The Empty Backpack: Growing Into Humanism, Part Four
So here’s my question, folks: Is Ryan Bingham a humanist? Or more specifically, is there anything about his implicit philosophy of life that would disqualify him from being recognized as one of us? I want to invite us to examine this story a little more closely, to see what we might learn from its hero, and from our reactions to him, about this unconventional faith that we share. Leaving aside the fact that few of us, no matter what our religious convictions, happen to be as easy on the eyes as George Clooney, is there any other part of this character that we would aspire to emulate? Or alternatively, does he reflect for us a shadow side of what humanism can become, if we are not careful?
Let me begin by confessing that for me this film is much less interesting as a romantic comedy than it is as a character study. There is a certain intelligent chemistry between Ryan and his female counterpart Alex that I enjoyed, but I find the philosophical portrait and the questions that raises, far more intriguing than the incidental love story – and I have a sneaking suspicion that the author and director Jason Reitman might have felt the same. The sex is not arbitrary, in the sense that it does move the story forward, and show us another dimension of Ryan’s personality and values, but it’s not about how love conquers all in the end, or even how a broken heart makes you a better person. Instead, I think it asks us to ask the question, Can freedom and reason really be the central, or ultimate, values? And that is a question that we as humanists, and as 21st century Americans, would do well to consider closely.
Ryan Bingham certainly has a plausible claim toward humanism, or perhaps humanism has a plausible claim on Ryan, in that he has clearly rejected all forms of conventional piety and sentiment, and is not anticipating any form of salvation outside his own efforts and consciousness. It is not god’s responsibility to make him happy, nor any other person’s, nor the government, nor his work, nor love. He knows where he finds his greatest fulfillment – in being on the move – and he entertains no unrealistic expectations for what that fulfillment is. His approach to life is congruent and authentic; he has not yielded to pressures to be other than who he is, or to live as others would approve. He can advise the people in his seminars to set fire to their overfilled backpacks, because his own is empty, and he truly experiences that lack of weight as freedom. He has organized his life in a way that makes perfect sense, given his premises, and he does not require anyone else’s sacrifice in order to sustain it. He is neither rigid, nor bitter, nor joyless, nor indeed ungenerous in a casual way. Even the career, which at first seems so callous, even brutal, makes a certain sense. Ryan does not choose to fire people; the decision about their future employment has already been made. And although the news he gives will never be good tidings – which is why it’s a job that companies are willing to pay him to do – he delivers it with dignity, and a kind of compassion born of his genuine conviction that it represents freedom and a new opportunity for more authentic lives. This is not an opportunity that most people welcome, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, at least in his eyes.
And yet, while I think we might agree that Ryan has the right to live as he has chosen to do, and perhaps there is nothing actively unethical about his choices – we could, actually, have a conversation about the carbon footprint implied by his love of commercial flying, but on the other hand, he doesn’t seem to own a car, and has no children, so there are trade offs – we still might want to argue that he is not a humanist hero; that there is something important, perhaps even essential, that is missing from a fully human life for him. He is actually trying to live rationally and responsibly a lifestyle of complete freedom, and urging other people to do this as well; to give up their unreasonable expectations of what their lives are supposed to be, so that they can embrace what their lives actually are. The virtues of this stance are thrown into relief by Natalie, the young trainee that he is assigned to take under his wing and show the realities of the work that their company does. When she arrives at the airport with a suitcase that is going to need to be checked, he literally unpacks her luggage, and discards the unnecessary items that will slow down their journey. When her boyfriend later breaks up with her in a text message, and her professional veneer momentarily dissolves, we see that her mental and emotional luggage also is full of youthful fantasies and arbitrary expectations about how her life is supposed to unfold. It seems clear that Natalie will never have either an authentic career or an authentic relationship until she has let go of these self-imposed timelines for success. Her brittleness is not the same as Ryan’s experienced self-assurance, and his example has something useful to teach her. By contrast, her indignant efforts to challenge his complacency in his own values are unavailing.
The true questions begin to arise in his relationship with Alex, a woman who in many ways seems to mirror his convictions about freedom and rationality. Like him, she is comfortable with sex and friendship on the basis of convenience, whenever the paths of their travels happen to cross; it appears to be an ideal connection. Yet when Ryan begins to wonder whether there is in fact the potential for anything more, we come to find that she is not, after all, as she had called herself, a person just like him who happens to have a vagina. Rather, she is a creature of a different sort altogether; a much more familiar one – namely, a hypocrite – who wants to have it both ways; to experience the benefits of personal commitments and promises, but also periodically to escape from the disciplines that they entail. Her real life, she informs Ryan, is not the world they share. This leaves him, and us, with the question, what is it, then, that makes our lives real? It is not a coincidence, by the way, that the book Ryan finds his reluctant brother-in-law-to-be reading in the church nursery is The Velveteen Rabbit, with its reflections on what it means for a toy to become real. This is a film of deliberate layers.
It seems to me that what is missing from Ryan Bingham’s humanism is one of the qualities of spiritual maturity, which is the capacity for covenant. He is, or has been up until we meet him in this film, content to structure his life without depending on anyone else, and without compromising his liberty by creating obligations to anybody. His sense of ethics has called him not to make promises, because he won’t want to keep them; they will impede his freedom, weigh down his backpack, get in the way of his endless journey. And it is important to recognize that there is a certain virtue in this hesitation; none of us should make commitments that we know will become sources of confinement, frustration, and resentment; it’s not fair to our own lives, and it’s not fair to the people who thought they were depending on something we chose to do because we wanted to. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be bullied into choices that have lasting implications, either by society’s expectations, or the wishes of other people, or by our own laziness. That is part of the essential gospel of humanism; don’t believe anything just because people say so, even important people, like popes, or presidents, or parents. Don’t believe it because it is easier. Think for yourself; make up your own mind. Choose. Choose freely, and then take responsibility for the consequences of your choice.
And yet, here is what I know – I, who took marriage vows at the age of 18, and have been thankful every day for the last 37 years – Ryan Bingham is wrong; we are not sharks. As precious as our freedom is, as indispensable as reason is, they alone will not show us the path to the fully human life. We will never be truly adults, and we will never be genuinely fulfilled, until we have learned to make, and keep, the promises that connect us to the world and others through mutual obligation. To grow up is to have a back pack that is no longer empty; it is to be grounded in our commitments, so that our lives have shape and weight and boundaries based on what we have said matters, and the choices we have made. These may be the person we have married, the children we have brought into the world, the friends who have seen us through our mistakes and miseries. They may be the professional skills or academic disciplines we have committed to, the patients or clients or customers or students we have offered to serve. They may be the candidates we try to get elected, or the laws we try to get passed, or the companies we lead or the volunteers we organize. They may be the houses we buy, or the gardens we plant, or the products we manufacture, or the animals whose well being we take into our hands. Each of these choices represents a commitment and a responsibility, and it’s true that at times the back pack gets heavy, and the fantasy of setting it all aside and starting over can be appealing.
Moreover, nothing in the back pack will save us from our human finitude. Not the greatest achievements, not the deepest love, not the most perfect plans, will stop any of us from getting old, or prevent our eventual death. Jim is quite correct, there in the nursery with his expectant bride sobbing in the foyer. There will be houses and children and birthdays and Thanksgiving and graduations and grandchildren and baldness and illness and dying, and his wedding is one step along that path. If the point of getting married is to stop that happening, then the enterprise is a failure, for there is no point. And yet, as cartoonist Gary Trudeau once memorably had one of her preschool moppets say to their teacher, Joanie, as she agonized over her move toward a new career, “How old will you be in four years if you don’t go to law school, Ms. Caucus?” The point is that Thanksgiving comes and goes, and the years flow by, and the baldness and the illness and the dying come, whether you ever give your word to anyone or not. Death has no opinion of your rationality, and no respect for your freedom, and as Ryan correctly observes, in the end each of us dies alone. The spiritually mature humanist has made his or her peace with that reality, and understands that the only possible point is what we do in the meantime, with whatever opportunities we have.
John Thorlin suggests that it is not rational to expect to be happy in the absence of self-respect, and that self-respect must be earned by doing something genuinely productive. Mere self-interest is greed, that makes us think we can be happy by taking stuff from other people, rather than doing something useful or creative ourselves, but such a belief is not reasonable, and therefore does not represent rational self-interest. Reason in itself may not be able to make us happy, but it can surely help us to understand the conditions by which happiness is to be achieved. In the same way, freedom is only conducive to happiness to the extent that it enables us to make choices about our commitments and promises; not when it becomes an end in itself, and prevents us from making the connections that give meaning to our brief days.
In this sense, it seems to me that Ryan Bingham has a classic theological problem; he has been engaged in idolatry. He has made freedom, and to a lesser extent rationality, into ultimate goods, and sacrificed a portion of his deeper humanity to their service. He has been living in a kind of false maturity, and pseudo sophistication that entailed, in the end, exactly what he said – emptiness. And he was wrong if he thought that’s what we all really want. Sure, all of us have junk in there that we would be better off without, but that doesn’t mean that what we would rather have is nothing. We don’t want our backpacks to be empty; we just want to be sure that what we are carrying around is really precious; that it’s worth the strain on our shoulders sometimes. It is not rational to think that we can achieve happiness by greed, without earning our own self-respect, and it is equally irrational to think that we can achieve happiness by sheer freedom, without ever being confined by the keeping of our promises. There is no covenant that is not sometimes irksome, but as long as our gratifications are rooted only in freedom, there will always be a fuller, more mature, more human happiness available that we have yet to realize. We grow into a wiser humanism by understanding that we are necessarily connected beings, and that our freely given assent in relationship is a precious, even sacred, ability that enables us to create meaning for our lives. Only through that capacity can we create personal relationships that go beyond self indulgence, family fidelity that loves by accepting our differences, or community that strives to build something enduring together.
Dearly beloved, this is true of religious community as much as anything else. We know that for us as liberals, the covenant of memory and promise cannot be built upon convention, or the authority of tradition. None of us can believe because someone else tells us to; if we could, we probably wouldn’t be here. But somewhere on the other side of our freedom to examine, and to search for the truth that rings true to our own experience, the need for choosing, and for fidelity to our promises, still meets us. Community, like other relationships of mutual commitment, requires reciprocity; it is never just about the needs of one individual. If, like Ryan Bingham, we make an idol of our freedom, and use it only to accumulate empty miles, we will never find the real connections that make the journey between now and death mean anything to any of us. The experience of genuine community rests upon loyalty; to one another, and to the institution in which we gather. No one will hold you here against your will, but if your will does not hold you here by your own choice, then you will only observe community, not experience it.
The ending of the movie leaves open the question of whether Ryan has changed his mind, or has been changed, by the experiences that we have witnessed. It appears that he can no longer in good conscience continue to preach his gospel of emptiness as freedom, but we are left to decide for ourselves what he might believe instead. Personally, I am hopeful that there is enough of the humanist in him that he is not going to give up utterly on his sense that freedom and reason are important keys to the life he wants. But I hope too that he has also grown enough to understand that there is something important to be found in groundedness, and that relationships of mutuality can enhance your authenticity, perhaps even more than they burden you. If that is so, then he has made an important move toward real maturity and wisdom as a human being, and he will have a message of much greater value to teach his future seminars, and protégés. Or, if it is not so, then perhaps his function as a fictional character is simply to warn us of the potential for excess even in some of our most dearly held values. I will be interested to hear what you think, at the discussion in a few moments.
For however long we may have been at it, humanism is never a finished proposition for any of us; not for me, not for anyone in this room, not for any of the great sages and heroes in the history of this movement. We grow into it as an unfolding proposition; through practice we learn to embrace more fully the intensity and ambiguity of being human, and live without black and white answers; we cultivate the compassion of Tonglen, and learn to be in the presence of pain without panic; we recognize that we are not separate from or superior to the natural world, but part of a network in which all beings are kin, and all existence is interwoven, mitakuye oyasin; and we discover that our covenant promises bind us to the world and one another, so that even though death comes surely in the end, we have made whatever meaning was possible along the way. This is some of the wisdom of a spiritually mature humanist; no one starts out with these habits of heart and mind and conscience completely in place, no one ever ends with nothing more to learn. And we are here to learn together, to help one another along that journey; to admire the examples and profit from the mistakes that we each have to offer. Here in this covenant community of memory and promise, we find that we are not alone, and we are not our own; the earth claims us, the past shapes us, families, friends and strangers all are mirrors that show us who we truly are. Let us not flee from those bonds of connection into an empty freedom, but rather choose, willingly and with awareness, to be grateful for them, and to build for that ever expanding community a house of welcome; a world of peace on this globe that is our common home, with thanks and praise for the life we share.
