Giving up

A recap

    Maybe it would be a good idea to recap where we have been in these blogs.

    We started out by asking the question “Why should we do Good?”  We argued that doing Good was a response to our caring for “the other.” 

    But that raised the question of where “caring” comes from.  Is it just a biological phenomenon?  Or is it merely something we teach each other?  I argued that it is partly those things, but it is not completely those two things – that there is something more going on, something beyond just nature and nurture.

    Maybe there is a Rulebook that sets out the bounds and responsibilities of caring?  Wouldn’t that make things easier!  But, no such luck.  As much as we would wish to have a perfect path to follow, perfectibility is a myth.

    Yet, so many people in the world have decided that they have found The Way, The Law, The Book, The Path.  This is the genesis of fundamentalism, which I argued is on the rise in reaction to uncertainty.  No wonder fundamentalists are willing to violate the rights of others, maybe even kill “the other,” because they are, after all, on the path to Perfection.  How dangerous is that!

    And we can see the allure of perfectibility.  I called this “giving in.”  After all, if there is no perfect path, then life is inevitably uncertain.  We may have a sense of what is “the Good,” but we can never be sure.

    On the other hand, if life were perfectible, then we would have the moral obligation to perfect.  We would become slaves to perfectibility.  It is only by accepting our limitations that we start being able to choose what gives meaning to our lives.  If perfection doesn’t dictate meaning to us, then we are free to choose.  “It is only in our limits that we find our power.”

    So, by answering No to the first question on “The Path With Two Questions,” we arrive at “The Box.”  We can’t know for sure, because certitude leads us back to fundamentalism.  We have to put up with the uncertainty, and yet still try to orient ourselves, our lives, to what we believe is the Good. 

    OK, that is where we have been.  Now we come to an alternative to living INSIDE the Box.  Maybe we should just “give up.”

Giving Up

    Many people who shun humanism and fundamentalism, and find their way to the Box, and are confronted with the second question “Does life have meaning?” simply answer “No.”  This is Nihilism.
    We have no purpose, no calling.  Life is a cosmic joke, with death as its punch line.  If you studied existentialism in college, the people you read were probably in this position: Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche.  With no perfect guidance to lead one’s life, we struggle with the assault on meaning and either fight, whither or accommodate.  (Professor Nicolas de Warren at Wellesley College offered a course on existentialism with “special emphasis” on “boredom, death, bad faith, anxiety, suffering, freedom. . . .”) 
    In Sartre’s case, we turn to ourselves as the measure of worth, and strive to be the best “us” we can be. 
    In Nietzche’s view, we can’t stand to accept the void, the meaninglessness, so we exert our Power.  We “will the void, rather than void our will.”
    Or we can turn to hedonism.  A “good” life is measured by the pleasure we generate for ourselves.  He who has the most toys when he dies, wins.  These are all Nihilism.
    Nihilism has always been an option.  Even in Traditional times, there were doubters who didn’t believe the elders’ myths nor the power they were supposed to hold.  At each stage in the development of modernity, there have been skeptics.  For those who walk this way, and find themselves satisfied by nihilism, life is just something you do between birth and death, waiting, waiting for something you are fairly certain is never going to come.  The goal, if there is anything worth calling a goal, must be to pass the time as pleasantly as possible. 
    If the point of this discussion were to see where, if anywhere, we could find justification for trying to pursue a meaningful, a Good life, then Nihilism is one of the dead ends in that quest.  There is nothing that makes any action Good, or one action Better than another.  Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
    If a retreat to perfectibility in the face of this existential moment is “giving in,” then lets call the acceptance of Nihilism “giving up.”  And the popularity of this approach seems to be growing.
    Of course, I wouldn’t have spent my entire adulthood trying to teach thousands of students the intellectual foundations that support their desire to do Good in the world if I were a Nihilist. 

There are times. . . .

    But there are times. . . .  Times of doubt, of uncertainty, of recrimination.  Maybe I am wrong.  Maybe there is no basis for my moral stances and the political positions I have taken in response to them.  Maybe I have been wasting my time and the time of those thousands of students.  Maybe life is just a joke, merely a biological happenstance.  My sense of the Good is, like the rest of my consciousness, just a story that my physical brain tells me to keep my occupied while it runs my life.  The sacrifices that my students make and have made would be for naught.    
    Yes, there are times that I have thought about “giving up.”  But I keep turning back to the Box, and the call of faith.  That’s where we are heading next.