So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

As a teenager, my brother Derek was way into the books by Douglass Adams, an author whose magnum opus was probably the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Derek would sometimes tell me about humorous moments from the book, and I always meant to get around to reading it someday. Alas, I never have read it, but I recently rented the recent film version. I can’t comment on whether the movie lives up to the book, but I can say the film was hilariously philosophical. One of the central themes of the film is that a few aliens and human refugees from an obliterated earth go looking for an answer to “life, the universe, and everything else” with the aid of a guidebook to the universe entitled, The Hitchhiker’s Guide. In the film, we learn that the answer to the big questions is the confusingly simple number “42.” Silly as this is, I think it underscores an important point, namely, that answers are meaningless unless we have learned to ask the right questions. Unless we have meaningful and deeply troubling questions, there is no such thing as a meaningful and fulfilling answer. That is exactly what is wrong when, in Sunday School or secular schools, we try to give people answers to the big questions without helping them to first see the force of the questions. An education that tries to inculcate a particular pattern of life will always be shallow without an element of critical thought that develops questioning as much as answering.

Another theme of the film is looking beyond appearances. For example, the film tells us that, although we think that humans are the smartest creatures on earth, we are, sadly, just the third smartest. Dolphins, it seems, have been trying to send us messages for years and yet, we simply see them as performing amusing tricks like jumping through hoops and flipping their fins. Throughout the film, the heroes are placed in situations that thwart expectations (who would have thought that a towel, for example, would be one of the most important tools in the universe!). It reminded me of the research on creativity which suggests that creative thought is the ability to break free from “functional fixidity” and see irregular uses of regular things.

Bryan