09 December 1999, 811 words
The negative perspective is that "when yuh dead yuh done", a perspective that every Catholic bone in me finds horrendous because, if true, what is the point? We may as well not have come.- Keith Smith
Consider the following questions: What is the purpose of life? What caused the universe and why? How can you tell which beliefs are true? How can you tell what is good?
In his book Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky says that all these questions are impossible to answer because they are all circular. For this reason, he writes, "All human cultures evolve institutions of law, religion and philosophy [which] adopt specific answers to circular questions and establish authority schemes to indoctrinate people with those beliefs. One might complain that such establishments substitute dogma for reason and truth. But in exchange they spare whole populations from wasting time on fruitless reason loops."
I agree with every statement of Minsky's, except the last one. Minsky, in asserting that given answers save people intellectual agony, unconsciously assumes that because he is intellectually curious everyone else is, too. But human beings haven't changed much in the last 2500 years, when Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living" - also an intellectually elitist statement. Nowadays, people in even the poorest countries have much more education, goods and time than the Greek slaves whose labour allowed Socrates leisure for philosophical thought. But most people still do not bother examining their lives - at least, not in the philosophical sense Socrates had in mind.
Yet it is true that ideologies are, and always have been, immensely popular. It is also true that ideologies shape our world. Religions are the favourite ideological systems, closely followed by absolute political creeds. But even secular people adopt religious creeds, in the sense of ultimate values. Literary critics, for example, often base their opinions on (false) assumptions of absolute aesthetic principles. And many people look to science for ultimate truths.
But people do not turn to ideologies for meaning, but for the comfort of certainties. Once they adopt the ideology's beliefs, however, they conflate certainty with meaning. As long as ideology remains separate from action, not much harm is done by this. But, as history so clearly demonstrates, most of the evil in this world has been caused by persons who are absolutely sure of their beliefs.
This is one reason why it is neither courageous nor noble to seek meaning through religion. Also, the truly moral person does not act in expectation of reward or punishment. The Christian belief that suffering brings people closer to God, the Hindu belief that karma explains misfortune, and the Muslim belief that Allah determines everything - all these are only ways for people to explain evil and/or weasel out of their moral responsibility to do something about it. My writer partner Verne Guerin sums up the atheistic arguments of centuries of philosophers with admirable succinctness: "If there is Someone up there, He's doing a terrible job. But if there's no one up there, we not doing too badly."
The other ideologies are equally useless. Absolute political creeds appeal to those who want power, not meaning. Science offers only empirical evidence, the ultimate meaning of the information lying outside its purview.
The hard truth is, only we can create meaning in our lives. But we are reluctant to do so, because that would mean self-responsibility (with all the hard work that that implies). It is much easier to search for answers outside ourselves. But that way will always be unfulfilling, and will always cause much misery. Most people, I find, get real meaning from the so-called ordinary things in life: family, friends, children, fun, and work. And yet, consciously, most people would probably not describe these things as making their existence truly meaningful. Perhaps part of our problem is that we are not humble enough to accept that our ordinariness is meaningful, and not conceited enough to realize that we are gods who create our own meaning.
And, if Keith still wonders why he should have bothered coming, I recommend these words from biologist Richard Dawkins (whose book Unweaving the Rainbow is - astonishingly - available in RIK): "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh