for everything. This kind of hyper-focus on the self is obviously unhealthy, and leads people to search for divinity and purpose within - as if you can just somehow dig deep enough into yourself, you can discover an identity that makes you happy and completes you. It seems like a quest to discover what sort of divine being you have, making yourself into your own God that demands worship.
Of course the question of identity is extremely complex, and not something an individual can negotiate alone. We have all kinds of identities, from personal self-belief to how we interact with others, and despite what people now loudly claim, you cannot demand that others accept your self-identity. In fact, you cannot demand others share in your concept of self at all, and trying to do so will inevitably make you unhappy. You can’t control the world – you can only control yourself. And ironically with all the self-examination, people seem to be very bad at controlling themselves.
The desire for control also seems to be on the rise. One of the benefits of established religions is the fact that they are innately supernatural, and that there is always something humans can't explain and just have to accept as "God's will" or "God's plan." That aspect of faith, that it HAS to be something unknowable and undiscoverable, gives you a natural kind of humility - you literally CAN'T know everything, or prepare for everything, so there has to be a certain amount of belief in faith, the supernatural, inexplicable element of life. While in our modern, God as Self days, we assume we CAN explain everything, and hence can control everything. This belief was made explicit during COVID, a respiratory virus that was by definition uncontrollable, and yet there was a widely held belief that if we just did more masking, lockdowns, vaccines, etc. we could eliminate the virus, rather than just accepting we actually can't control something as unpredictable and random as a virus. In a faith-based society, you're conditioned to think like that, and have some humility, but in our God as Man days, there's no room for anything magical or inexplicable.
I think that contributes to the literal-mindedness I wrote about in a previous post, that we see in a lot of creative endeavors – we now believe that creativity has to be something realistic and explicable, because everything else is. Previous generations had this idea of being visited by a muse, a divine being who would inspire you, but there’s no room for such spiritual nonsense in our modern world. Now we have to analyze everything precisely and rationally, rather than just accepting beauty as something divine and hence unknowable. It's why modern art sucks.
The main crime of the new religion, in my view, is that it’s so incredibly boring. The old religions had great stories, even if you don't believe in them– the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Passion of the Christ are all timeless masterpieces that speak to humanity in a deep and profound way. They grip us, even if we don’t believe they are literally true. But I defy anyone to find any creation of the God as Self religion that has actually resulted in a good story.
All we can do is deconstruct old stories, slap warnings and censorship labels on things, and go back and change the words of the past so they don’t offend our pathetic sensibilities. We, the gods of the modern age, believe we have reached the peak of human understanding (we are gods, after all!) and hence are greater than any human who came before us. We are in the most enlightened age there ever was, or ever will be, and hence we can pass judgments on the flawed, devolved humans of the past, who we must now correct since we have become gods. Our ridiculous, self-righteous censors think themselves morally and intellectually superior to the literary luminaries of Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, P. G. Wodehouse, and William Shakespeare. It is an astonishing display of arrogance, but not as astonishing if you understand that these people believe themselves to be gods.
Literal-mindedness and the deconstruction of art turns art into a formula, with no room for divine inspiration. If your reaction when confronted with great art is to deconstruct it, or damage it to make a stupid political point, or see it as a relic of a sinful past that must be rectified, then you’re basically a robot, missing the fundamental emotional aspect of being human, and being moved in the presence of the divine. An atheist can be moved in a cathedral, even if he doesn’t believe in God – when he sees what people have done to honor their belief in the divine, what glory human beings are capable of achieving because of divine inspiration, that is moving, and humbling. Pride is the opposite of that - it is inward-looking and self-serving and Satanic, because you center God’s glory within yourself. In the God as Man religion, the divine is made common, and understandable, and transient.
Carl Jung believed that any human belief system had to have a dreamlike quality. Mankind needs fantasy, because we NEED to not be able to know everything, because we literally can’t know everything. We need to have unknowable and impossible things. Transcendence, the belief in something outside ourselves, something bigger than ourselves, is essential to live any kind of life. The intellect is pride, and tries to drag the transcendent down to its level. Humility is what is needed to appreciate art, and indeed life itself.
There has always existed a utopian desire for perfection that believes that reality can be shaped endlessly, with no room for chaos in the natural order. But humanity is inherently chaotic – that’s the story of Adam and Eve. And yet people have, and always will, try and perfect humanity by trying to control it, by trying to impose some perfect order on it. These people, intellectuals mostly, who believe if they can just find the correct formula, the correct words, if they can just shape mankind from the beginning, like a blank slate, then they will create paradise. But there is always a snake in paradise, and honestly, there probably always should be. The totalitarian mindset is horrific, and would end in a horrific world, a world where a man of science can excuse making meth, creating life from the dead, and warping animals into humans for the glory of some perfect God of the Self, the God of unbridled human narcissism and ego. I prefer the old gods myself.
I’ll close with the ending to “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” which is still one of my favorite conclusions to any work of fiction:
“I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and multitudes, and spend my days surrounded by wise books,—bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men. I see few strangers, and have but a small household. My days I devote to reading and to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is—though I do not know how there is or why there is—a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.”