Bumping into Reality
A meditation on the discovery of meaning
As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
— Anthony de Mello, S.J., Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality
I was a psychology major in college, and spent a period of time obsessed with the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. It was my first real intellectual pursuit, inspired by the teaching of a professor. Skinner wrote extensively on the science of human behavior, but his ideas went beyond the science. He wrote philosophical treatises on free will and human dignity. Both notions he saw as fictional, or besides the point. Skinner questioned the accepted American notion that individual will was the driver of a person’s destiny. He aimed to better humanity by perfecting human systems of reward and punishment.
I still find Skinner’s research to be greatly important, and under-appreciated, but I no longer subscribe to his ideas on human freedom. I believe there is a ghost in the machine.
My first job out of college was teaching psychology and coaching basketball at a Jesuit high school in southern California. These pursuits somehow got overshadowed by a new pursuit. After three years of teaching, I left to go study theology in graduate school. I was interested in spirituality in general, and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola in particular.
In graduate school, I wanted to gain a clearer sense of purpose. That's not what happened. While my experience was interesting and valuable in many ways, the pursuit of clarity backfired in the sense that I wound up in a state of existential confusion. It was probably just a coincidence that this personal crisis occurred during my studies. I don’t know. It was bittersweet.
So, after a five year jaunt in California, I moved back to Phoenix to settle down in the secular world. In a detached sort of way, I still find meaning in the ideas we pondered in graduate school.
For example, the ideas of Peter Maurin — counterpart of Dorothy Day and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement — who talked about creating a society “where it was easier for people to be good.”
Maurin advocated for farming cooperatives, where intellectuals would learn to farm, and farmers would study ideas. He advocated for personalism. In Day’s words,
Peter Maurin’s teaching was that just as each one of us is responsible for the ills of the world, so too each one of us has freedom to choose to work in “the little way” for our brother.
He organized roundtable discussions for the “clarification of thought.” He wrote a series of “easy essays” to explain his views in simple, poetic writings.
His religiosity drove his actions, so it's not easy to fit him into an ideological category.
Dr. Martin Luther King was similarly driven. He said in a speech at Arizona State University:
For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure.
There is a constant tension, in human life, between structure and spirit. Our cultural and political institutions reflect these tensions.
The Constitution, for example, sets out the parameters of government, but on the ground level much is left to interpretation. The essence of it depends ultimately on the virtues of the individuals in power. If oaths of office mean nothing to these individuals, then the system collapses. If there is no restraint — anywhere — in our politics, then the system collapses.
When it comes to education, technocratic structures are barricading curious minds. The word inspiration is nowhere to be found in our public school structures. How can it? There is no proper measurement tool that can capture it.
Are we making it easy for people to be virtuous members of our society? Are we inspiring people to be the best versions of themselves?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I never did think too deeply on the “pursuit of happiness” part of this decree until I read this book by Andrew Sullivan. Now I agree with Sullivan that this pursuit is crucial to the American project.
First of all, pursuit is constant. It’s never fully accomplished. It’s restless. It’s a journey.
Second, happiness is immaterial. It can’t be purchased. It can’t be measured or codified. It transcends and resists technocratic control.
It’s something that can’t be solved by the political system.
Governments can certainly cause misery and become an obstacle to human happiness.
But the best government can do, positively, is to ensure the conditions for which humans can pursue their own happiness.
This is the radical heart of the American project.
Andrew Sullivan was on C-SPAN in 1993, and a phone caller asked a question about MTV. The caller was concerned that MTV was promoting materialism and anti-social attitudes, and wanted to know what the panelists thought about it.
Sullivan’s answer deals with a concept that his publication at the time had referred to as the “politics of meaning.” He clarifies that his rejection of the politics of meaning is not meant to disparage the concept of meaning itself.
You know, all of us live our lives with grave self doubt and with existential angst, and I think simply saying that politics or some slogan or some set of policies is going to resolve the great aching of the human heart and human soul is something that we don’t want to peddle. I think life is harder than that.
He suggests the angst on MTV is a manifestation of young people abandoning the utopian dreams of the prior generation. If it fosters a more realistic worldview, maybe it can be healthy.
Andrew Sullivan is another person who is hard to categorize. He is a conservative who was on the forefront of advocacy for gay marriage and was the first national writer to endorse the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. He was an early and enthusiastic cheerleader for the Iraq War, but upon watching the terrible outcomes, he turned on it and became one of its fiercest critics. He is one of the few strong advocates for the Iraq War who took pause and reflected deeply on his error. In his penitence, he compiled a free e-book of his Iraq writings titled I Was Wrong, and then reworked his entire thinking on conservatism in a book called The Conservative Soul.
In certain ideological circles, Sullivan is taboo. Off limits. He has embarked on a crusade against woke progressivism. Additionally, he made a controversial decision early in his career as a magazine editor to publish an excerpt and analysis of the research of Charles Murray, who tried to find a link between IQ and race. Sullivan claimed he was airing a debate. His critics saw him as legitimizing Murray’s research.
Barack Obama, when he was a civil rights lawyer and writer in 1994, weighed in on NPR with a scathing review of Murray’s research. He called it “dubious science” and said it was aimed at getting rid of public assistance to poor minority communities. Obama argued simultaneously for community self-responsibility and targeted investments in the form of adequate healthcare, well-funded and innovative schools, and good jobs that could provide “structure and dignity to people’s lives.”
… in the short run, such ladders of opportunity are going to cost more, not less, than either welfare or affirmative action. But, in the long run, our investment should pay off handsomely. That we fail to make this investment is just plain stupid. It's not the result of an intellectual deficit. It's the result of a moral deficit.
The point here is not to rehash controversy or defend Sullivan’s views on any particular issue, but rather to celebrate a society that allows for fierce debate, and is better for it. In a free society, better ideas can rise to the surface.
The magazines of the 1990s gave way to the blogosphere of the 2000s, which gave way to the close-minded rancor of the social media era. There’s reason to believe that public discourse today is fundamentally (and uniquely) flawed because of social media, but maybe there’s still hope for better platforms and better discourse.
Maybe there’s still hope for a revival of civic virtue in America.
Andrew Sullivan’s writing is important — not because of his impeccable judgement, but because of the tenacity of his pursuits. He has pushed boundaries, has arguably crossed boundaries. He has also modeled and advocated epistemic humility. His current publication features weekly reader dissents, where he responds to even the most brutal critiques of his views.
The latest collection of his writings, Out on a Limb, includes a promotional blurb from a writer who is among Sullivan’s harshest critics, and by any categorization is an ideological foe:
Andrew has never been a prophet, so much as a joyous heretic. Andrew taught me that you do not have to pretend to be smarter than you are. . . . When I read Andrew, I generally thought he was dedicated to the work of being honest. I did not think he was always honest. I don’t think anyone can be. But I thought he held ‘honesty’ as a standard—something that can’t be said of the large number of charlatans in this business.
— Ta Nehisi Coates
We’re human beings. We’re never going to get perfect clarity, or complete honesty, or full happiness. We’re never going to fully understand the meaning of life.
That’s ok.
This recognition can be freeing. We are free to pursue, free to discover, and to keep discovering.
Northern Arizona, from the early summer of 2021. Haze of a wildfire illuminates the sunset.