Read for the second time in September 2012.
Upon finishing Palm Sunday, I decided to embark on a reread of Vonnegut’s works. I chose Sirens of Titan, because although I didn’t remember it as the best, I found the idea behind the story the most compelling. That idea being that the whole purpose of the human race was to deliver a replacement part for a spaceship to a stranded messenger from another galaxy, stuck on one of Saturn’s moons. I recall fondly the playful way Vonnegut told this tale with a nihilistic whimsy and I remain impressed by it.
Vonnegut also invents a new religion here. I think this is something he was fond of doing early in his career. The gist of this religion is that god is indifferent to human beings. You take care of each other and I’ll take care of myself is the message of this religion’s god. As presented by Vonnegut, it seems like an inarguably great religion, an improvement for humanity if we had the ability to embrace it. But I lack Vonnegut’s talents, and it sounds depressing in my own words.
Another thing about this religion is that people handicap their advantages, and this leads to people forgoing the desire to take advantage of others. I’m not 100% enthused by the invented religion in execution, but I’d prefer if it, and not scientology, had succeeded into having real world converts.
There seems to be a strange breach of logic when one character tells another character to pay attention to his future son’s good luck object, and then that same character sees to it that that character’s memory is erased. That conversation must be their for the reader’s benefit. Tsk Tsk.
I remain convinced that the world would be a better place if everyone read and studied Vonnegut. But I also realize that human nature being what it is, people would still be shitty to each other. It’s not as easy as making up a new religion. It’s not religion’s fault that people are shitty to each other; religion is merely an excuse or a pretext. Everything has a material explanation.
That’s what religion blamers don’t really understand. Religion isn’t even really a comfort for people, but a coping mechanism, and probably one is as good as another. The human mind needs something with which it can negotiate for control over all of those things it can’t control. I don’t think Vonnegut understood this at this point in his career or that he ever would. But that’s okay. It’s not really a flaw.
But Vonnegut’s great strength is in recognizing the perspectives that makes human beings do tiny small-minded things that increase the unhappiness in the world. He tries to shift our perspective, so that we might recognize them ourselves and behave in a way that increases the happiness in this world. I think with this book about man’s search for meaning and usefulness, Vonnegut is at his very best in this regard. It’s probably Vonnegut’s most ambitious book in terms of big ideas and probably his most underrated. It belongs on the same tier as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle.
Ultimately,I think nobody has written more useful parables for the human race since Jesus Christ himself. And let’s face it, a whole lot of Jesus’s parables aren’t really that useful once you realize that the kingdom of god isn’t a real thing.
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