Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at 900 miles an hour. It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned, The sun that is the source of all our power. Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, Are moving at a million miles a day, In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour, Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
-Eric Idle, The Galaxy Song
from The Meaning of Life
Sort of a grim morning here in the frozen north. At the macro level, we have surging unemployment and news of a wave of shoplifting, not of electronic gadgets or jewelry, but rice and diapers:
People are starving, right here in the U.S of A. And we act like we don't know what can be done about it.
Another 3,000 of our neighbors died yesterday of mass stupidity, dressed up at Covid. At the current pace we'll lose close to 90,000 loved ones this month alone in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the political leadership in the red states is laser-focused on the most important challenge facing this country: overturning an election in which the challenger won by seven million votes. Elections do in fact have consequences, such as putting so many sycophants in positions of power, and watching these folks strut and flap their arms like eunuchs in King Donald's court is a spectacle both mesmerizing and pathetic.
Closer to home, I find myself at cross-purposes with my professional partners over my decision to work from home rather than sitting in a 10 X 10 office in a county with a 20% Covid-positive rate to show I'm really part of the team. It is dispiriting.
Don't even get me started on the debate about where to live, and whether it's possible to re-invent oneself at 56. Dispiriting doesn't even begin to describe it.
Collectively, this morning's milieu finds me starting to push back against all the voices weighing in on how I should spend what's left of this life. The urge is, unfortunately, thick in my genes. My mother's father spent a decade as a major in the Air Force because he had a bad habit of calling out what he considered stupidity when he saw it (his OERs from that time are almost comical), and once punched his commanding officer over a perceived insult after a few drinks at the officers' club. My own father has, well, a certain disdain for authority--let's just leave it there. That's the evolutionary soup in which I congealed.
All of this unease with the moment leads to questions of meaning. Why does life feel so unmoored and inhospitable right now? Whatever became of the facets of life that seemed to give it purpose?
Religion no longer offers any refuge. In fourteen days we will celebrate an event supposedly precipitated by a divine being impregnating a fourteen-year-old girl. Even after we learned enough basic biology to realize this was impossible, and noted with some unease that the tale sounded a lot like other religions' "gods coupling with ladies" myths, we mouthed the children's story in our creeds and chalked it all up as a "mystery", a much more accommodating word than the more descriptive "bullshit".
I can already hear you--"But it gives people hope!" Hold that thought--we'll get back there in a moment.
Maybe we find meaning in spending our life in some grandiose deontological exercise, cleaving to a set of rules as if we are being graded on our performance. Religion serves up a big dollop of this as well, but one need not believe in a narrative of talking snakes and divine smiting to arrive there. Stoicism or Confucianism offer the same template. But why bother if no one is paying attention?
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice,
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill,
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose freewill.
Neil Peart wrote those words forty years ago, when he was drumming for Rush. Apparently he was very into Ayn Rand at the time, and handed out copies of The Fountainhead to his coterie. Ayn Rand was probably onto something there, eccentric as she was.
I make P crazy when I ascribe the libertarian excesses of the radical right to an overdose of Atlas Shrugged. There's a lot of truth in her philosophy, and insights about human nature many of which we'd rather not admit. And it's a supreme act of doublethink to adhere to Rand's objectivism and Christianity in the same social construct. No wonder those people seem so crazy.
Maybe a search for meaning is, in itself, mis-framing the problem of existence. Musing over it all this morning, I find myself thinking back to a few lines of poetry from Robert Louis Stevenson, words I used to say I wanted on my headstone when I thought I'd actually have a headstone:
I have trod the upward and the downward slope; I have endured and done in days before; I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope; And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.
There it is--"bid farewell to hope." There's the thing that ultimately may release us to be fully human.
Years ago I had a professional disaster that at the time seemed so overwhelmingly awful I was convinced it would change my life forever. In my wrestling with how to go forward in a world where a lifetime of achievement was blown away by a typographical error, I came around to a conclusion that those around me must have found disconcerting. "Now that it's all gone," I mused while walking the dog one night, " I can be whatever I want, do whatever I want, with no worry about the consequences because there is no next big thing, no promotion, no judicial appointment."
Yeah, that would've worried me too, on the outside looking in.
But I had hit on something, and I wasn't the first. A few years later in the midst of another search for meaning, back in seminary, I ran across The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus.
The essay starts out with a provocative premise:
Camus then goes on to deconstruct a number of philosophical responses to the question of life's meaning, and finds most either cop out with a religious answer or trumpet their adherence to reason, which ends in platonic abstraction.
Where all this leads, in Camus's estimate, is that life is absurd, and has no meaning. There is also no basis for hope, given the inevitability of death as the end of life's journey.
And yet, Camus does not conclude his analysis by some self-defenestration born of despair. He observes that an embrace of the absurd means freedom, unfettered by hope of an eternal reward:
"Integrity has no need of rules. 'Everything is permitted' is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgement of a fact."
The measure of life, in his view, comes down to living with integrity to oneself. He ends by pointing to the eponymous Myth of Sisyphus, in which the protagonist is punished by the gods for briefly imprisoning Death by spending eternity pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down, over and over. It is the ultimate absurd, meaningless existence, and a metaphor for how most people live their lives in pointless toil. But Camus's Sisyphus does not fall into despair; he accepts the futility and hopelessness of his situation, and out of that acceptance find the strength to approach his task with integrity. In my favorite line from the essay Camus concludes, as his character is walking down the hill to repeat the exercise,
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
This has been quite a ramble, and perhaps worrisome to a few. It shouldn't be. I'm just talking to myself this morning (aren't we all?), trying to find a way through all the pressures from the outside and the ridiculousness of this national and personal moment. And it seems that the way through it all is to eschew the search for meaning as a false hope, embrace life's absurdity, and accept.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth; And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
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