Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
From Philosopedia.org
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. (11 Nov 1922 - 11 April 2007)
Vonnegut, a fourth generation German-American, has said, “For at least four generations my family has been proudly skeptical of organized religion.” His father designed a Unitarian chapel, and Vonnegut is a nominal Unitarian.
Once described by Graham Greene as “one of the best living American writers,” Vonnegut writes wry, whimsical, and satirical works about organized religion and the horrors of contemporary life. His Slaughterhouse Five (1969) appealed to collegiates, although some have complained that he shows the lack of humanity which his works advocate. Pollution of the environment, dehumanization, mass death: All rate his disapproval as he evaluates this latter half of the century, despairing of the human condition. Martin Seymour-Smith, however, criticizes his work, saying its black pessimism, guiltily convoluted irony, and black humor tend to rob his work of lucidity. Others have objected to such of Vonnegut’s statements as, “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut wrote:
- During World War II, while I was serving with the Third Army in Germany, I removed a belt buckle from the uniform of a dead German soldier. The lettering on the buckle read Gott Mit Uns (God Is With Us). . . .
“So it goes,” he often comments about the human condition in which we find ourselves.
Cat’s Cradle (1963) has Deweyan overtones of pragmatism, and many of his short stories also show humanistic touches. Its character, Bokonon, rejects the New Testament message of “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” to “Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea of what is going on.” Bokonon, like a guru-figure, is humorous, anarchistic, pleasant, humanistic, and skeptical. To him, only man is sacred. Well-meaning lies help humanity more than absolute truths, he holds. What is sacred is not the beautiful sunrises, sunsets, and other delights of nature: What is sacred in Bokononism is man. Just man.
In 1969, J. Michael Crichton who had then received fame for his Andromeda Strain and since has become known for his Jurassic Park, wrote in New Republic (26 April 1969):
- A Vonnegut book is not cute or precious. It is literally awful, for Vonnegut is one of the few writers able to lift the lid of the garbage can, and dispassionately examine the contents. . . . The ultimate difficulty with Vonnegut is precisely this: that he refuses to say who is wrong. The simplest way . . . is to say that everything is wrong but the author. Any number of writers have done it, with good success. But Vonnegut refuses. He ascribes no blame, sets no penalties. His commentary on the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King is the same as his comment on all other deaths: “So it goes,” he says and nothing more.
His work also includes Player Piano (1951) and Deadeye Dick (1982). Life, Vonnegut appears to say in his writings that some term “wacko stories,” is a series of errors, orchestrated by a few mighty technocrats whose power is leading humanity into the ridiculousness of these our times. He neatly brings the message, but he implies, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
So it goes!
In 1984, he made a suicide attempt, unhappy that critics had accused him of being a rambling, repetitious, and sometimes incoherent writer who leaned lazily on his autobiographical experiences. He felt they were out to "squash him like a gnat" and vowed that he would not write another novel, according to The Economist's obituary (21 April 2007). Timequake (1997) was his last novel.
In a 1994 concert, the Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble performed a Vonnegut poem, of which critic Bernard Holland wrote the following:
- After intermission came Edgar David Grana’s choral setting of "Stones, Time and Elements," a "Humanist Requiem" in poetry written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. What Mr. Grana’s curious jumble of music does most egregiously is render Mr. Vonnegut helpless. Through the maze of overlapping musical styles, rhythms, meters and instrumental colors words rarely penetrated. All the musical gestures are familiar but are rearranged in new contexts. Post-modernism is meant to thrive on nonsense but here drowns under its weight.
So it goes!
Whereas the 19th century boasted large numbers of Unitarians who were writers, Vonnegut is one of the few contemporary Unitarian authors. Asked why, he once said contemporary Unitarianism appears not to be so intellectually appealing in our time as it was in Emerson’s and Coleridge’s era. His Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (1991) confirmed this, for he wrote,
- I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in churches quite a lot).
In 1992, Vonnegut was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association (AHA), of which he had become Honorary President and was on the editorial board of The Humanist. He is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism and in 1993 accepted an honorary membership in the Secular Humanist Society of New York. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, serving on committees.
In 1994, when AHA President Michael Werner battled with the two co-editors of The Humanist, both cited editorial autonomy and left. This led Vonnegut to pull his name from the magazine’s editorial advisory board. In doing so, he accused the AHA of being “highly politicized,” adding that he might also resign his honorary presidency. He did not, however.
Timequake (1997) included the following:
- I am Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, whose headquarters in Amherst, New York, I have never seen. I succeeded the late author and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. That we have an organization, a boring business, is to let others know we are numerous. We would prefer to live our lives as humanists and not talk about it or think amore about it than we think about breathing. Are we enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn’t like that. I thought that was too much to lose. I had never had faith like that, because I had been raised by interesting and moral people who, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were nonetheless skeptics about what preachers said was going on. But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much. I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr. Asimov a few years back. I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. . . . When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, “He’s up in Heaven now.” . . . The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can’t. . . . Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the humanists’ Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them.
Soon after Vonnegut's death, NY1 in New York City aired in April 2007 a 2005 interview that Budd Mishkin had with Vonnegut. Mishkin had been requested that the station not run it because of Vonnegut's anxiety over part of the conversaton, during which he had called President George W. Bush "dumb." Upon his death, the station chose to run the entire interview.
Death
Morgan Entrekin, a family friend, reported the death to the press, saying Vonnegut had fallen several weeks prior and had suffered brain injuries.
Dinitia Smith, in The New York Times, wrote a full-page obituary but, as is often the case with that journal, no mention was made of Vonnegut's Atheism, freethought, and secular humanism.
Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, however, heard on the 12 April 2007 National Public Radio (NPR) news "Kurt Vonnegut was a self-described religious skeptic and a freethinking humanist."
The Atheist, Unitarian, and Freethinker
Vonnegut was asked by Freethinking Activist Nonbelieving New Yorkers (FANNY) in 1993 if he would be willing to be listed as an honorary member, along with painter Paul Cadmus, novelist Arthur C. Clarke, M*A*S*H originator Ring Lardner Jr., Bangladesh physician-poet Taslima Nasrin, lexicographer Allen Walker Read, and sculptor Anita Weschler. He responded as follows:
[See entry for his brother, Bernard Vonnegut, a physicist. Also, see a speech Vonnegut had planned to give in Indianapolis at Butler University but, following his death, was given on 27 April 2007 by his son Mark. "He was really serious about being funny," Mark said of his father, then read from the speech which noted that he achieved the same military rank as Napoleon and Hitler, that he intended to sue a cigarette manufacturer for breach of promise ("Their product did not kill me") and that the final words of a condemned man ought to be, "This will certainly teach me a lesson." The last sentence of the speech was, "I thank you for your attention, and I'm outta here." ]
