My depression in Waterloo, part 1: the first term

The previous series of posts, called “The causes of my depression”, established the triggers that set off my depression. Since coming to Waterloo, I have been encountering these almost every single day. I am therefore beginning a new series on (the effects of) my depression in Waterloo. As before, these posts were expanded from notes I took after my sessions with UW Counselling and a private psychiatrist.

The University of Waterloo is run on a system of three terms (or semesters) of four months each per academic year. The first term actually went very well for me, right up until near the end of the term, when I made the mistake of consenting to a visit from my parents.

The first thing that I did right away was to sign up for the Introduction to Quantum Computing course, which coincidentally was scheduled for the very first morning after I arrived in Waterloo. It was taught by Dr. Michele Mosca and Dr. Raymond Laflamme, the latter of whom was a graduate student under Stephen Hawking. I felt very embarrassed around him, because my father had insulted both him and his former supervisor. One of the comments he had made about Dr. Hawking when I was in high school, after he had discovered my interest in his books and papers, was the rhetorical question, “What idiot would want to study under him to learn such frivolous things?”^[1]

So my father had indirectly called Dr. Laflamme, who was now my professor, an “idiot” (傻瓜), and had also dismissed his research as “frivolous” (無聊). This made me very self-conscious around him, despite the fact that there was no way he could’ve found out about my father’s aspersions, nor was my father ever likely to notice that I was in a class taught by a former graduate student of Dr. Hawking. My embarrassment was therefore quite irrational, especially of course since I disagreed with my father’s sentiments; but then again, I suppose that my depression itself is completely irrational. Nevertheless, this was the first of many instances in which my parents had placed me in a socially awkward situation since my arrival in Waterloo. Dr. Laflamme was also the director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, in which I would later work, and so my father had effectively insulted my future boss while I was still in high school.

Another course I took was Formal Languages and Number Theory, taught by Dr. Jeff Shallit. Besides wanting to learn more about the topics covered by the the course (topics which my father had dismissed as “worthless” and having “nothing to do with computer science” when I was in high school), I had also wanted to meet Dr. Shallit, who is a well-known critic of creationism and the intelligent design movement. To explain why I had wanted to meet him, I shall have to make a digression.

My own interest in creationism stems from a broader fascination with historical negationism by religious believers, and with the role of this revisionism in the downfall of civilisations. Creationism is only one aspect of a much larger complex of myths held by certain Christians who attribute all of the accomplishments of Western civilisation to Christianity. These Christians maintain that the United States was “founded as a Christian nation” and that Christianity is the cornerstone of modern science. The infamous Wedge Document, a manifesto produced by the Discovery Institute, a major American creationist think tank which aims to replace the methodological materialism in science with a theistic paradigm, exemplifies this view. It begins:

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

While it is true that all of the Founding Fathers were nominally Christian, several prominent ones were Deists or Unitarians (and vociferous ones), and the founding documents drew inspiration from sources other than Christianity, such as Freemasonry. Most of them were not the kind of Christian that a modern evangelical might imagine them to be. And while modern science indeed originated in Christian Europe, and all of the early modern scientists were Christians (and many of them quite devout), the rise of modern science was the result of a combination of many factors including, for example, the freedom to question religious doctrine and authority.

It cannot be denied that one of the pre-requisites for the Scientific Revolution was a belief in an orderly and rational universe which can be comprehended by the human mind through reason, and that historically it was Christianity which had supplied the basis for this belief. But clearly the belief can and does exist independently of Christianity, and a large number of scientists became inclined towards Deism or atheism once they had the option of formulating their own religious opinions. To me, the suggestion that science should “return” to Christian theism (or turn to a belief in some unspecified intelligent designer) is as misguided as a proposition that all books should be printed in Chinese, on the grounds that papermaking was originally motivated by the needs of the Chinese imperial court and spread through the transmission of scriptures by Buddhist missionaries.

But this sort of historical negationism is nothing new. The Golden Age of Islam came about because the early Muslims conquered lands which were already ancient centres of learning, and assimilated and further developed the knowledge of their vanquished Persian, Byzantine, and Indian subjects, as well as Chinese and other foes. Some Muslim scientists during this period might be considered orthodox, while many were agnostic, skeptical, or even heretical, but they were nevertheless sponsored by liberal patrons. The decline of science in the Muslim world started with the tightening of the grip of a newly minted orthodoxy, and the creeping acceptance of the myth that all pre-Islamic and non-Islamic societies were in a state of ignorance and had nothing to offer to Muslims. And yet, when I discussed the history of science with university students from Muslim backgrounds, they had inevitably been taught by their religious authorities that Islam was the true source of science, and that the scientific prowess and the political and economic might of the Muslim world began to fade only when Muslims started to stray from orthodoxy and introduced innovations. This is the exact opposite of what is evident from the historical record.

When I observe the creationist movement in the United States and Canada, I cannot help but compare it with the anti-rationalism which centuries ago put an end to the development of science in the Muslim world, a setback from which it has never recovered. Both offered a pat and simplistic explanation of their respective societies’ ascendence and decline, explanations which appealed to the emotions of religious believers by affirming their membership in a higher civilisation without actually requiring them to make the difficult effort of contributing to the sustenance of one. (One can go to any number of Internet forums where the theory of evolution is discussed to witness the number and intensity of attacks on it from people who can barely string together a sentence, let alone make a coherent argument. They are certain that evolution is wrong, quite apparently without having studied the subject at all, because their religious leaders had told them so. If only they would put that energy and time towards actually advancing real scientific knowledge.) I don’t think too many people have remarked on this similarity. It amazes me that the followers of each of these two major world religions seem oblivious to what they can learn from the history of the other: Muslims that intellectual freedom, including religious freedom, is a necessary condition for scientific advancement, and Christians that the attribution of all good things to a rigid adherence to orthodoxy is a sure sign of a civilisation’s demise.

While Dr. Shallit’s criticisms of creationism focused on the misuse of information theory, complexity theory, and other ideas from computer science and mathematics by its proponents, my interest was mainly in creationism as a part of a larger reaction by certain Christian groups to the perceived eviction of Christianity from a pedestal of privilege in Western civilisation. But in any case, we shared a concern in the problem of how to effectively communicate science and rational thinking to people who might be priorly prejudiced due to their religious beliefs, and I was curious to hear his views. This was the sort of question my father had always dismissed as “worthless” and told me to stop asking in high school, because — accordingly to him — I would not do well in university otherwise, since it was “irrelevant”. But Dr. Shallit is both interested in these questions and a respected professor of computer science, and it was good simply to be in the company of someone who reminded me that once again my father had absolutely no clue about the characteristics of the kind of people who are successful in academia.

I did very well in both courses throughout most of the term. (I also had a third course, Artificial Intelligence, but that wasn’t a subject that my father had objected to, so I wasn’t worried about it.) I actually felt that I should have known the material much better, considering that I had been studying both subjects since high school. But of course, there were gaps of months or years during which I didn’t, or couldn’t, touch them. I was very much encouraged by a classmate who was in both courses with me. She called me a “genius”. Actually, she told me that someone else had called me a “genius”, but in a way that implied that she agreed with the assessment. A lot of guys had called me that while I was at the University of Toronto, but I hadn’t heard it from many girls (or more properly, young women) since high school, and it made me very happy. (I guess that makes me a sexist.) Incidentally, she’s also Iranian, adding yet another Iranian to the tally of those who have encouraged or supported me in school. She also inspired me to learn more Persian poetry.

I had been putting off any visits from my parents since the beginning of the term, because I thought that once they realised what I was studying in Waterloo, they would try to stop me. They had already chastised me for switching out of engineering into computer science instead of continuing with a Ph.D. in engineering, because I would have to “waste time” establishing myself in an entirely new field. But from my point of view, it was the last half of high school, my entire undergraduate degree, and a lot of things that followed from that which had been the waste of time. There was quite literally nothing in the Engineering Science program that I would later need for graduate school except for things that I either had already studied in high school against my parents’ wishes (and enduring their dismissal of them as “worthless” as well as their threats and beatings while doing so), or would have learned on my own anyways, and in a far better environment. The things that would be of central importance to my graduate research were precisely the very things that my parents had derided as “worthless” and had tried to prevent me from studying in high school and in university. I had, by that point, wasted close to a decade of my life trying to get back into what I had wanted to study in high school in the first place. And yet these very people who had derailed my career through the use of violence had the gall to complain to me that I was unfocused and wasting my time. If it hadn’t been for their interference, I could have been doing what is now my graduate research while I was still in high school.

Naturally, I did not want to see them, but they insisted on coming to visit me, and I relented towards the end of the term when there was nothing left but projects and final exams. I needed to know what I would be able to get away with in the coming terms. I was determined to study quantum computing, which my father had explicitly forbidden me from studying since high school on pain of being disowned. I was perfectly prepared to do research on information retrieval as my main area while working on quantum computing on the sly, and the most sensible topic would have been information retrieval in languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, which was both very topical and something I had been working on for a number of years. The problem, of course, was that since 9/11 my father would become extremely upset at the mention of anything having to do with Muslims or the Muslim world. So I had to strike this delicate balance between secretly studying something that my parents had threatened to disown me for studying while publicly studying something else that would cause my father to scream at me and my mother to continually nag me to stop. In retrospect, my success was quite unlikely, but I never thought about that at the time.

Whenever my parents asked me what I was studying, I would leave the answer very vague because I didn’t want to hear what they had to say about it. I would just tell them that I was studying “computer science”. I really didn’t want to hear them tell me that what I was studying had “nothing to do with computer science”, especially since I was actually enrolled in a computer science program. I had also kept a very low profile since arriving in Waterloo, for example essentially abandoning my web site. I just didn’t want to give them any excuses to criticise me. I think that a large part of the purpose of their visit was to determine what they believed I must have been hiding from them.

I could have continued to hide what I was studying from them when they came to visit, but I chose instead to reveal everything in a dramatic fashion. I deliberately put “Mike and “Ike” (the textbook used in the quantum computing course) on a table in the middle of the room, surrounded by materials on formal languages, finite automata, Arabic, Persian, and Islamic studies. (I should have taken a photograph, but I suppose that the significance of the arrangement would not have been apparent to anyone but myself.)

The climax of this story is not as exciting as it might have been. When my father saw my display, he picked up “Mike and Ike”, flipped through it a bit, then asked, rather flippantly, “What’s the use of your studying this kind of thing?”^[2] I didn’t answer his question, and he didn’t notice the rest of my display. I suppose that I should count myself lucky that he didn’t scream at me or threaten to disown me, but I became very depressed after my parents left, and couldn’t focus on my studies for weeks afterwards. I think that I actually became depressed because he didn’t threaten to disown me. He had been screaming at me and beating me throughout high school for studying basically exactly the topics covered in that book, and insisting that they had “nothing to do with computer science”. And here I was, taking a course on quantum computing in computer science (actually, it was cross-listed in physics, computer science, and combinatorics and optimisation), and there was even a textbook on the subject. His reaction was much less severe than I had anticipated. I don’t know if it’s quite right to say that I was disappointed with his reaction — I obviously didn’t want to be screamed at or threatened. Rationally, I should have been happy that he hadn’t reacted more violently, but in fact I felt just the opposite.

Coincidentally, the outbreak of SARS happened at around this time, and because I was feeling very sick and had recently been to some places with a high concentration of people from Hong Kong and China, I used that as an excuse to stay away from school for a couple of weeks. But I knew that my condition was due to my parents’ visit; and from then on, I would become physically ill whenever I saw them.

– davinci

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