The Purpose and Meaning of Life?

            In 1930, Will Durant, historian and philosopher, wrote On The Meaning of Life. If you are unacquainted with Durant check him out on the Internet, it will be worth your while.

            It’s a small book like his remarkable, The Lessons of History (1968), 110 pages packed with sagacity and wisdom gleaned from some of the more prominent thinkers of the thirties. Their thoughts are as germane today as they were 80 years ago, and probably more profound now because it seems, in looking at the world around us, we are no closer to understanding the meaning of life. 

            What Durant did was write a letter to the most notable thinkers of that age, men like H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Will Rogers, Dr. Charles H. Mayo, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, and George Bernard Shaw, to name a few, asking them the following questions:

Spare me a moment to tell me what meaning life has for you,  what keeps you going, what help – if any -- religion gives you,  what are the sources of your inspiration and your energy, what is the goal or motive-force of your toil, where you find your consolations and your happiness, where, in the last resort, your treasure lies.

            In his curious letter, Durant (November4-1885 – November 7-1981), in asking –“What is the meaning or worth of human life?” prefaced his reader with what I perceived as intellectual cynicism.  In citing “theorists from Ikhnaton and Laotzu to Bergson and Spengler” he said:

The result has been a kind of intellectual suicide: thought, by its very development, seems to have destroyed the value and significance of life.  The growth and spread of knowledge, for which so many idealists and reformers prayed, has resulted in a disillusionment which has almost broken the spirit of our race.

Astronomers have told us that human affairs constitute but a moment in the trajectory of a star;  geologists have told us that civilization is but a precarious interlude between ice ages;  biologists have told us that all life is war, a struggle for existence among individuals, groups, nations, alliances, and species;  historians have told us that “progress” is a delusion, whose glory ends in inevitable decay;  psychologists have told us that the will and the self are the helpless instruments of heredity and environment,  and that the once incorruptible soul is but a transient incandescence of the brain.

            Durant was 45 years old in 1930, and although the two paragraphs above might suggest he suffered from depression, he later wrote and published his epic eleven volume, The Story of Civilization, between 1935 and 1975.  As a youngster he was raised in “the faith” but as he studied science and philosophy he lost “the faith,” but as he aged seemed to recapture his “lost faith.”  In 1975 when the eleventh volume entitled, The Age of Napoleon, hit the press he was age 90 – and was as productive and creative as he was at age 45.  He and his wife Ariel had left notes for a twelfth and thirteenth volumes, “The Age of Darwin” and “The Age of Einstein,” but ran out of time.  I would have loved to read the “Darwin” volume.

                As a youth Durant was educated by the Jesuits and was preparing for the priesthood, but in 1905 began experimenting with “socialist philosophy.”  His sentiment towards God in 1930 suggests the influence of his radical leanings:

God, who was once the consolation of our brief life, and our refuge in bereavement and suffering, has apparently vanished from the scene; no telescope, no microscope, discovers him.  Life has become, in that total perspective which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured; nothing is certain in it except defeat and death – a sleep from which, it seems there is no awakening.

                I believe that doubt is the first step towards progress and creativity.  In that regard, Durant seems to doubt the efficacy of the pursuit of truth.  Perhaps if he had had the time to plunge into The Age of Darwin and Einstein, he would not have been so pessimistic.

We are driven to conclude that the greatest mistake in human history was the discovery of “truth.”  It has not made us free, except from delusions that comforted us and restraints that preserved us.  It has not made us happy, for truth is not beautiful, and did not deserve to be so passionately chased.  As we look on it now we wonder why we hurried so to find it.  For it has taken from us every reason for existence except the moment’s pleasure and tomorrow’s trivial hope.

            We ordinarily think of truth and knowledge as freedom.  But the following passage by Durant helps explain his incredulity.  What he is doing is adeptly expressing feelings many of us have experienced and may be the impetus behind faith trumping impotent materialism.

The biologists reported that all life lives at the expense of other life, that big things eat little things and are eaten in turn; that strong organisms use and abuse weak organisms in a hundred thousand ways forever; that the ability to kill is the ultimate test of survival; that reproduction is suicide, and that love is the prelude to replacement and death.   

            Even in midlife when Durant was preoccupied with reality it is apparent that he struggled with his spiritual roots.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.  Religion was profounder than philosophy, and refused to root human happiness in the earth; it based man’s hopes where knowledge could never reach them – beyond the grave. … a morality without God is as weak as a traffic law when the policeman is on foot. … thought undermined society by separating sex from parentage, removing the penalty from promiscuity, and liberating the individual from the race; now only the ignorant transmit their kind…

            There are alternative ways to approach an issue or subject and cynicism being among the most provocative often reaps the best results.  However, of those icons and moguls who responded to Durant’s poignant questions, all agreed answers do not come easily.  If put in a hummingbird’s egg the pat response from respondents for a worthy life is doing the best you can with what you’ve got.

            I liked Mencken’s satiric and heretic style so much I bought and read two of his books.  (Google him, he was an interesting guy.) Following are a few of his gems:  “I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.”

            “It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and, thus, like to play with them.”

            “I am a writer and editor; which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.”

            “I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do – what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it.”

            Mencken (Sept. 12, 1980 – Jan. 29, 1956) made a good living saying what he thought regardless of what others thought.  I think he got away with it because he said it so well.  You may not agree with him but when it came to prose he was an artist.

                As for religion, I am quite devoid of it.  Never in my adult life have I experienced anything that could be plausibly called a religious impulse.  My father and grandfather were agnostics before me, and though I was sent to Sunday school as a boy and exposed to the Christian theology I was never taught to believe it.  My father thought that I should learn what it was, but it apparently never occurred to him that I would accept it.  He was a good psychologist.  What I got in Sunday school – beside a wide acquaintance with Christian hymnology – was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous. … I see little evidence in this world of the so-called goodness of God.

            Will Rogers (Nov. 4, 1879 – Aug. 15, 1935) said, “For there is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get off the thing that he was educated in ….”

            I was surprised when it came to the question of “worth of life” how pessimistic many of the respondents were, including Rogers, a humorist.

                The whole thing [life] is a ‘Racket,’ so get a few laughs; do the best you can, take nothing serious, for nothing is certainly depending on this generation.  Each one lives in site of the previous one and not because of it.  And don’t start “seeking knowledge,” for the more you seek the nearer the “Booby Hatch” you get.

            Carl Laemmle (Jan 17, 1867 – Sept. 24, 1939) movie maker and founder of Universal Studios, took exception to Durant’s remark that “the greatest mistake in human history was the discovery of the truth.”

The truth which different men think they have discovered is probably not the truth at all, and that is why it has not made us free.  I still have my delusions – thank God! – and I feel sorry for the scientists and philosophers who have thought themselves into a deep pit.’

I would rather remain a hard working businessman and be as happy as I am than become the world’s greatest sage and accept all the sourness and hopelessness which seem to go with too much abstract thinking.

            Durant had this to say about the response from Jawaharial Nehru (1889 – 1964), successor to Mohandas K. Gandhi:  “To have a great purpose to work for, a purpose larger than ourselves, is one of the secrets of making life significant for then the meaning and worth of the individual overflow his personal borders, and survive his death.”

            Of the women from whom Durant solicited a reply, three responded, one a 26 year-old tennis star.  She found action and perfection a panacea for her restlessness.  The other two were noticeably more spiritual in their response than men who were more rational and focused on the productive and creative impulses.

            I think each one of us has our own ideas about the worth and meaning of life – and they all have a common genetic origin.  While some look to the heavens for meaning, as I once did, all I saw was stars.  I was told to look through the omniscient eyes of prophets, popes and priests but all I saw was deception.  I now look within, like the old Gnostics advised. 

            I found the purpose of life had been programmed in my DNA, the meaning is what I give it and the world gives in return.   Authentic joy is in creating (ideas) and producing (children) and self-actualization (overcoming the selfish instincts for we are perpetually incomplete) and serving justice (helping others when opportunity presents itself). 

            Acquisition leads to eventual decay.  Power is always shifting, never staying in one place.  Fame is capriciously temporary and seldom historical.  An individual’s legacy is not measured by wealth or status but by the completeness of his children.  Purpose and meaning is doing what we can with what we got, where we find ourselves.  Besides, who’s keeping score?  That’s my opinion!

            My children and grandchildren are my treasure, they, and attempting to understand human behavior is my “motive-force.  I find happiness in working my little farm and the thrill of a sudden bend of a pole when a 3 pound Rainbow Trout hits my lure.  Lastly, as amateurish as I am, I find the philosophical exploration and expression of ideas exhilarating and rewarding.  How dull life would be if I could not read, write and think.