Ignorance is Bliss

In last week’s Campus, Alex Newhouse ’17 wrote an opinion piece, “Confronting Life’s Big Questions,” in which he issued a plea for greater enthusiasm and openness, especially from friends, in discussing “vulnerabilities and those deep, philosophical fears.” In effect, he wants to talk about the meaning of life. Well, he and I aren’t quite friends, but I’m willing to answer his call. The strict limit of word count on such an ambitious undertaking unfortunately leaves little room for nuance. (Good thing then that I generally shy away from nuance anyways). First we’ll have to slog through some assumptions before we get to the irredeemable conflict between the meaninglessness of life and our desire for something more.

The goal of philosophy is to be constructed in such a way as to be free of contradictions. To go about this, we turn to reality, because it is inherently free of contradictions. If it were otherwise, it simply wouldn’t exist. And it is science that tells us what reality is. For this reason, scientific knowledge has immense implications for philosophy. Physics tells us that everything is “atoms and void” and nothing more; biology describes life.

What is man? We are endurance running primates evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Two conflicting traits distinguish us: our capacity for reasoning and our social nature. In a talk last spring, Harvey Mansfield explored this dichotomy. Our reason, aided by a very useful invention—math—discovers scientific knowledge. Then there are the humanities, or “non-science”; it is these emotions, our irrationality, that constitute the basis of our social nature. Together, these two developments have enabled Homo sapiens to conquer the planet.

Science, our reason, informs us of the emptiness of the universe. Evolution is just the competition among replicating genes, to which we are nothing more than temporary, programmed vehicles. We inhabit a pale-blue dot, a mere “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”, in a galaxy among billions. Our lives, absent any privileged role in the cosmos, are meaningless.

But our emotions reject and rebel against this truth. Our social nature evolved because it resolves the classic economic problem, the prisoners’ dilemma. In a group, if everyone cooperates, everyone is better off.  But from the individual’s perspective, it’s more profitable to be a free-rider, to take without giving. When everyone behaves rationally as such, everyone suffers. We can solve this with the introduction of a mediating third-party, a government that monopolizes force and uses it to arbitrate conflict. But that is an artificial solution. Instead, nature made us imperfectly rational. We have faith, an affirmative belief despite contrary evidence, in other humans. We do the right thing even when no one is watching. We would feel bad otherwise and expect others to do the same. And so, we can cooperate spontaneously and socialize. These social bonds are sustained through emotions. We behave irrationally and yet we all benefit. To behave irrationally is now rational. To be selfless is to be selfish.

This evolutionary altruism allows for cooperation among genetic relatives, but humans take things a step further. We extend our cooperation to greater numbers of individuals, including strangers, through the use of ideas. The best means of making cooperation propitious among individuals is to coax them into believing that their actions carry moral significance in some grand scheme. We all lie to ourselves. We construct grand, compelling myths. These include religion and human rights, all conceptions of morality. But, because we all believe the lie, it, in a sense, becomes true. Human history is the chronicle of massive self-delusions. We seek to invent our own truth.

How do we reconcile empty truth with yearning feeling? How can we have a meaningful life in the face of nothingness? In other words, why do we not kill ourselves? Camus rightly declared that “there is but one truly serious philosophical question and that is suicide.” He considers three responses. First is physical suicide; end man, and end the longing. Second is philosophical suicide; take a leap of faith that there is meaning. But these are, respectively, a rejection of inherent freedom and of truth. He proposes a third response: choose to live in the face of this absurd reality; indeed, embrace it. Live this paradox of life. Live as if there is meaning but never reject its meaninglessness. I can propose a similar recommendation.

O wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?

Passion and reason, self-division cause.

 

Mustapha (1609)—Fulke Greville

We know that there is no meaning, but we feel that there is more. Our constructed realities aim to fill the God-shaped vacuum within us all. However, objective reality creeps in on our fantasies and threatens to vitiate the whole project. So, how can we live? Well, simply put, we live by seeking distractions. That is, we live by occupying our lives with fictions that can distract us from truth. We can watch American Ninja Warrior, or go to Syria and fight for ISIS or work as a custodian in a hospital. These distractions are most potent when imbued with some sense of a greater meaning. And so, more than anything, we seek to hang out with friends and family, for they are the best distraction. Because the intensity of socialization is commensurate with the intensity of fulfillment, the ultimate distracting emotion—the apotheosis of our sociality—is love. (Please pardon the perilous proximity to bathos). So I guess it’s true that we live to love.

And so, when we feel a lack of love—that is, when we feel lonely, the antithesis of our sociality; loneliness is the most contradictory feeling vis-à-vis our social nature and so creates the most profound inner tension—our distractions feel insufficient. Combined with adversity that actively reminds us of meaninglessness, the incessant knocking of truth cannot be ignored, and we opt for suicide. This doesn’t happen in a moment of overheated passion, but after a long struggle; when things don’t, as people promise, get better, we pine away into despondency, having acknowledged that it’s not a winnable fight. Above all, suicide is a “crime of loneliness.”

How do we go about finding distractions? Well, do what Viktor Frankl said: dereflect; stop ceaselessly dwelling on the grand questions, and just occupy your life. “It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.” I’m not really saying much. Because my ideas are so general, so all-encompassing—all of life can be subsumed under the notion of distraction—they are, in a sense, empty and inconsequential. But this perspective affirms the futility of confronting life’s big questions. Thinking about the meaning of life is a Sisyphean and isolating endeavor. Don’t try to be brilliant; “brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.” Don’t live for the sake of realizing some ultimate goal, but just to get through each day. We need to acknowledge the emptiness; okay, that’s just how life is, so distract yourself from that. This process will repeat itself throughout life, as the truth approaches and recedes into and out of our thoughts, but distract yourself until death, at which time the program will terminate and the neurons will stop firing.

The second season of Gotham started three weeks ago. At the end of the first episode, we see a letter written by Thomas Wayne for his son. He tells him: “You can’t have both happiness and the truth. You have to choose.” Truth lies in the realm of reason, the absence of feeling. There can be no reconciling the fundamental incompatibility of truth with feeling, for “we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains.”