Crimes and Misdemeanors

Crimes and Misdemeanors

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DVD Reviews of Crimes and Misdemeanors

DVD Review: God Is Not An Idiot
Summary: 3 Stars

Martin Landau plays an ophthalmologist having an affair with a frantic, aging stewardess threatening to disrupt his affluent contentment by confronting his wife. Not deriving solace from a kindly Rabbi patient and friend who is facing blindness and recommends honesty, Landau solicits help from his criminal brother to solve the problem with a hired killer. His bouts of conscience include reminiscing moral debates at a family Seder during his adolescence. His father, favoring a morally sensible existence, argues with a nihilistic aunt who trivializes the bible, believes God's non-existence is proven by The Holocaust, and views morality as a social contrivance.

Allen plays an uncompromising documentarian falling in love with an assistant (Farrow), also pursued by his boorish brother-in-law (Alda) who produces sitcoms and relishes being perceived as a creative genius. Alda's deep thoughts include the idea that with enough passage of time, tragedy becomes laughable, believing the Lincoln assassination to be an example. Alda throws his in-law a bone by allowing him to film him at work when Allen would rather work on a portrayal of a humanistic philosopher pondering serious questions. Unlike Landau's cynical aunt, the philosopher believes an empty universe is given meaning when human beings define values for themselves.

Allen's likable character turns the documentary of Alda into a satire of the man's vanity, and we gain sympathy for his protectiveness towards a favorite niece. Shielding her proves futile as Allen learns of the philosopher's suicide while on an outing with her. At a wedding reception, Allen discovers he has lost his battle for Farrow's affections to the egotist and then engages in a chance colloquy with Landau, wistful over the fading of his conscience. Allen's sadness invites us to share a resignation over the capriciousness of fate, the success of obnoxious people, the joyless end of an unmourned mistress, the unrequited love of a sensitive man, a sweet woman taken in by a cad, the blindness of a benevolent Rabbi, the despair of a man of apparent wisdom, and the return to comfort by a philanderer and murderer all serving to portray God as incompetent because life is unpredictable and joy and suffering are not proportionate to decency or malice. The answers of religion must be contrivances.

However, it requires contrivances to view God as a fool. Extreme skepticism often ignores contrary evidence to its cosmic-accident interpretation of existence. If we are just "a pack of neurons" and our mental life nothing but electrical impulses, then we cannot explain the realm of abstract concepts, including those of science. Nor can we explain the human mind's openness to truth, the foundation of all thought. Atheists cannot explain why anything should go right, even observation and deduction, why good logic should not be as misleading as bad logic, if they are both chance movements in the brain of a bewildered ape. Atheists exalt reason, but they cannot account for reason. Neither can materialism account for consciousness, free will, value judgments, and the existence of a unitary self. In a material world such things cannot exist. Matter cannot be free or have a self. Neither could free will exist if joy and suffering existed in perfect proportion with virtue and malice reducing our functionality to stimulus-response reward-punishment contingencies like that of lab rats pursuing a piece of cheese. Love and courage could not exist.

Similarly, no matter how we claim to be nonjudgmental and deny innate moral truth, we can not ignore the countering evidence of our own anger, which reminds us that there are natural expectations we have, should have, and can not avoid having of each other. Anger is the existential expression of moral outrage even when we exercise moral outrage at the very concept of moral outrage, reflexively calling anyone presenting a moral vision a hypocrite. In our sober moments, we know the life of the desperate woman is as sacred as the successful doctor. Nonetheless, we often live with the temptation to defer to "important people," hoping the identification of an imaginary human genius will confer a sense of superiority on ourselves by our presumed courage in recognizing theirs. We are quick to excuse the transgressions of genius. Morality can not be enough for great minds if they represent insights that anyone can have. Allen is a brilliant satirist of human pretense, often portraying trendy sophisticates as fools, but just as often sides with their elitist conventions that view metaphysical and moral questions as hopelessly complex needing great minds to sort it out for the rest of us. The last advice from Allen's philosopher is to hope for some genius of the future to give us life's meaning, although in the interim loving our families provides meaningful hope.

But since a benevolent creator implies the universal nature of important truth, the fading of conscience does not really occur so easily, and an ethical sense is innate to human decency. The killing of a man of noble purpose is still a tragedy 140 years later. So is the killing of a lonely mistress. A God with the wisdom to be subtle also invites us to find meaning in loving our families, which is precisely what we don't do when we exercise a blind faith in our self-definition. Self-worship is closer to the definition of evil. It may be that we prefer to ignore evidence that God is not idiotic because it helps us to avoid realizing that we often are. Why impeach our failures of decency if God is in no position to judge us negatively if we don't? Fortunately, as our better, God is merciful in judging our mendacity, our failures, and our acts of desperation. There is a vast body of literature examining theodicy, unfortunately most written by humble people whom intellectuals never notice.

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