The Principle of Explosion: A Study in Love, Loss, and Logic

Abstract

Like my mother, I built abstract universes to fulfill my need for certainty. She took up conspiracy theories; I became a mathematician. A 100,000 word hybrid memoir/biography, The Principle of Explosion: A Study in Love, Loss and Logic, braids the story of my estrangement from my mother—a lesbian Desert Storm veteran and early follower of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—with the logician Bertrand Russell’s failed search for mathematical certainty. Inspired by recent hybrid projects like Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist and Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, the book folds philosophical inquiry against personal narrative. Its multiple-logic-based structure enacts the ontological uncertainty inherent to a “post-truth” era and circles the wound at its center: the impossibility of understanding another person, the impossibility of being understood. My mother believes many things: that the Army tried to poison her, that a shadow group called the Illuminati has controlled all world events for centuries, that my grandparents stole me as an infant and brainwashed me against her. If I didn’t believe these things too, she told me, we couldn’t have a mother-daughter relationship. The Principle of Explosion unfolds in the aftermath of this ultimatum. In the years following, I, mid-twenties, entered a self-destructive spiral, which led to, among other things, spending the night of my mother’s birthday in a West Virginia jail. In trying to pull myself out of that spiral, I attempted to make sense of my relationship to truth, belief, certainty, and the learned behavior of inhabiting “many universes, at once inside them and hovering above.” To that end, the book threads two lines of inquiry: the personal-meets-political events of the years 1991 to 1995 and the life and work of Bertrand Russell, in whose mathematical tradition I studied. When my parents, both lower-enlisted soldiers, returned from Desert Storm in 1991, my mother came out as a lesbian, left the Army, and left my dad and me. My dad’s parents raised me in West Virginia, and I didn’t see my mother much until 1995, the summer after I finished kindergarten. These years are a kind of black hole in my own history. My mother says she wanted me all along, tried to get me back, but my grandparents tricked her and kept her away. My dad and grandparents, in trying to protect my image of my mother, didn’t tell me anything at all. The public events of these years—Desert Storm, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the rise of Alex Jones, and the Oklahoma City bombing—also formed the conditions for the right-wing extremist movements that culminated in the January 6th Insurrection, a coincidence I could not, in those years, overlook. The book explores these events and their surprising ties to my personal story. At first, the narrator sees the “hidden connections” as a way to make sense of what happened with her mother. Over the course of the book, she realizes these events, like they’d been for her mother, are simply a method of looking away from the question she’s unable to ask: why did my mother leave me? As I learned to do as a child, the book straddles multiple logical universes: the conspiracy world of my mother—which, in 2015, the year of the ultimatum, went mainstream—and the 20th century mathematical drama of Russell, Kurt Gödel, and the doubt emergent from that drama. “All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements,” writes cosmologist John D. Barrow, “yet we do not know what mathematics is.” This uncertainty applies, in the real world as in the mind of the book’s narrator, to even the most basic mathematical statements like 2+2=4. “The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol—all have their counterparts,” Barrow continues, “in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.” As a young mathematician, I was compelled by this sense of mystery, and also a little freaked out by it. It speaks to the interplay between reality-as-experienced and reality-as-can-be-described, and it’s why, I think, I gravitated toward Russell and his study of mathematical foundations. At the turn of the last century, Russell believed logic opened access to another realm, a Platonic realm. With a set of axioms and logical rules of inference, he believed he could describe, with black-and-white clarity, the laws governing The Universe, the reality in which humans live. I hoped sooner or later, Russell writes, to arrive at a perfected mathematics which should leave no room for doubts, and bit by bit to extend the sphere of certainty… With Principia Mathematica, he constructed a language he believed was capable of describing the laws of arithmetic, those laws we take for granted in every aspect of industrial society, from counting to accounting, from predicting Hurricanes to building skyscrapers. With the logical language, Russell believed he could close the distance between Truth and our human experience of obvious truths. Russell’s attempt “exploded” when Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem found a contradiction within Russell’s system. With the Theorem, Gödel proved we’ll never have a logical system capable of describing mathematics, let alone a broader sphere of certainty. We’ll never know what mathematics is, so we’ll never close the distance between Truth and experience. “And so we find that we have adopted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths,” Barrow continues. “Change mathematics to God and little else might seem to change.” For me, whose early life was grounded in the certainty provided by grand conspiracy theories and millenarian Christianity, the loss of the promise of certainty constituted an existential crisis. In grappling with my double-loss—of certainty and of my mother—the book looks to the life of Russell to address an urgent question: How does one survive when one’s theory of truth no longer holds? While I’d initially seen logic as a way out of my mother’s conspiracy thinking, learning about Gödel disabused the notion. The book explores the parallels in the emotional drivers behind both conspiracy thinking and Russell’s decades-long attempt to reduce mathematics to a purely logical foundation. Both Russell’s grand theory and New World Order conspiracies constitute, in the mind of the narrator at least, the kind of all-encompassing, certainty-providing logic she’d sought all her life. In both systems, there’s no room for coincidence. All events are explainable and part of a preordained plan. At the end of his life, Russell wrote the line, While I may have conceived of theoretical truth wrongly, I was not wrong to believe that there is such a thing, and that it deserves our allegiance. If this book points toward any ultimate “lesson,” it’s grounded in a similar realization to Russell’s. Until I’d contended with truth’s slippery nature, I could not see the truth—about my mother, her years of absence, and the stories she spun around her shame. If we, as a society, are going to re-construct a shared sense of reality, that re-construction must begin with a similar acceptance. In this way, unlike other popular memoirs like Tara Westover’s Educated, The Principle of Explosion doesn’t valorize the protagonist’s escape from errant belief. By showing my own psychological need for certainty, the ways the mind keeps searching for a single, simple narrative to explain chaos away, this story is one of self-implication as much as an implication of the conspiracy-laden thinking it criticizes. It’s a project grounded in love and human understanding. To that end, the story is told in two parts. The logic of Part I mirrors the black-and-white logic of both conspiracy thinking and of Russell’s logicism project. It’s told in numbered sections, borrowing the notation from Russell’s Principia. By the end of Part I, both Russell and the narrator believe they’ve constructed a language system where absolute certainty was possible. Part II unravels this certainty, resisting, reimposing, and resisting again the clean logic of what came before. Like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, it demonstrates a logic doubling back against itself. Part I sets up the conditions—a mother’s absence, chief among them—that compelled both Russell and me to seek certainty in the kind of way, as Russell writes, in which people want religious faith. The seven chapters cover the two years following my mother’s ultimatum, which were marked, for me, by professional perfectionism, a move to New York City, and a habit of secret self-destruction: an arrest for a DUI, binge drinking and eating, risky sex with strangers. This period, which happened to surround the 2016 election, was also when Alex Jones went mainstream, prompting flashbacks to moments he influenced in my childhood: a drive through Waco in 1995 with my mother who told me, five years old, that the government firebombed the Branch Davidians; her reverence for Timothy McVeigh who bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City that year, end-times prepping for Y2K, my mother’s belief that 9/11 was “an inside job.” Braided within these chapters are moments from Russell’s life spanning his birth in 1872 through publication of the Principia Mathematica in 1913. In his childhood, adolescence, and early career, Russell was engaged in a kind of all-out assault on doubt, a way to describe what is True about the universe. In the years following the ultimatum, I tried out many ways of describing the situation with my mother, which becomes a refrain throughout Part I. “Tell someone you don’t speak to your mother and…” In these moments, I, like Russell, was looking for a language capable of ensuring everyone else might understand. To this end, Part I builds toward the construction of two “logical universes,” that of Russell’s Principia and a metaphorical logical universe in which the story is simple: my mother is Bad and I am Good. Part II explores the ways we continue to live once we’ve been, as Russell writes, unwillingly forced to the conclusion that most of what passes for knowledge is open to reasonable doubt. For me, the doubt forced itself back into my mind following two events: the January 6th Insurrection, where Alex Jones led an armed militia toward the U.S. Capitol, and reading a folder full of letters my mother wrote to my grandparents in the years of her absence. Both made me consider the futility, even perhaps the dishonesty, in the ways my logical universe dehumanized my mother. This is not to say I side with my mother or the conspiracy theorists, but that these events forced me to reckon with emotional complexity underpinning the elaborate theories in a way I hadn’t before.In the years after she left, my mother came out as a lesbian, and these chapters explore the ways systemic oppression fueled her shame and behavior. In the same years, the events of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City created the conditions for the movements that would ultimately end in Insurrection. In both timelines, the book grapples with the messy realities of America’s violent and oppressive history, and considers the conspiracy theories as a tragic, but somewhat-understandable, result. For Russell, the doubt came with the Incompleteness Theorem, but, as the narrator uncovers over the course of Part II, he’d already turned away from his belief in logic’s power to deliver Truth. These chapters explore those the factors that led to the change: having children, WWI, and, most crucially, the impact of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who convinced Russell mathematics is just the art of saying the same things with different words. The Wittgenstein/Russell relationship provides fruitful ground for reflection via Wittgenstein’s obsession with being understood by Russell, and their years of cyclic estrangement. Wittgenstein’s later work in language games provides the logical framework for the third turn in the book toward the narrator’s “searching-self” and “hovering-self”—she realizes each self is playing a different game. Part II ends with the surprising realization that Russell’s brand of progressivism shares an intellectual history with the apocalyptic movements of today via 1840s Boston Radicals, who believed they could usher in the Biblical promise of a millennium of peace, a utopia here on earth, by what Russell calls “catastrophic conversion.” This game, which the narrator comes to understand as her “searching-self,” continues to read meaning into the “hidden connections” she finds. Meanwhile, there’s another game in-play, a “hovering-self,” which is capable of seeing, for the first time, the “human lessons” present in the timelines. As with Part I, each of the five chapters braid Russell’s life and my own, organized around themes of reckoning, catastrophic conversion, estrangement, and the inability to face the contradictions inherent to one’s own character. The Principle of Explosion takes its title from a law of formal logic: if a contradiction exists within a mathematical universe, any statement—even a false one—can be derived within that universe. Truth ceases to have meaning there. The logic of the universe “explodes.” This threat suggests the book’s unifying themes: the doubt inherent to my early childhood and my estrangement from my mother, humanity’s deep desire for certainty and understandability, and the chaos that arises without a shared system of belief. By tracing parallel emotional arcs between Russell’s story and my own, the book invites the reader to feel the temporary thrill of these grand theories of truth and the pain of the contradictions that inevitably explode them. In a time when both conspiracy theories and family estrangement are on the rise, The Principle of Explosion is a book for the moment. Millions have, like my mother, gone down the rabbit hole with figures like Alex Jones. More still have misplaced their faith in objective truth. Many have taken up guns. They are not, as we’ve learned, isolated. This book is for their children, parents, siblings, and friends.