Trapped in a World You Never Made?

What, after all, is the meaning of life?

The common (post)modern stance is that we do not know. We wander our wasteland, waiting for Godot, and Godot does not show.

Some say the meaning of life is 42. Good joke. We are less than laboratory rats.

Or it is up to each of us to simply invent or construct a meaning. As if it were possible to immaculately conceive meaning from meaninglessness, something from nothing.

This sad conception has led to ugly things. It seems to me that it has led to the present cancel culture, rampant censorship, unfriending, shouting down those with whom we disagree. Everyone is losing all their friends. Many are losing livelihoods. To do such things amounts to spiritual murder: when we stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to listen, we are declaring the other a non-person. And it leads on an unwavering trajectory to actual physical murder, perhaps on a mass scale.

For what, after all, can we do, if we have invented our meaning by some act of will, and it conflicts with the next guy’s meaning? As it inevitably will. There is no higher authority to which to appeal. So there is no way to settle the conflict but to pretend he or she does not exist; to silence them; or to eliminate them.

At the same time, from the same cause, at least in the developed world, indications are that the incidence of “mental illness,” and suicide, and death by overdose, alcohol, or “accident,” is growing by spiraling upward seven-league strides.

We have gotten ourselves into a dark place, with this notion that life has no meaning.

Is it right? Is it all Godot’s fault?

It is worth pointing out that life does have meaning. At least, everyone thought it did until quite recently. Until the early 20th century, the meaning of life was uncontroversial. And no, it did not depend on anyone’s particular sect or religion.

The meaning of life was to seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This was understood by the ancient Greek philosophers, and did not change with the coming of the great monotheisms—except that they called the ultimate Good, Truth, and Beauty “God.”

As did the Hindus, independently. Classifying in terms of the human experience of God as opposed to God’s own qualities, they arrived at a similar trinity: Sat, Cit, Ananda, roughly translating as Truth, Consciousness, and Bliss. Bliss describes the aesthetic experience, and corresponds to Beauty. “Consciousness” corresponds to the Good—morality is at base the awareness of the independent consciousness of others, treating another as an independent sentient being instead of a thing.

But, you say, there is no Truth, just as there is no God. You have sought and sought, and found none.

Let us point out first that that claim is contradictory. “There is no truth” is a claimed truth. Of course, if true, it is false.

All you can say, then, is that you have not yet found truth; you cannot claim you know there is none. And if you do say there is none, of course, you are not looking.

Were you ever really looking? Speaking from my experience, those who claim to be such perennial seekers of Truth are those who recoil most dramatically from anyone who claims to have found Truth. Religious believers, most notably. This is contradictory: they seem to dismiss out of hand the possibility that anyone has found Truth. If so, they cannot really be looking for it.

It seems to me that the claim that they cannot find Truth is also easily and trivially disproven. If you insist you have found no truth, are you really prepared to deny the Pythagorean theorem, or that 2 + 2 = 4? Are you prepared to ignore the Law of Gravity in your own daily actions?

But, you will say, if there is Truth, there is no Good. Morality is just what each society agrees on: it is “socially constructed.”

That leaves you with no possible argument that Hitler did anything wrong. He was, after all, the duly elected social authority. You similarly have no argument against such cultural practices as child sacrifice, slavery, or widow burning.

To the contrary, Kant has shown that the moral imperative is self-evident and beyond question. It is enshrined, almost word for word, in all known moral codes: do to others as you would have them do. Respect other sentient beings.

You will then say, at least, that there is no Beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We all know that much.

This is a consolation for physically ugly people like me; we all know it is not really true. While not everyone will find a given thing beautiful, results of a survey will be far from random. Balance, harmony, clarity, seem to be consistent elements. We say that beauty fades, or is often a matter of trickery; but then we mean gross physical beauty, not the Beauty referred to as transcendental. The beauty of art is something else, and does not trick or fade.

Next you will say, but why are these three qualities, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, to be valued? The question cannot really be answered, because their value is self-evident. It is in our ROM. Rather, we determine the value of all other things by the degree to which they are either good and useful, true, or beautiful. Posit, if you like, a divine programmer. There is a point beyond which, in self-knowledge, we cannot go.

How then did we get so knocked off the path in modern times? Why are we sleeping in ditches in Eliot’s Waste-Land?

I can only speculate. I think it was and is a disease of the Humanities. Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was unified by religion; theology was the queen of the sciences. The first schools and the first universities, everywhere, were religious institutions. This is true in Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or Confucian lands. It is universal. Knowledge therefore had a plot and a direction.

With the success in the West over the last few centuries of empirical science, it gained such prestige that it tended to supplant religion and philosophy as the perceived centre of knowledge: now physics and not theology was the queen of the sciences.

For all its impressive success, science does not work well in this role. It is not possible to unify all knowledge on physical terms; most of the real world and of real human experience is on the metaphysical, spiritual plane. We are more than robots with sensing organs.

With the growing prestige of the sciences, the Humanities, over the past two hundred years or more, have been struggling to be “scientific.” This has spawned the “social sciences.” Yet as is increasingly apparent with each generation, every attempt to put the human world on a scientific basis has failed. It must always necessarily fail. Marxism seemed promising, but was wrong. Freudianism was wrong. Behaviourism was wrong. Chomsky was wrong. Keynes was wrong.

All this while physical sciences were building towers and bridges, arcing from strength to strength. No surprise if it was demoralizing. The Humanities/Social Sciences are depressed.

Yet rather than realizing or admitting that they have been hunting in the wrong place with the wrong dogs, scholars in the humanities/social sciences have thrown up their hands and said, increasingly since the Second World War, “There is no truth.” “There is no meaning.” This is the sin of acedia, of spiritual sloth, of despair.

They have then extended this to empirical science as well. It is just not tolerable to accept that science has truth, and they do not. This is the sin of pride; for acedia and pride are interlinked.

But you, gentle reader, need not be so misled. You need not retreat into some personal “reality,” some cherished hallucination, whether drug-induced or otherwise. And you need not then murder your neighbour to maintain it.

Wake up. Smell coffee. Seek truth.