OBLIVION, THE SEARCH FOR MEANING, AND THE SEARCH FOR DISTRACTION

Part of being human is about knowing ourselves, even why we are here. The late beloved Jewish philosopher and theologian, Abraham Heschel, asserted this very thing:

• It’s not enough for me to be able to say ‘I am’; I want to know who I am and in relation to whom I live. It is not enough for me to ask questions; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

Psychologist Arthur Deikman also wrote:

• Human beings need meaning. Without it they suffer… Western Psychotherapy is hard put to meet human beings’ need for meaning, for it attempts to understand clinical phenomena in a framework based on scientific materialism in which meaning is arbitrary and purpose nonexistent.

The late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl affirmed:

• Man’s search for meaning is a primary force in his life.

The late professor of philosophy, Dallas Willard, claimed:

• [Human life] essentially involves meaning. Meaning is not a luxury for us. It is a kind of spiritual oxygen, we might say, that enables our soul to live. (Os Guinness, The Journey, 39)

Even the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche admitted that without a “why” for our lives, we remain fragile:

• “He who has a why to live for can bear any how.” (Guinness)

When we have a goal, a reason for our being here, we can endure far more than if we are just living for pleasure. It is our confident purpose for living that allows us to see beyond our painful circumstances to a joy beyond ourselves.

Nevertheless, there is also the opposite – the pursuit of diversion, a desperate respite from trying to figure out life. The late scientist, mathematician, and inventor, Blaise Pascal, wrote that humanity seeks diversion:

• From thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind off it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show… It is not that they bring happiness nor anyone imagines that true bliss comes from possessing the money won at gaming or the hare that is hunted. (Pensees)

Why is it, if finding our purpose for being is so central to our being, that do we avoid it through distractions? Pascal wrote:

• If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from it. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. (Pensees)

Well, isn’t the meaning of life and the comfort that it is supposed to bring discoverable? Not according to the late British skeptic and philosopher David Hume:

• Most unfortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature [pleasure] herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bend of mind, or by some avocation and lively impression of my senses, which obliterates all these chimeras. I drive, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends…(Treatise of Human Nature)

Even the brilliant Hume could not figure life out. Therefore, he resorted to sensual pleasures.

However, if Hume couldn’t figure life out, what hope have we? Perhaps Hume started with the wrong assumption or paradigm. It’s like starting with the wrong button. Every subsequent button will be misplaced until we go back to the beginning, but are we willing to?

Well, what is Hume’s misplaced initial button – the button which had become his guarded and cherished bedrock? Atheist Stephen Knight, host of the Godless Spellchecker podcast, acknowledged that, without God, “Oblivion looms”:

• “When we reject the imagined supernatural meaning from our existence, what we’re left with is far from a consolation prize. Sure, it’ll be messy at times, sometimes joyous, sometimes miserable, but it’s all we’ll ever know. And it’s ours. We invent comforting lies to distract us from one simple truth: Oblivion looms. So, what are you going to do about it?”

What is the “comforting lie” to which Knight alludes? Heaven, an afterlife! But perhaps the atheist also has his comforting lie – an oblivion where he will not be judged, which allows him to live in the way he wants, at least for now.

Why would anyone prefer oblivion above the possibility of finding God? The atheist and author of the Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, explained his rejection of the Christian faith:

• I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning [and moral absolutes]; consequently assumed that it had none…We don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless. (Ends and Mean)

Huxley was right. Meaninglessness is a choice of the wrong initial button and not a lack of intelligence or evidence. But why would anyone make such a choice? Jesus explained:

• And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

Consequently, meaninglessness and the pursuit of diversion are the costs for rejecting the light – the choice we make.

Ken Wilbur, Albert Einstein, and World-Centrism

What is ethical? - Compassion that stops at our own household or a compassion that embraces the entirety of nature? Albert Einstein associates a self-centered and myopic compassion with an “optical illusion of …consciousness,” ethical “delusion” and “prison”:

• A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated form the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Why should we widen “our circle of compassion?” Einstein insists that ethics restricted to “personal desires” is “delusion,” a failure to see reality as it truly is. Indeed, the concept of “delusion” suggests that there is a condition of “non-delusion,” a higher truth that trumps and transcends a narrow preoccupation with our needs and comforts. However, if this is the case, what is the basis of this higher moral reality, and how do we know that we are actually tapping into it? Perhaps instead, the highest truth is nothing more than the survival-of-the-fittest – me and my genes first! How can I be sure that this represents “delusion?”

New Age guru Ken Wilbur expresses Einstein’s ethics in terms of the stages of “moral development”:

• As we look at infants at birth, they have not yet been socialized into the culture’s ethics and conventions. This is called the pre-conventional stage. It is also called egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely self absorbed. But as young children begin to learn their culture’s rules and norms, they grow into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude care and concern for those not of one’s group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also called world-centric.

Even if Wilbur is correct about the stages, why should the final stage – world-centrism – represent an ethical improvement over the former stages? The later isn’t necessarily the best, no more than senility is an improvement over adolescence. Perhaps the first two stages might contribute more positively to the evolution of the human race? If there are no universal, immutable, and authoritative moral absolutes – fixed standards of judgment – who can say that self-fixation or the survival-of-the-fittest is morally wrong?

If world-centrism represents a positive step in “moral development,” is there a rationale for this judgment? Perhaps it’s better for our families to be centered upon their immediate needs? And perhaps our purported concerns about the world are simply the reflection of our own psychological need to demonstrate our moral superiority over those of the first two stages? I can’t help thinking of world-centric communism. While expressing flowery idealistic concerns about the world did more to decimate the world than had any other philosophy.

Usually, world-centrism is erroneously defended by pragmatic appeals to its possible benefits for the entire world. Appeals are made to protecting the environment and limiting warfare, starvation and disease worldwide.

However, this argumentation secretly assumes the very thing that it is trying to prove – that “warfare, starvation and disease” are evils, which need to be eradicated or at least reduced. The argumentation fails to answer what makes these things or anything “evil.” Consequently, pragmatic argumentation is deceptive. It rejects the need for transcendent moral absolutes, while it secretly appeals to them and their condemnation of certain “evils.”

There is no way that pragmatic considerations (science, for example) by themselves can coherently call for a moral response. As the skeptic and philosopher David Hume observed, we cannot logically go from what “is” (pragmatism and science) to what “ought to be” (morality). They are separated by an impassable God-created gulf.

Einstein insists that because of “delusion,” the self-centered are missing a vital piece in the puzzle. However, how does Einstein know that they are deluded? We can’t make such a judgment unless we are certain about a fixed moral reality, transcendent moral absolutes – truths that transcend my myopic needs - and an embrace of the Creator, Sustainer and Enforcer of these absolutes. Without this Creator, there can be no basis for transcendent moral absolutes – the very thing needed to declare “world-centrism” superior to “self-centrism.” Without this Creator and His moral absolutes, no one can tell me that their morality is any bit superior to my own. We are left with nothing more than molecules-in-motion.

Without this higher standard, there is no basis to judge one action as better than another. It would be like a math teacher grading math exams without answers that are absolutely correct. Trying to do so without this absolute standard would be disingenuous.

Some might try to appeal to our common moral intuitions as a basis to make such judgments. However, this just passes the buck to another insubstantial source. The question still remains:

• Why should I trust my moral intuitions as an authoritative basis to judge, especially in view of the fact that my feelings change and are largely a reflection of my culture and upbringing? What makes them any more authoritative than the intuitions of the murderer?

Indeed, most of us feel that we are our neighbor’s keeper, but if this feeling is merely a chemical-electrical cerebral reaction, why then heed it? Is there any connection between feeling and moral truth? Not if a superior Being hasn’t designed this glorious connection!

Consequently, I am world-centric because God – the unchanging, all-wise and loving Source of all truth - is world-centric. Jesus taught that we should regard everyone as our “neighbor” and treat them accordingly. This is where the buck stops –absolutely!