Forever Seeking

According to Andrew Sullivan, I have a religion.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

I have to admit that I find this interesting. After all, I don't really understand what it means for life to have "meaning," unless we're talking about the entry for "life" in the dictionary.

In the very beginning of his piece, Mr. Sullivan says: "It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being." Later, he notes "We are a meaning-seeking species."

Perhaps, if I sat down with Mr. Sullivan, which is unlikely ever to happen, we would come to a shared understanding, some sort of accommodation that would reveal his understanding that I am seeking meaning, and my understanding that I am not, to be merely a difference in how we define certain activities. But there are other possibilities. One is that I am seeking meaning in the way that he defines it, and thus, I would fit his definition of religious. The other is that I am not, and I would then fall into his definition of non-religious. (I suspect what would actually happen is that I would find that he has simply decreed that everyone is seeking meaning by defining something basic, such as the very state of being a living human being, into meaning-seeking; rendering it a tautology. And that he, on the other hand, would decide that I desperately want to find meaning, but am in denial.)

But if I did fall into his understanding of not seeking meaning, would I then cease, in his eyes, to be human? Does the fact that we are a meaning-seeking species, to use his formulation mean that each of us must necessarily and recognizably seek meaning?

Because how does an infant seek meaning? How does a person who has other, more pressing day-to-day concerns that the alleged meaning of life seek that meaning?

I am always dubious of people stating that "to be human is to do [X]," because it seems unwise to assert that one knows the minds for billions of other people. And it leads to a point where one is trapped into either insisting that other people don't know themselves or seeking to deny their humanity. Now, Mr. Sullivan gets around this somewhat by positing that this "search for meaning" is encoded into our genome.

Which is not unreasonable. But in order for that to hold, it would have to be encoded into something that makes life itself viable. They would have to be attached in a very deep biological level. Otherwise, a simple mutation could remove it. And unless that mutation triggered something so catastrophic that it rendered the person sterile (or effectively so) it would be passed on to their offspring. You could make the point that a person who carried the gene to search for meaning would be more successful in one of Darwin's three conflicts (intraspecies, interspecies and versus environment) than not. And some people would say that the rise of religious observance and its high rate of uptake proves that it does. But you could also make the point that it's an artifact of culture; I, of course, suspect the latter, but I'm not a geneticist.

In the end, Mr. Sullivan's point seems to be that Christianity Good, Lacking Christianity Bad. I can understand the idea that what the Cult of Trump and Social Justice Warriors have in common is a lack of the "wisdom and culture and restraint" that Mr. Sullivan finds in Christianity. (But surely not only Christianity exhibits these traits?) There is the common refrain that to not have religion, to not have a "place of refuge, no spiritual safe space from which to gain perspective, no God to turn to" in a time of crisis is to be adrift in a crisis, "coasting along on materialism." I call B.S. Human beings can be strong without recourse to an invisible, and often disapproving deity. They prove it every day.