The Most Pressing Question

The last couple of posts have addressed themes touched upon by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. As we've noted in the previous posts, he talks in the book, inter alia, about our collective lostness - our contemporary forfeiture of objective truth, dignity, freedom, and morality as well as the loss of any ground for human rights.

There's one more thing he argues that we've lost in the modern age that I'd like to focus on today: Meaningfulness.

Sacks tells the sad story of author David Foster Wallace who took his own life at the age of 46 in September of 2008. Wallace once said that the emptiness of modern life manifests itself in a kind of lostness.

He noted that he and his friends were affluent, highly educated and successful in their chosen walks of life, but despite these advantages some of them were deeply into drugs, others were workaholics, others were going to singles bars every night.

They were, he said, "adrift."

He told a magazine in 1993 that "this is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values."

Reading his story reminded me of Ernst Hemingway's semi-autobiographical novel The Sun Also Rises written in 1926 and F.Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby written the year before. They both describe a lost generation living lives of not-so-quiet desperation, lives spent in an alcoholic haze, enmeshed in petty squabbles and projects, trying to find something with which to satiate their hunger for meaning and purpose.

Albert Camus' novel The Stranger (1942) is a somewhat similar tale of the ultimate pointlessness of human existence.

The century since Hemingway and Fitzgerald has brought material blessing that those artists could never have imagined, but the emptiness of modern life, despite our comforts and technology, is as painful as ever.

A character in the movie Contact captures our existential anguish well when he says that, "In all of our searching the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other."

The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was perhaps ahead of his time when he asked, “What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?”

Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman insisted that, “You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.”

Why this awful nihilism that has descended upon Western societies like a suffocating smog over the last 100 years?

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre hints at an answer when he asserted that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal."

Writer Somerset Maugham puts it similarly when he wrote that, "If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.”

Death, these men tell us, is the big eraser. It wipes away anything that could possibly make life worth the suffering, the boredom, the terror that existence holds for so many. And as David Foster Wallace observed even those who live in relative comfort, maybe especially those, are not exempted from the ennui and the pain of existential emptiness.

Put differently, unless what we do matters forever, it doesn't matter at all. For this reason, to quote Evelyn Waugh, "Life is unintelligible and unendurable without God."

Sacks cites a New York Times article on the despair evinced by the soaring statistics of depression, suicide and self-harm, especially among the young. The article quotes one person who confessed that, "Drugs and alcohol are the only shining rays of light in my otherwise unbearable existence."

Another admitted that, "I no longer find much of anything meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying. Whatever used to keep me going has gone. I am currently struggling to find any motivation to keep going."

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw in the 19th century that the loss of God would eventually unmoor mankind and plunge him into a cold, empty void of meaninglessness and despondency. In The Gay Science (1882) he wrote:

"Whither is God?" he [Nietszche's Madman] cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?

Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?

Is not night continually closing in on us? .... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Modern man lives by the conceit that he can do away with God and the only consequence of his abandonment is that he's now free to sleep in on Sunday morning. This is very naive.

When we do away with God, as I've maintained over the last several posts, not only have we no longer anything upon which to base objective truth, mutual trust, human dignity, freedom of the will, objective morality, and human rights, but we also become untethered, lost in the cosmos, to borrow from the title of a Walker Percy novel.

We lose all hope of having any lasting meaning, purpose or significance. That's why the question of God is the most pressing question in all of life and why I return to it so often on Viewpoint.