Ross Douthat, Will Wilkinson, and the Meaning of Life

Ross Douthat takes on Will Wilkinson (the callow versus the shallow?) in the online equivalent of a late night dorm bull session on whether life has and can have meaning in the absence of god.  Wilkinson posits that life must have meaning because it sure seems meaningful, Douthat finds this insufficiently intellectually robust (opting instead for meaning via thousands of year old stories told by ancient peoples, reduced to writing in non-contemporaneous accounts, and subject to subsequent random additions, deletions, and mistranslations via committee).  Douthat argues that it is of great consequence whether our life choices occur within C.S. Lewis's Christian Universe or Richard Dawkins' godless cosmos -- to which I say of course -- who wouldn't rather hang out with a talking Christ lion than some tendentious atheist? 

It's all very vigorous stuff -- hell, Wilkinson's appears on a site modestly called the "big think."  I always thought Camus to be the most concise of writers, but clearly he wasted a hundred or so pages in penning The Myth of Sisyphus.

Wilkinson's argument does have the classic superficiality one expects from libertarians -- sort of a "50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong" approach to life's meaning.  The fact that most people believe their lives are meaningful doesn't make it so -- anymore than the fact that a resounding majority of Americans believe in a personal Christian God makes Douthat's vision so.  These matters run a little deeper than a public opinion survey. 

Douthat is one of those people who, like Jennifer Fulwiler,  the atheist convert who prompted this exchange, cannot really imagine living a happy (and seemingly meaningful life) in a universe in which his special soul does not have the opportunity to exist forever.  Wilkinson, on the other hand, confronts the void with all of the aplomb of one of those obnoxious business gurus, encouraging "epistemic best practices."  After all, we live in an era where there is a lot of neat stuff to buy -- how could life be meaningless if there are all manner of Apple products to consume and flat screens have never been cheaper -- Wilkinson no doubt appreciates that, as Roy would put it, ours is truly an age of wonders.          

Fulwiler, who converted to Catholicism, is less than intellectually rigorous and seems to have been a bit of a mess psychologically (my Juris Doctor suggests that she may have had a bout with pretty severe post-partum depression prior to her conversion experience).  First, she conflates the absence of god to a universe in which people are in essence fleshy robots (some of us more fleshy than others) driven by random neuron firings.  We go from a world without god to one of complete biological determinism.  I don't think even the most annoying evolutionary biology types would go this far.  Second, she finds compelling the notion that "Jesus founded just one Church before he left the earth, and that he instilled it with supernatural power so that it would accurately articulate the truth about what is good -- and therefore about what is God -- for all times and places."  I find that this notion is a tough sell to your average hard-minded skeptic.  Lastly, she finds the Catholic Church's teaching against contraception to be logically compelling, indeed, "airtight," as she describes it.  (I'd suggest that she read Garry Wills Papal Sin to get a better sense, from a still devout Catholic, of just what a flimsy edifice this particular papal diktat is.)  As a result of this latter point, Fulwiler appears to have taken chances with her life and health by eschewing birth control.  Beware the zeal of the convert. 

Personally, I remain pretty comfortable with post-war existentialism.  We were born in the void and will surely die there too, but we can choose consciously to live our lives as though they are meaningful, we can revel in life's beauties and wonders, which are surely as real as death, and we can embrace solidarity with our equally doomed brethren with whom we share the planet for our short stay here.  We can make such limited life as we have more meaningful and more beautiful through our actions -- and that should be enough.  

Comments

[Freddie]

Perfect.

[Eric Wilde]

We were born in the void and will surely die there too, but we can choose consciously to live our lives as though they are meaningful, we can revel in life's beauties and wonders, which are surely as real as death, and we can embrace solidarity with our equally doomed brethren with whom we share the planet for our short stay here. We can make such limited life as we have more meaningful and more beautiful through our actions -- and that should be enough.

Well said.

[kathy a.]

that is enough. that's what we've got to work with. i personally do not have time or patience for pondering about the eternal when i'm living in the present world, with real people, conditions as they are, and the vehicle of my body will only go so many thousands of miles.

and i do think what i do matters, that it makes an immediate difference, and has some lasting meaning -- for good or not. that's true for all of us; we all have family, friends, neighbors. my great-grandmother was born in about 1880 and died in 1972; she is still loved and remembered, and stories are told of her and her sisters and the time an in-law hosted albert einstein. i know! but mostly, it's about her, and how she treated people and lived.

i don't actually care if anyone remembers me in 100 years; that seems unlikely. but i care a lot if some of all that hard work of raising kids and taking care of others makes things better for them -- even though sometimes it won't, either because i messed up or because of something else. in the universe, i'm a tiny speck. a mighty tiny speck, sometimes.

go forth and do good. or try, anyway.

[corvus9]

(opting instead for meaning via thousands of year old stories told by ancient peoples, reduced to writing in non-contemporaneous accounts, and subject to subsequent random additions, deletions, and mistranslations via committee)

That was my favorite part.

However, I think you might be wrong about the determinism thing, Sir Charles. I think it was philosopher of science Daniel Dennett who holds the view that consciousness is not a thing outside the physical universe, that it is merely a projection and illusion created by the interaction of the chemicals in our head. If consciousness doesn't influence anything, is in fact not really a thing, then yeah, the universe is deterministic, and the universe is just a big machine/robot that we are part of, with only quantum weirdness in the way of the universe being a completely clockwork mechanism.

Personally, I guess I think/feel that the universe must not be deterministic, since I think there really is no meaning to life if the universe is deterministic. If we are really just robots, what does it matter if one of us breaks? But there is a big difference between saying that consciousness is real and mind can influence matter (and matter can influence the mind) and believing in any particular religious conception of the metaphysical superstructure of reality, especially in the complete absence of any evidence. "The universe is not deterministic" is about as far as I am willing to venture into the realm of faith.

[Molly London]

This post is too much philosophy for me, in fact we can say that the more we think the more sad we become, so... be stupid and positive! Good luck!

[big bad wolf]

good luck, indeed.

[Joe S]

This is slightly off topic (although not by much), but am I the only person in the world who finds C.S. Lewis to be an overrated writer who is really cloying to read. Unlike many of the readers and writers here, I'm not an atheist or agnostic (although I have a strong belief government should be secular). So I shouldn't find Lewis as bad as I do. But I just can't stomach Lewis-- and when conservatives cite Lewis, it just makes me dislike him even more.

P.S., Sir C, like you, I love the Twentieth Century existentialists (most notably Sartre and Camus), but I ultimately found the Christian spin on existentialism (Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, Dostoyevsky, Cornel West, and Roberto Unger, and even, to some extent, St. Augustine in places) more compelling.

I think what I find most annoying about the likes of Fulwiler, Douthat, and Wilkinson is the lack of doubt. I find the idea that human beings (limited by brains evolved to better find sugar and carrion protein on the African Savannah) to be able to figure out the true and unequivocal meaning of reality through clever turns of phrase to be the height of hubris.

[Sir Charles]

Joe,

I, too, find Lewis a little hard to take -- and to take seriously.

I also like the Christian existentialist and that whole strain of thinking. Like Camus I am a non-believer who is nonetheless quite interested in the religious world view of people of intelligence and good faith.

What I really dislike, as you suggest, is the glibness and shallowness of thought shown by so many of these people -- as you note, the absent of doubt, and, I would add the absence of depth.

[oddjob]

I think the absence of doubt and the absence of depth go hand in hand. I think the clinging to certainty indicates an unwillingness to travel to the dark places of the soul and that it is precisely that journey that results in depth of thought and of self.

It's not an accident that the mythic hero's journey so often or usually is a traverse through darkness, as well as either death or near death. That journey transforms, deepens, and leaves scars. That journey teaches you that life is beautiful, but it hurts, too.

I think the absence of doubt is an indication of a soul unwilling to hurt in that way.

I also think that not traversing that journey prevents one from being fully adult.

(If this comment seems cliché, you may be correct in thinking so, but thinking in this way works for me.)

[low-tech cyclist]

Joe: "am I the only person in the world who finds C.S. Lewis to be an overrated writer who is really cloying to read"?

Good Lord, no. I found C.S. Lewis more or less convincing when I was 19, but he didn't wear at all well as the years passed, especially his all-too-comfortable certainty, not just in the existence of a loving God, but in practically everything he seemed to think that should imply. From Mere Christianity to Narnia, his writing, as Sir Charles implies, is largely absent of depth.

This God business isn't easy if you take it seriously as something more than another form of tribal identity. I believe in a God who is always nudging us to grow into something more than we are. It's a worthwhile and often joyous journey, but it can also be damned uncomfortable and difficult on a lot of stretches of the road. Lewis isn't much of a guide for that sort of trip.

[nancy]

Reading "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to your child was pretty much de rigueur for parents at our parochial elementary school, circa child's second grade. Having never read it (non-Catholic with a capital C, probably small one though, about which this post reminded me), I plunged in for the nightly read-aloud before bed. What a slog -- and 'cloying' is the right word. Unfortunately when a parent embarks on a book choice, it's kind of bad form to 'leave' before the final chapter. Moving on to "The Indian in the Cupboard" was a great relief.

Narnia series was a Christmas gift that goes unread to this day.

Years ago, encountering Camus led me to suddenly elect to major in French as an undergraduate. (My spoken French is merely serviceable, ahem). I wanted to gobble French Lit up and starting with him, work backward. Thanks for this post SirC.

[corvus9]

I have never finished the Narnia books. I read the first two or three, but stopped reading after he started phasing out the older children. Look, if you spend years and years in a magical Otherworld before returning to this one, you don't start suddenly stop believing in it when you turn eighteen! The allegory there was just to thick for me. Not the Christian allegory, mind you. I didn't pick up on that at all, being raised in a pretty non-religious family, but the magic=childhood allegory. Now, since I have heard about the trouble with Susan, I don't think I could ever read it all except as an academic exercise.

I really enjoyed The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe the one time I read it though.

[nancy]

(If this comment seems cliché, you may be correct in thinking so, but thinking in this way works for me.)

Oddjob -- cliché? don't know, but i agree with what you've written. dark and light. doubt and hope and trust. that's what we try to ascertain, no?

[Sir Charles]

nancy,

I am glad you like the post.

When I first encountered Camus -- through the Stranger (like most young people I suspect) I felt like I had landed upon a long lost older brother who also happened to be smarter and more humane than more or less every person in the universe. I was 15 years old and a second cousin of mine who was a high school history teacher told me that I must read him -- I was hooked and then saddened to realize that he was dead and that what limited literary oeuvre he had left -- however brilliant -- was all I would ever read.

Corvus,

I actually read the entire Narnia series to my son --along with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the bulk of the Harry Potter books etc. It was only late in the Narnia series that the religious themes started to overwhelm them and make them less enjoyable to read.

One of my most pleasant memories as a father is a day when my wife had left for a lengthy business trip to Peru and my son -- who was about seven at the time -- and I road the DC Metro back and forth (it was one of his great loves) for four hours while I read one of the Potter books aloud to him. I only stopped when I lost my voice.

oddjob,

Not cliched at all.

[oddjob]

that's what we try to ascertain, no?

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.
- Ursula K. LeGuin

[Gene O'Grady]

On Garry Wills and contraception, Bare Ruined Choirs is probably a more revealing book than Papal Sin. And more revealing still is that of my friends from the previous Catholic generation, many of whom had eight or ten children, I can think of no one who from private, and not so private, like with the priest in the room, conversation did not believe that Humanae Vitae was not just a mistake but a betrayal.

I always had an allergy to C S Lewis (except his literary scholarship, which is salutary), but at a critical time in my life a woman who had been a fairly devout Episcopalian before her own crises recommended On Working in Wartime, which I found useful.

[low-tech cyclist]

nancy and corvus - re-reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe several years back, I really felt like you could see where the backdrops were just backdrops, and if you weren't careful, you might push them over or burst through them, Blazing Saddles-style.

There was a certain dubious logic to the notion that the kids were getting old enough that they could and should find Aslan/Christ in their own world, but the problem was that if there was a world where you could meet him face to face in life, then why weren't all the worlds like that? Hell, it would be a big improvement if Jesus would check in even once a century to remind his supposed followers of just how far off course they'd gotten.

But the whole thing with Susan deciding she didn't believe in Narnia anymore - corvus, you're spot on: "if you spend years and years in a magical Otherworld before returning to this one, you don't start suddenly stop believing in it when you turn eighteen!" My own youthful religious experiences were considerably less dramatic than that (what wouldn't be?), but still pretty damned hard to deny four decades later. It's hard to believe in Susan's rejection of Narnia.

I've still got some time before I have to decide whether or not to read them to the kid; he enjoys some pretty impressive books for a four year old (he's been through Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks twice now) but he still needs an illustration every couple of pages to sustain his interest. And the Narnia books are weak on illustrations, so they'll probably have to wait another year.

[nancy]

Not quite sure why, but thought this encounter deserved a spot on this thread.

Also, oddjob and LTC -- Once, I read Ursula LeGuin's story, 'Catwings", to a roomful of second-graders at 1:30 in the afternoon (an antsy hour) in the school library. Even the boys were silent and enthralled, scooting closer to see the illustrations. Her poem above is a distillation of the 'Catwings' series.

And, Sir C -- The image of you reading aloud for four hours on the Metro is too sweet for words. Was the car mostly empty?

[Sir Charles]

nancy,

We literally rode back and forth from terminus to terminus, so sometimes the car was nearly empty and other times it was busy in the kind of Saturday afternoon way that the Metro is. We only stopped because my voice was shot -- it was like doing a trial.

I was a little sad when he no longer wanted to be read to. I remember that when one of the subsequent Potter books came out we purchased it at midnight at the book store up the block from us -- it was quite surreal -- we live on a pretty quiet block in DC especially late at night. But this evening, it was like a hot new club -- albeit one that allowed children -- had opened in the neighborhood. I remember he allowed me to read the first chapter to him and then I went to bed and he stayed up all night and read the whole damned thing.

His train love has never worn off -- to this day he is pleased as can be to hope on anything that runs on rails.

[oddjob]

Her poem above is a distillation of the 'Catwings' series.

Interesting! I haven't read the Catwings series. The poem opens "A Wizard of Earthsea", the first of her Earthsea series. The Earthsea series also is distilled by that poem.

[beckya57]

I found this post and the comment thread very interesting. I've been thinking about this issue more lately, and I'm hard pressed to define my own personal beliefs; I certainly don't believe in a white-haired God who's counting up my good deeds and sins on some abacus, nor do I believe in heaven and hell or any of the rest of that. And I definitely don't agree that a religious faith is a necessary (or sufficient) condition for living a good and ethical life. (Incidentally I agree with those above who cared less for C.S. Lewis as they aged.) I'm not a regular churchgoer, and don't really think of myself as belonging to any one tradition. On the other hand, I'm not exactly an atheist or agnostic either, though I know and respect a number of people who identify that way. My background is a weird mish-mash of Quaker, Presbyterian, Wiccan and Episcopalian, and I think all of those have something useful to say about how we live. I probably identify the most with the Quaker and Wiccan, in that I strongly share many of the Quaker values (and don't much care for formal church services) and my spiritual feelings are very tied to my appreciation of nature and the cycles of the seasons. I guess I'd have to say I'm trying to stay humble and continuing to think about all of this and figuring it out as I go along; the journey's more important then the endpoint anyway. Oddjob, I strongly identified with what you said too. And Sir C, that image of you and your son on the train is very touching.