Existence Is a Whodunnit

In a recent article, I called attention to the one-hundredth anniversary of G. K. Chesterton’s reception into the Catholic faith. It was an occasion that got me thinking about the vast canon of the prodigious writer, which includes an earnest helping of whodunnits.

Thing is, I am not a huge fan of crime mystery. While I readily admit that the only two TV programs that I have watched consistently in the last twenty years are “Monk” and “Psyche”, that was mostly for their quirky humor, and while I admit to having read most of Chesterton’s Father Brown adventures, reading Father Brown was more about my love for Chesterton (and his quirky humor) than anything else.

That said, I always wondered what exactly the whodunnit fascination was all about, and through my recent ponderings, I think that I have finally seen the light. Solving a crime is all about uncovering the backstory, as is solving the riddle we call life—and our cultural and personal obsession with self is but the throes of life lived with an immense missing piece: self-knowledge.

Our culture is enamored with self-image; indeed, engorged with self-everything. We have become self-centric. We take selfies, wielding cell phones with selfie sticks, read Self Magazine, speak of self-pleasuring—the list is long and putrid. None of this is an accident or particularly surprising—in fact, it is the baseline—for a race with no identity. An ego improperly nourished soon becomes obese and ill.

There is a perpetual “I know something you don’t know” brattish smugness that engulfs much of our culture. Like the Gnostics of old—who claimed “special knowledge” even though said specialness was mindlessly, unquestionably shared by their ilk—a misdirected search at “finding ourselves” can lead to the most vacuous imaginings, and there is no better witness than the once Gnostic St. Augustine as to the tenacity of those imaginings.

The single most terrifying thing about the fallen state of humanity is that we are born bereft of self-knowledge. We are born with no backstory, at least, none beyond our immediate human ancestry. While it is scary to be lost, it is terrifying to not know who or what we are. Jesus’ command to “Be not afraid” is about correcting that loss, about restoring our self-knowledge, finding it in the source of our existence and salvation, and it is along this path of self-discovery that we also discover our human connectedness.

Finding truth involves asking questions. Even before our first breath, our senses are immersed in the what: what am I and what is all this? And then a very curious thing happens: our next question, the one that defines toddlerhood, is why. It is a very curious thing because it is a question that is out of order; in fact, if toddlers weren’t so cute, their weaponized use of the word why might bring a parent to feel like a frustrated judge inclined to slam the gavel to the bench and shout, Out of order!

What does any of this have to do with whodunnits? The first thing an investigator at the scene of a crime wants to know is what: what crime has been committed? If murder is suspected and the victim’s pockets are turned inside out, we might suspect robbery as a motive, but that suspicion is very inconclusive.

We can’t reasonably address questions of motive without a suspect, and to get clues about that we need to ask how; how was the murder committed? What was the weapon? Does it appear that the perpetrator was left-handed or right, tall or short, male or female? We need to ask and attempt to answer the how questions to be able to intelligently seek the who.

Only after having identified a potential suspect can we realistically expect to establish a motive that will warrant an arrest—that is, to adequately address the why questions.

And broadly speaking, that is the crux of what is wrong with much of mankind’s approach to acquiring knowledge in the pursuit of wisdom. The why question, out of order, is the question that enables the terrible twos, sociopathy, and autocracy. It is concupiscence in action. Psychologists have noted the similarity between the social skills of toddlers and those of history’s well-known autocratic tyrants. A nation of gargantuan toddlers is a frightening thing.

An infant accepts his own existence readily enough and soon finds said existence to be one of obvious cosmic necessity—the long-awaited fulfillment of the universe—and then begins to wonder why, why, why everything and everyone is not totally ordered toward serving that obvious center of the cosmos. How did the universe get along without me and why is it not stepping up to the plate to serve my every need?

Concupiscence always wonders why, and left completely to our fallen nature, it is the only quest we’ll ever take up. Once we know the what, we only want to know why it is not all ours. However, having acquired even a modicum of mature curiosity, we may begin to ask the next logical question—a properly ordered question—how? How did this all come to be?

The how question is essentially the metaphysical question. Properly approached, the how question leads one to the next logical question: who? —it does so simply because any other question, both physically and metaphysically speaking, is woefully inadequate of addressing the immensity of the knowledge void.

And is there not a frightening similarity between terrorist toddlers and pubescent teens? With new awakenings in the body and hormones affecting moods and desires, what once seemed a solid and settled world becomes a mystery anew, and potentially a crisis—a time in which revisiting the how and who questions is paramount in calming another tumultuous volley of whys, or worse, why nots.

St. Thomas tells us that our awareness of the divine, like our awareness of all things, starts with sensibles; that is, our perception of the world through our senses. Our knowledge of anything beyond the sensory is won with more effort—is won by asking the right questions in the right order.

However, we live in an age defined by an immature reluctance to ask the how question, or, conversely, an eagerness to answer it with quasi-scientific nonsense. Without the how question being asked and properly answered, no legitimate why questions can be adequately entertained; nonetheless, entertain them we do.

Such is the upside-down, concupiscent race of which we are all born. Civilization, at its finest—that is, when it has flourished with beauty and the splendor of truth—has embraced the how and found its answers, it’s fulfillment, in the who, and has busied itself passing this great discovery on to its posterity. Once the who is discovered, the why questions have the very real potential of teaching us a great many things about the who, and therefore, about ourselves and our universe.  

What, how, who, and why, in their proper order, are the foundational questions, the bedrock of all true wisdom, secular or sacred. They’re also irreplaceable for solving whodunnits. Are modern teaching methods properly ordered? Do they answer—moreover, do they even ask—the how questions? In our secular education system, we cannot teach anything that smacks of religion, even if the science takes us there.

Ancient Greek philosophy, with its “prime mover” imperative, becomes forbidden fruit. Modernist positivism has cast metaphysics aside without regard for the logic of its claims. The oddity of embracing one pure science, mathematics, alongside the condemnation of another pure science, metaphysics, and the inadequate attempt at justifying the differentiation, continues to escape the notice of the numb masses.

None of this is surprising; it is as it has always been. Its explanation is to be found in the book of Genesis. Eve knew the what. I mean, her husband had named everything—there’s that. And she and hubby knew the how—I don’t think God was keeping any secrets from them about how the world came to be. And the two of them obviously knew the who. So, you’re probably thinking that, by my standards, she was a long way down the path toward being able to correctly answer the why question. So, what went wrong?

It seems that their education was not hard-won. Theirs was no school of hard knocks. They had not suffered for the knowledge they had acquired—had no skin in the game. In common parlance, one might say they were spoiled. Eve’s question was not a toddler’s why, it was an adolescent’s impetuous why not?!

Every artist, in a certain sense, knows what The Divine Artist knows; that is, that there is nothing to be communicated on the canvas without light and shadow. Adam and Eve walked and talked with God, but they did not appreciate the light until after they had embraced darkness. In writing his whodunnits, Chesterton cast his sleuth as a Catholic priest. Who better to understand light and darkness than one who witnesses it first hand in the confessional?

Every blessing is a challenge; every curse, an opportunity. Prosperity spawns complacency; desperation fosters hope. We speak of the swing of the pendulum as regards cultural shifts, but at the personal level, life is more like a vast array of teeter-totters, a forest of individual rises and falls. It is when we rise together that culture blooms, and it is in falling together that the world is engulfed in darkness.

This life is light and shadow. It seems that, without the shadows we cast, the beauty of the divine light is lost on us. Our first parents, knowing only the light, trivialized the danger of the shadows. Making sense of existence begins with asking the right questions in the right order. Making sense of light and shadow, good and evil, is accomplished through the same process. Civilization and our personal salvation depend upon it.