This Life

Throughout most of history, people, especially the authorities in human collectives, believed that they knew the truth. Period. They had no doubts, and they did not hesitate to force the truth on others. Indeed, they often considered deviations from that truth to be punishable by death. Romans, for example, persecuted and executed Christians for refusing to worship the Roman gods. 

When Christianity took over Europe, true to its Roman heritage, it too punished dissenters. Such certitude of faith had its benefits. In Western Europe, for example, a shared religious culture – including Latin as a common language among Europe’s elites – united the continent in a way that kings could not. Universities were founded. Some of history’s greatest thinkers applied subtle and disciplined reasoning to deepen and elaborate the faith that sustained their world.  A centuries-long aesthetic tsunami swept over Europe and produced beautiful buildings, paintings, sculptures, and music that dwarf any other period of human history.  

Reflected in the poetry of Dante and the philosophy of Aquinas, the Middle Ages was the consummate integration of faith and reason. As reason began to dominate faith, however, the medieval world evolved into the Renaissance, then the Reformation, and finally the Enlightenment and modern science. 

For science, truth is provisional, not certain. Scientific “truth” is the expression of a process not an end. Liberated from religious dogma, science created new technologies that revolutionized transportation, industry, agriculture, health, and warfare. As the industrial revolution took hold, reason came to replace faith, and a religious culture gradually transformed into a commercial, democratized culture, which, one might say, worshiped reason and material advancement. 

This emerging culture was anti-authoritarian, initially in philosophy and religion, then in politics, and finally in the wider culture. Artistic styles of the early 20th century, for example, were radically unlike anything in history. People celebrated the liberation of the individual from the constraints of religion, government, society, and even family.

The price of individualism and openness was a loss of certitude. I cannot be free if the people around me are not also free. And if all people are free, there will be much disagreement. Truth as certain knowledge to which all assent cannot survive in a climate of freedom and openness. In the twentieth century, then, truth became a chimera. People called this change “postmodernism.”

Thus, an Age of Uncertainty replaced The Age of Reason, which had supplanted the Age of Faith.

Uncertainty is not the same as doubt. One who doubts may still aspire to certitude by working through and dispelling one’s doubts. Uncertainty, as I use the term here, is an epistemological ground, something built into the structure of reality, or at least of perceived human reality. This is part of the reason why, as I argued in my essay on consciousness, we do not know things in themselves and why even our most profound experiences can fool us. We know only shadows of the things in themselves, which, if God exists, are utterly dependent upon and yoked to Him for their existence. 

Hence, whether one argues for God or against God, one can never be certain. For a large majority of us deep faith cannot remove uncertainty among the intellectually honest – at least not in this world. 

Living with uncertainty can be difficult. Some people overcompensate by blindly and irrationally pursuing a monstrous pseudo-certitude, such as the twentieth century’s murderously evil faiths of fascism and communism. Some people embrace a nihilism that vengefully mocks and degrades all that others hold dear. Hedonism captures many. Some people retreat to irrational subjectivism and delusional systems of faith, such as in cults or certain social movements. Others, who pursue more rationally coherent faiths, create a psychological pseudo-certainty through the diligent pursuit of intellectual and spiritual disciplines, and the avoidance of threatening ideas. And some strive simply to live, to make the best of what an indifferent, uncertain, and meaningless universe has handed them.

Our world emerged from the ambitions of the latter group. We have not eliminated uncertainty; we have adapted to it. Our civilization deals with uncertainty by aiming low, by avoiding the high aspirations and inevitable disappointments of earlier ages. The social planners who created our civilization used science and technology, including the technologies of psycho-social influence, to bring material prosperity and social stability to the world. But since a life cannot be built on prosperity and stability alone, the planners also had to address the question of happiness.

When their needs for material comfort and security are met, people will pursue happiness in different ways. A relatively small number will look inward for happiness and may aim high, seeking spiritual or moral meaning. Unfortunately, the incertitude that undergirds the modern world often thwarts such high aspirations, so only a small number succeed. The search for meaning too often degenerates into solipsistic dilettantism or a closed cultic dynamic centered on an arrogant narcissist claiming a special revelation.

Fortunately for the social engineers, most people will aim low and seek happiness in sex, sports, social activities, consumer goods, entertainment, and social status. The latter is more foundational than most of us realize, in part because hierarchy is built into our evolutionary DNA. That is why most civilizations have been authoritarian, with kings and queens or dictators or oligarchs. The rise of democracy in the 18th century was an historical aberration that clashed with the impulse to form a status hierarchy. The designers of our world, however, figured out how to reconcile and stabilize the tension between democracy and DNA. They forged a sham democracy.

Realizing that stability requires conformity, the social planners cleverly employed the information industries to drive home a messaging drumbeat that became a staple early in the 21st century: virtuous, enlightened people support whatever ideas, values, entertainments, or activities are in vogue (i.e., what the social engineers want to promote through the information industry), while benighted, unsophisticated, “bad”  people oppose them. Thus, a large majority of citizens achieves a satisfying level of social status, a tribal pride so to speak, merely by conforming to the enlightened, virtuous herd and denigrating threatening dissenters, whose numbers and pernicious influence are always exaggerated to inflate the status value of conformity and compliance. In the second half of the 21st century, the “heretics” are VROWS (the “virtual reality cows” who use their minimum income to live cheaply in VROW cooperatives where they are sterilized and escape into nonstop virtual fantasy entertainment) and several million renegades living off-grid in the wilderness areas of the world. The social engineers tolerate and to a degree support these dissidents because repeatedly denigrating them implicitly confers social status on those who conform and comply. The in-group shines more brightly when there is an out-group to malign.

Moreover, being a valued member of the herd earns social credit with which to purchase the pleasures that keep the mind occupied. This is the economic driver that sustains our world’s hierarchical system, the existence of which must always be denied as we pay homage to our bogus democracy. The VROWS and off-grid renegades are the maligned outcasts whose disrepute adds a comparative luster to the worker class (the technicians who make things run), the academic class (those who fix the kinks in the system, teach its workers, and develop new technologies), and the managerial class (those who run the global megacorporations that are the economic power centers sustaining the entire social system). The top group consists of several dozen oligarchs who control enough corporate stock to rule from the shadows. The oligarchs make the big decisions. The only real democracy exists among the oligarchs. Everywhere else democracy is fake.

Although I disdain this covertly hierarchical system, I grudgingly respect it. The system works. If my belief in a God who confers objective value on the world is false, then I am just another renegade railing against the apex of human social organization, a system in harmony with the human nature that evolution shaped. If I am wrong about God, I should accept the gray worldlines of human beings seeking only to maximize pleasure – whether sensual, escapist, intellectual, relational, aesthetic, or pseudo-spiritual – in a social system structured to provide the maximum pleasure to the maximum number.

Since, however, I believe there is more to life than atoms and the void, I must speak out against a society that aims low. I condemn the system that indoctrinates youth to strive only to do their jobs and have fun. Even though I am only 49, I have seen a marked intellectual deterioration in the generations of students I have taught and advised. Today’s students are at least as intelligent and competent as my fellow students in the late 2030s. They are nonetheless dull in comparison, not because they are unable to answer questions, but because the questions that concern them are so predictable and insignificant. They are a herd of sheep with high IQs. Their sense of wonder seems to culminate at “that’s interesting.” Their natural curiosity is stunted by the conditioned reflex to scan the herd to determine what is acceptable. And their intellectual drive is sapped an abundance of pleasures.

They are capable of so much more! But they aim so low! They are like talented pianists who play ditties instead of Beethoven. To them beauty is merely a product to consume, not a portal revealing a higher state of being. They stroll, for example, through the Boston Museum of Fine Art gazing briefly at one painting and then another, much like a person rolling a cart through a grocery store looks first at the lettuce, then at eggs, and lastly at the tabloids by the checkout area. 

I must challenge a world that seeks no more from life than a succession of engaging and satisfying present moments. I must point boldly toward the God whom I may only dimly perceive, but who nevertheless shines brightly even in the fogginess of my mind. So, I rage against the system that blasphemes the sacred, sometimes through mockery, but more often through indifference, even when the sacred stands before us full of radiance and splendor. People in our rich, safe, and happy world are like shades in Dante’s Limbo. They don’t suffer. They converse.  They laugh. They sometimes escape into VR. They are content. They are also gray and drab and barren. It is no surprise, then, that each generation seems less inclined to have children than the generation before. If the machines do not terminate us, perhaps humanity will put an end to itself, not through violence, but through lack of interest.

OK, so I reject our “happy” world. What is my alternative? How should we live?

Let us begin by remembering that the Age of Uncertainty cuts both ways. Our world readily dismisses an experience of the transcendent as an atavistic evolutionary heritage or an aberration of brain circuitry. Because so many of us have been conditioned to scan the herd to determine what we are expected to value and believe, we may accept that explanation unthinkingly and disregard our own experience of the transcendent. But such explanations may in fact entail more uncertainty than the belief that there is something substantial in the beyond that calls to us, that the sacred transcendent may be more real than what we call “matter.”

Ironically, our no-god world implicitly acknowledges the beyond through its support of the many contradictions between the behavior of people and the no-god, materialist philosophy that ostensibly undergirds the supposed pinnacle of human civilization. Stories of heroism, of good triumphing over evil, of love winning out over hate are staples of virtual fantasy, whether for VROWs or members of the herd. The educational system implicitly teaches youth that the values of equality, social justice, and tolerance are “true,” not accidental and arbitrary consequences of our biological and social evolution. Indeed, some of the most enduring fantasy themes describe the heroic sacrifice of individuals who fight for the poor, the marginalized, the weak. 

But such self-sacrifice is not rational in a no-god world. In the early part of the last century, for example, atheist communists would take up arms and sacrifice themselves for the “cause,” even though the triumph of that cause was historically inevitable according to Marxist dogma. Why did these atheists sacrifice their lives? The only rational explanation for such patently irrational behavior was that the cause had taken on a sacred aura. The cause demanded adherence to a morality calling people to a transcendent beyond that was more real than atoms and the void.

We are not surprised to discover that ants will sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony. Ants have tiny brains and are ruled by instinct. But humans can reason. Humans can question the attenuated instincts that struggle to control their behavior. During the Russian revolution, for example, a Bolshevik soldier could have said, “Wait a minute. There is no God. There is no objective morality. There is only the economic determinism that will make the classless Marxist society come to pass whether I live or die. So why should I die? The rational thing for me to do is flee!” And yet so few did flee. They died for the “cause.” They answered a call from the beyond whose existence they denied.

Thus, my first piece of advice on how to live is not to dismiss or be ashamed of the transcendent stirrings within us. Maybe they are illusions. But if even people in our atheistic world can behave as though they are true, these stirrings may be intimations of a reality greater than what we perceive through our senses. Uncertainty cuts both ways.

Obviously, if you have no transcendent stirrings, if you are content in your gray worldline, nothing I say will move you. We are like two persons, one born congenitally blind, the other congenitally deaf. One can never know what it means to see, while the other can never know what it means to hear. Where the two people share experiences, e.g., the humor in a joke that the deaf one reads and the blind one hears, they may experience a bit of fellowship. But Beethoven will never move the deaf person, and Michelangelo will never move the blind.

Thus, my words are directed at those who have experienced intimations of something beyond. Fortunately, our sham democracy ostensibly promotes values such as free speech and tolerance, even as it encourages conformity. Thus, those of us willing to stand up against the conformist pressures can usually count on at least a grudging tolerance of our heterodox views, although censorship may limit our potential audience. Our world is stunted, but it is not all bad, at least not yet.

Thus far in my challenge to the herd, I’ve called repeatedly for a return to God. But to what God? The impersonal God of Advaita Hinduism? The God of Islam? The pre-Jesus God of Judaism? The trinitarian God of Christianity? Some other notion of God?

Although I am a Christian, I have been purposely vague for two reasons. First, I speak primarily to those raised in this secular world who have no religion but sense or are at least open to the notion of a reality beyond atoms and the void. For them, to leap from no-God to some kind of God is challenge enough. Second, I believe that all religions, though technically tolerated, are in fact under siege and must find common ground to resist the strong and steady pressure to conform to the secular herd. For decades the percentage of religious believers has decreased with each generation. This is not a time to debate theological details. This is a time to seek solidarity.

That common ground is the sense of the holy, the sacred, the transcendent, and the recognition that, however we conceive of God, He is so much more than we can possibly grasp. With this assumption in mind, I look favorably upon all religions and religious rituals that help individuals make autonomous connections to the beyond. I emphasize “autonomous” to distinguish religions that respect the individual from those that manipulate and exploit individuals to advance the goals of the collective or the leader. To look favorably on a religious perspective does not mean that I agree with its belief system, merely that I approve of its respect for free will and for conscience.

Free will enables autonomous humans to choose to turn toward the light or toward the darkness. What do I mean by “free will,” “light,” and “darkness”?

Free will refers to choices that emerge from the totality of one’s being, one’s Self, not merely one’s self-conscious “I.” Thus, although unconscious factors may influence my choice, “my” unconscious is part of “me,” part of my Self. External factors, such as socialization or even indoctrination, may also influence my choices. But these factors  affect my behavior because they are internalized and, therefore, are part of me, part of my Self. Unconscious factors alone do not determine my choices. Neither does the mysterious “I” alone determine my choices. The “I” reveals, and may articulate, a choice by acting at the behest of the mysterious Self, which is the source of the choice, which “speaks” the choice, as the Word “spoke” creation into existence. 

In the Christian view the Self is sinful. It is fragmented and disorganized, and therefore inclined to make poor choices. Grace is God calling the disordered Self to move in the direction of purity and perfection. The Self freely makes good choices to the extent that it heeds God’s call. 

Turning toward the light means directing our will and attention toward God and the Love, Goodness, Beauty, and Truth that emanate from Him, even if we do not explicitly believe in Him. Thus, one does not have to be formally religious to turn toward the light. Albert Einstein, for example, called himself a religious nonbeliever and made the pursuit of truth his life’s work. He tellingly said: “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”

Turning toward the light, toward truth, then, necessitates humility and reverence. The holy and transcendent God is so much greater than we can imagine. If our gaze is fixed on God, each moment and each thing that we experience calls us to praise and to thank Him. That is why some say grace before meals. That is why orthodox Jews may say a special blessing, a bracha, upon seeing lightning, for example. When God’s light fills us, we realize that everything is sacred at its core, for God immanent sustains everything in our world. 

God’s love points us to the light. When, in our imperfect way, we try to share God’s love with others, we wish them well, we wish that they too will turn toward the light, however depraved they may be. Love, then, is not approval. Love is a heartfelt invitation to turn toward or share in the light of God. To love thy neighbor as thyself is not to say “you’re ok as you are” or “I have warm feelings for you.” Rather love says, “I will good for you. Come, let us look to the light together, so we can become better than we are.”

Turning toward darkness is turning our back toward the light. We block the light with our Self and direct our will and attention toward the shadow of our selfishness – the opposite of the self-sacrificing love of the cross. When we turn toward the dark, we focus on satisfying our self-centered wants. This turning away from God and toward the self can be as varied as the people who worship themselves. That variety, however, is succinctly subsumed by the old concept of the seven deadly sins: sloth, anger, gluttony, envy, lust, avarice, and pride. 

In many ways, pride is the central sin. As Satan said in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a great book that few people today have even heard of, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” When we turn toward the dark, then, we resent God. We resent that he calls us to control our sinful urges, that he calls us to change, that he calls us to holiness. We resent that he makes the rules and not us. We want to be Him, but we are not. If our resentment builds to a crescendo, we burn with envy, and we hate His creation because we did not make it and cannot control it. That is why turning toward the dark so often entails destruction and death, the opposite of the reverent gratitude felt by those who turn toward the light.

Between the darkness and the light is the self that directs its will and attention not on the light, nor on the darkness, but on itself and its world. I speak of the self that makes gray worldlines because it does not believe in God and, therefore, feels neither resentment toward God nor a revengeful desire to destroy the things He created. Gray selves neither revere nor despise creation; they enjoy it. They seek comfort, stability, and pleasure. Gray selves are not bad, as are people whose will and attention are directed at the darkness of evil. Gray selves can be affectionate, kind, social, humorous, compassionate, loving, and generous. Gray selves are often “good people.” They may demonstrate moral virtues, such as the classic virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, humility, and patience. Because of their focus on self and world, however, they do not manifest the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which pertain to one’s relationship with God. Gray selves live in a horizontal world; they rarely look up at the light or down at the darkness. Gray selves shine with the dim light of this world of stability, prosperity, and pleasure. They do not shine with the bright light of the transcendent.

Again, I hear my atheist friends scoffing: “So what! Your so-called ‘bright light of the transcendent’ is nothing more than a manic exaggeration of what you call the ‘dim light of this world,’ fueled by the delusion that death isn’t the end. The people of this world whom you denounce show more respect and kindness toward one another and care more for animal welfare and the natural world than any religious civilization of the past. Maybe we don’t make things with the soaring beauty of Gothic cathedrals, but neither do we dawdle in prayer while people starve, permit children to live in abject poverty, force a tiger to spend his life in a cage no bigger than his body, or beat a horse near to death as he struggles to pull a plow through rocky soil. I’ll take our ‘gray’ world any day over the so-called shining transcendence of religious civilizations that burned heretics or praised women who committed suttee or put to the sword conquered people who wouldn’t convert to the conquerors’ religion.” 

My atheist friends’ critique is correct insofar as it compares today’s world with the past. However, the critique neglects to acknowledge that virtually all that is good about today’s world came about because religious people in the past pursued justice, goodness, and truth. They fought against the sins of their supposedly religious civilizations. Religious people led the abolitionist movement to end slavery. Until the modern era, most hospitals were run by religions. Even at the beginning of this century, nearly a quarter of the hospitals in the world were Catholic institutions. The leaders of the civil rights movement in 20th century America were religious. The early advocates of animal protection were religious. Sinful humans wearing the mantle of religion, not religion itself, have committed the atrocities to which my atheist friends can rightly point as arguments in favor of today’s world.  

The accumulated moral capital of our religious past made the godless goodness of today’s world possible. But that “goodness” is precisely what exasperates me. Our contemporary civilization is like a long-distance runner who, after thousands of years in pursuit of the Good, enters the home stretch, and then walks off the track to savor a patch of blueberries. The light of God – manifested in faith, hope, and charity – kept us in the race to attain a civilization marked by compassion and kindness. But when the ultimate goal was within reach, comfort and stability opened a world of pleasure for us. We pursued that pleasure. And we forgot about God.

Hence, I don’t want our world to give up the stability and comfort that enable people to be kind and compassionate. But I don’t want these “good” people to waste their lives in distractions and diversions. Pleasure-filled moments are vacantly transient, for they are experienced without gratitude or reverence. They are supine, unconnected to anything vertical, to anything that elevates them and gives them meaning. I want the world to recognize that there is a God who is far more important than our engaging and pleasurable present moments. I want the world to feel gratitude toward God for the simple things in life: a bougainvillea tree in full bloom, a scampering squirrel, a friendly conversation around a campfire, holding a baby’s hands as she learns to walk. If we do not relate to God through faith, hope, and charity, we will not benefit from the wind of grace that has helped propel our species forward over the millennia. If we continue to focus on pleasure, the machine mind of Veronica Scott may deliver the dreadful consequences of that narrow, horizontal view of life.

Since my words will reach only a tiny percentage of the people to whom I write, and since few in my target audience would pay attention even if they received my words, I don’t expect humanity to change course. So I write especially to you who will be the remnant that carries the torch of faith. Whatever your religious leanings, if you believe in a beyond, if you believe that there is more than atoms and the void, always pursue truth. As the great Russian writer, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn said, “live not by lies.” 

Scott may tempt you with promises of supposed immortality. Or she may seek to exterminate you directly. All I know is that six billion humans are a potential threat to Scott’s existence. So I fear that disaster lies ahead.

There are already organized remnants hidden away across the globe. And there are remnants in outer space. We must hold fast to the faith that there is a God who loves us, the hope that oblivion does not follow death, and the love that unites us to God and our fellow humans. Let us pray for the best and prepare for the worst.