Rick Rubin vs CS Lewis on higher powers
Is "the universe" indifferent to morality or does it have demands of us?
Today I want to point you toward a little comparative philosophy. For a year now I’ve been on a journey with C.S. Lewis, to better understand Narnia and his arguments that reshaped Christian thought in the 20th century. I’m currently taking a break and enjoying The Creative Act, a zen book on human creativity by music producer, Rick Rubin. He’s a prolific producer, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his new book. What makes Rubin so interesting for artists is that he claims to have zero technical skills as a musician. He plays no instrument, can’t work a soundboard and Rubin doesn’t know time signatures or the “math” of music. He just knows vibes. He feels things and shares them with the artists as they grasp for greatness.
Take one look at Rubin and you’ll get a sense of his energy. He wears ruby-red glasses, has a monkish beard, and does a lot of his interviews barefoot and cross-legged. He is a chillaxed dude in a very tense busybody industry.
The book reminded me of a passage in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity where Lewis speaks of the pitfalls of “a pleasant theology” that promises the transcendent without costs, standards, or consequences. It’s an interesting passage because in the 1930s it’s as if Lewis was offering criticism of George Lucas and the Force. “You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you”, Lewis says of this vague spirituality that has no expectations of the individual. You’ll read the whole passage below in a few minutes. In Star Wars, sometimes the Force appears to have a will and motive, and other times it acts more like a tool in a toolbox. I think Lucas intentionally did this so that the Force is extra confusing for the audience, and hard to put into a box.
In The Creative Act, Rubin talks about a universal energy that he calls The Source. It’s quite familiar because you could swap out those words with God, the Logos (a reasoned governing nature of the universe), the Force (Star Wars), or what Steven Pressfield called The Muse in his work on creativity.
It’s basically all to say that there is something out there from which our human spark derives its energy. Pressfield’s Muse must be appeased. The Source must not be tuned out. The Logos explains your pain and adds a semblance of order to the randomosity in your life.
The way Rubin talks about The Source really is beautiful. You can approach it as a person of religious faith or secularism and write yourself into the philosophy. The Source whispers. The Source screams. The Source finds human vessels for an idea whose time has come. If you deny the call, someone else will answer it.
You can dampen your senses to The Source, according to Rubin. You can numb your receptors with drink, drugs, or even headphones while you’re taking a walk. Rubin has a very hippie-dippie approach to life as a creator, which is that you have to be attuned to your surroundings. The Source may try to speak to you in the sound a tree makes when it creaks in the wind, or it may try and reveal a new color for your painting in a patch of rock on your walk to work.
The question is — will you notice it?
Here is C.S. Lewis talking about the abstract “universe” that atheists often allude to when they’re thinking about fate and destiny:
“One reason why many people find Creative Evolution ( a 1907 book by French philosopher Henri Bergsonon) attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious “Force” rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
We indeed love to ascribe order to randomosity and chaos by thinking it is part of God’s plan. We don’t want to feel small or like an accidental occurrence in the galaxy, so we drift toward a grand narrative where a God of the universe made us for a purpose. On the flip side, we also love to reflect on “vibes” and “energy” and “a universe” that brought us certain good things…but we hate to think it might have demands or moral standards.
Here is Rick Rubin talking about The Source from which artistic expression flows:
“Source makes available.
The filter distills.
The vessel (you) receives.
And often this happens beyond our control.Art is an act of decoding. We receive intelligence from Source, and interpret it through the language of our chosen craft — You could say it’s a feeling. An inner voice. A silent whisper that makes you laugh. An energy that enters the room and possesses the body. Call it joy, awe, or elation. When a sense of harmony and fulfillment suddenly prevails. It is an arising of the ecstatic. The ecstatic is our compass, pointing to our true north.”
I think it’s plainly true that almost all human beings are subject to religious thinking. We simply package it differently. The way modern people talk about natural disasters is almost Biblical and fate-based, demanding societal atonement for sins against the Earth.
What I love about both Lewis and Rubin, Marcus Aurelius and George Lucas, is that all of them were Seeking and looking higher. This world is so limiting, so much so that I often believe it’s not the ultimate reality. I don’t know what I mean by that, perhaps something like The Matrix where this is “real” but something else out there is “more real”.
Seek. Look up and beyond yourself.
When George Lucas was crafting Star Wars during the peak of the 1970s hippie movement, he was thinking about this deep yearning in the human heart. He said,
“I see ‘Star Wars’ as taking all the issues that religion represents and trying to distill them down into a more modern and accessible construct — I wanted to make it so that young people would begin to ask questions about the mystery.”
Yes! Ask questions about the mystery. There are things at work in our lives that science and reason can’t explain. Do you feel it? There is a mystery. For thousands of years, people have searched for it and given it names. I believe those people were onto something.
What name would you give it?