A Lost People

Celebrated science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury died Tuesday at age 91. David Klinghoffer remembers a passage from his Martian Chronicles in which humans escape a doomed civilization on earth to colonize Mars and in the process wipe out the native Martians. Writes Klinghoffer:

The Martians, his protagonist Jeff Spender explains, saw their religion and their science as compatible, "each enriching the other." Not so the men of Earth as Bradbury imagines it in the near future:

That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion.

We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.

When people have no hope that their lives really mean anything, when they believe that they exist for no greater purpose than to indulge their senses and leave offspring, then culture collapses in a swirl of degenerate diversions, as Suzanne Collins illustrates so vividly in The Hunger Games. Jean Paul Sartre, who once wrote that his project was to "draw the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position" writes in Nausea, "I was thinking (as he sat in a cafe) ... that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing."

Perhaps we, too, are a "lost people," but still too absorbed in our amusements to realize it.