Letter #45: This Dark City

The spirit is signal; the world is noise.

Comrade Dad,

We’ve both been watching The Three Body Problem, in which Chinese Communists make contact with an advanced species from a distant planet and learn that Communism doesn’t work there either. There’s a satellite dish that takes in radio waves from outer space and measures how likely they are to contain messages from intelligent life forms (the kind that don’t practice Communism). When the signal is very organized, the computer flags it with a high “recognizability rating,” suggesting it’s not just random noise: it’s a message.

In real life, there’s no machine that can distinguish signal from noise more reliably than our minds, which oddly enough seem designed to do exactly this. We’re remarkably good at paring away irrelevant details and tracing the outlines of important shapes amid the confusion of light that comes pouring in through our eyes. When we see rightly, we see where the true meaning lies. So, few things are more important than which filter we apply. 

I thought of that yesterday as you told The Melancholy Tale of Orange Fella and Pope Dude. You wrote that “the cosmos speaks, not with the angel voices I’d prefer, but with the hardboiled realism of a Dashiell Hammett novel.” If that’s true, and I think it is, then wisdom is learning what kind of story you’re reading, what kind of meaning you’re looking for. Amid the heart-wrenching political compromises, the ragged trek through a life that tears away almost everything we cherish…where’s the through-line we can follow to arrive at the end with what matters intact?

Monday is tax day, when Americans also discover, though more gradually and indirectly, that Communism doesn’t work. Every year when I do my taxes, my immediate experience is rageful indignation. On one level that’s a perfectly normal reaction to our tax rate, which is obscene. But deep down I know it’s also a sign of where my treasure is.

“I want what’s mine”: there’s one way of filtering the raw data of human life, and it seems to come pre-installed. But here’s another: “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” Charming enough to coo over as a wall hanging if you don’t think about it too much. If you do, though, Jesus starts to sound like one of those impossibly tough customers from the detective stories. “Money, food, fancy clothes: it all gets ground up and slopped through the back-alley sewers in this dark city of a world, where pigs and politicians wrestle for it. Let ’em scrap. Shore up the riches of your soul.”

This hard-boiled teaching is why Christians draw an uncompromising line between the “spirit” and the “world.” It’s a filter: the spirit is signal; the world is noise. It’s not always easy to tell the difference. But it’s what we, uniquely among creatures of the earth, are built to do.

Love,
Spencer