Rick and Morty: The Cosmic Horror of Perfected Science
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: Rick And Morty, Science Fiction, Philosophy, Existentialism

Did you see the Rick and Morty episode where Rick rounds up all the new atheists and secular humanists and humiliates them by demonstrating the baselessness of their optimistic, progressive worldview?

Actually, there’s no such episode, but the show’s creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon might as well have dealt explicitly with that scenario. The popularity of the animated TV show Rick and Morty is surprising because the show’s nihilism and pessimism, along with its earnestness in grappling with existential despair are opposed to the prevailing secular conviction that it’s safe to trust in science and in ourselves. According to the leading lights of secularism such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins, science and technology are forces of progress and we can be both happy and rationally informed about the natural facts of life.

The Abomination of the Human Deity

For the uninitiated, the premise of the TV show is that Rick Sanchez, a spry older man, is in most ways the ideal scientist. His knowledge and technological power are godlike. He has a portal gun that can teleport him anywhere, including to any place in any of the infinite other universes in the multiverse. He’s modified his body with a host of cybernetic implants and he creates clones and can transfer his mind into them, so he’s practically invulnerable and immortal. Most importantly, he’s a superhuman genius and industrialist, so he’s virtually omniscient and omnipotent. He’s travelled throughout existence in the broadest possible sense, gotten into all sorts of adventures with alien races, with his grandson Morty, and thus represents the pinnacle of human advancement, as that pinnacle is predicted by science fiction.

Mind you, Rick has reached that space-operatic height of accomplishment except in one glaring respect: he’s miserable because all his knowledge and power haven’t supplied him with a reason to go on living. For all the facts he’s discovered, Rick hasn’t found any meaning in life; all he’s found is more and more natural indifference and foolishness rather than anything supernatural or divine. More precisely, he hasn’t uncovered any purpose that offsets the palpable absurdity of natural life, given the universe’s enormity and the infinite variations of events in the quantum multiverse.

If the universe wasn’t made for us by a loving God, our being alive is largely accidental and we’re condemned to live as alienated strangers in the inhuman wasteland of outer space, huddling within the flawed shelters we can muster that will themselves eventually be swallowed up by time and circumstance. What could the special meaning be of your turning left when in other universes alternate versions of you turned right or went straight or jumped up and down or stopped altogether?

Rick and Morty plays with the classic Faustian bargain and explores Jesus’s ominous rhetorical question, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36). But the show also critiques the scientism that’s persisted after the demise of early-twentieth century positivism, and that’s infected conventional secular wisdom. Scientism today isn’t a well-worked out theory or philosophy; instead, scientism is an attitude or more precisely a prejudice that tells us science and the fruits of science are all we need. In particular, we needn’t fear what Nietzsche called the “death of God,” because science is destined to turn us into gods, whereupon we’ll literally have nothing to fear.

Rick’s answer to that science-centeredness, in effect, is that such a prejudice falls afoul of the naturalistic fallacy. Science tells us all the facts and the technological applications of scientific explanations provide us with all the power, in the limit case, but none of that determines what ought to be done with that knowledge and power. The “ought” doesn’t follow from the “is,” no matter how many facts you pile up.

In the episode “The Rickshank Redemption,” Morty says Rick isn’t a supervillain but he shouldn’t be anyone’s hero, because he’s “more like a demon or a super f’d up god.” Rick is a philosophical take on the mad scientist character. From Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein to Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth to Back to the Future’s Doc Brown, the mad scientist’s exploits illustrate the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Rick and Morty goes further, though, in holding up this stock character as a warning about the Pyrrhic victory of scientific progress. If the world is inherently flawed because of its pointlessness, does it make sense to rigorously confirm every inch of that pointlessness?

Rick Sanchez against the Secular Humanists

In a 2010 conversation (starting at the 9:08 minute mark of the video), Stephen Colbert asked astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Is knowledge always a good thing?”

Tyson’s response was, “I have to say yes, because it empowers you to react and possibly even to do something about it.”

If Rick had teleported himself onto that stage, he might have answered Tyson in turn, “React to the universe’s absurdity? With what, more meaningless events? If you squeeze more and more shit into a shit sandwich, does the sandwich suddenly turn into a hamburger?” To be fair, Tyson may have had in mind the knowledge needed to fix problems on this planet, such as poverty and global warming.

If asked about the larger, philosophical matter of whether perfect empirical knowledge is compatible with happiness, Tyson would likely appeal to the freedom of each individual to answer that sort of question for herself. That is, Tyson would revert to the economic rationale of neoliberalism, according to which questions of value are subjective and we should ensure that society is free enough to let all the flowers bloom.

I suspect Rick’s answer to that fallback position would be that it’s possible to have too much freedom, such as the freedom of being a god in a universe that can never be repaired. It’s like the freedom of having too many options at the supermarket or too many books to read, with no overriding reason to choose one product over another. It’s the freedom of outgrowing your naïve worship of your parents, after you’ve discovered they’re just fallible individuals and there are no absolute answers to our deepest existential questions, no life plan we’d be objectively wrong to dismiss.

Elsewhere, in a 2014 Nerdist podcast (starting at the 20:19 minute mark), Tyson says philosophical questions are often useless delays in progress, since they hold us back with navel-gazing as we ponder the sound of one hand clapping. Again, not that Rick would defend philosophy on principle, but I can imagine him swooping in to oppose Tyson’s go-go science attitude: “If philosophy’s pointless, that’s because philosophy is in touch with the ultimate pointlessness of everything that exists. So stop shooting the messenger, because eventually the absurdity of being a natural creature will catch up to you and you’ll laugh at your boasts about human progress.”

Or take the biologist and leading new atheist Richard Dawkins’s secular encouragements that echo those of Carl Sagan. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins writes, “The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder…If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed.”

Here’s more feel-good secular humanism from Dawkins: “After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?”

Want more of his poetic comforts? “Whichever way you look at it, only an extremely small proportion of creatures has the good fortune to be fossilized. As I have said before, I should consider it an honour…We are alone among animals in foreseeing our end. We are also alone among animals in being able to say before we die: Yes, this is why it was worth coming to life in the first place…A Keats and a Newton, listening to each other, might hear the galaxies sing.”

Finally, there was the 2009 Atheist Bus campaign in the UK, which Dawkins supported. There were 800 buses bearing advertisements with the message, “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Rick’s answer to the latter seems obvious: “Yeah, stop worrying about the nonexistent God, but start worrying about the absurd universe.” In the episode “The ABCs of Beth,” Rick’s daughter Beth asks him, “Am I evil?” He answers, “Worse. You’re smart. When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours. And I’ve never met a universe that was into it. The universe is basically an animal. It grazes on the ordinary. It creates infinite idiots just to eat them.”

But do you see how Dawkins manages to lift his spirits? Notice his use of such words as “wonder,” “blessed,” “noble,” “enlightened,” “honour,” “worth,” and “singing galaxies.” What exactly do those attributions of value rest on for Dawkins? Given science and philosophical naturalism, why aren’t Dawkins’s “Buck up!” British liberal values mere subjective opinions?

If you asked the pessimist John Gray, he’d point out that as rational as they may have been, the early modern philosophers were beholden to the Christian ethos of their European societies. One philosopher who wasn’t was Nietzsche and he threw up his arms and said no one knows now what sort of nontheistic morality should replace the anachronistic religious commandments. In Straw Dogs, Gray says, “Humanists insist that by using our knowledge we can control our environment and flourish as never before. In affirming this, they renew one of Christianity’s most dubious promises — that salvation is open to all. The humanist faith in progress is only a secular version of this Christian faith.”

The humanism in “secular humanism” is about trusting in human nature rather than in gods. For the humanist, we’re saved by human ingenuity, not by any deus ex machina; we need to learn how the world really works, face our problems, and solve them one by one. Clearly, humanism is largely progressive if we confine our attention to instrumental problems of how to achieve our various goals. For example, science can tell us how to build better means of transportation, assuming we want to get from here to there. But the problem raised by Rick and Morty — and by the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche and John Gray — is that science isn’t so relevant to solving the prior mystery of what goals we ought to have in the first place.