Rick Warren’s bestselling book The Purpose- Driven Life opens with a sim-
09
ple admonition: “It’s not about you.” It might come as a surprise that a book
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so many people have turned to for comfort and advice begins on such a
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down note. But Warren’s strategy is to appeal precisely to people’s sense of
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being overwhelmed at life’s challenges. He offers them a direct way out: it’s
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not about you; it’s about God.
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You don’t have to accept Warren’s theology to sympathize with the im-
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pulse. There are many ways it could be about something other than us: we
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could be spiritually inclined without belonging to a traditional organized
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religion, or we could feel devoted to a culture or nation or family, or we
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could believe in objective forms of meaning based on scientific grounds.
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Any such strategy can be both challenging, in the sense that it can be hard
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to live up to the standards that are imposed on you, but also comforting,
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because at least there are standards, darn it.
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Poetic naturalism offers no such escape from the demands of meeting
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life in a creative and individual way. It is about you: it’s up to you, me, and 24
every other person to create meaning and purpose for ourselves. This can
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be a scary prospect, not to mention exhausting. We can decide that what we
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want is to devote ourselves to something larger— but that decision comes
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from us.
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The ascendance of naturalism has removed the starting point for much
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of how we used to conceive of our place in the universe. We’re Wile E. Coy-
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ote, and we’ve just looked down. We need some new ground to stand on—
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or we need to learn how to fly.
32
•
33
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There are two legitimate worries about the idea that we construct meaning
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for our lives.
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The first worry is that it’s cheating. Maybe we are fooling ourselves if we
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think we can find fulfillment once we accept that we are part of the physical
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world, patterns of elementary particles beholden to the laws of physics.
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Sure, you can say you are leading a rich and rewarding life based on your
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love for your family and friends, your dedication to your craft, and your
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work to make the world a better place. But are you really? If the value we
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place in such things isn’t objectively determined, and if you won’t be around
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to witness any of it in a hundred years or so, how can you say your life truly
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matters?
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This is just grumpiness talking. Say you love somebody, genuinely and
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fiercely. And let’s say you also believe in a higher spiritual power, and think
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of your love as a manifestation of that greater spiritual force. But you’re also
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an honest Bayesian, willing to update your credences in light of the evi-
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dence. Somehow, over the course of time, you accumulate a decisive amount
13
of new information that shifts your planet of belief from spiritual to natu-
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ralist. You’ve lost what you thought was the source of your love— do you
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lose the love itself? Are you now obligated to think that the love you felt is
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now somehow illegitimate?
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No. Your love is still there, as pure and true as ever. How you would
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explain your feelings in terms of an underlying ontological vocabulary has
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changed, but you’re still in love. Water doesn’t stop being wet when you
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learn it’s a compound of hydrogen and oxygen.
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The same goes for purpose, meaning, and our sense of right and wrong.
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If you are moved to help those less fortunate than you, it doesn’t matter
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whether you are motivated by a belief that it’s God’s will, or by a personal
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conviction that it’s the right thing to do. Your values are no less real ei-
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ther way.
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27
•
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The second worry about creating meaning within ourselves is that there
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isn’t any place to start. If neither God nor the universe is going to help us
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attach significance to our actions, the whole project seems suspiciously ar-
31
bitrary.
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But we do have a starting place: who we are. As living, thinking organ-
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isms, we are creatures of motion and motivation. At a basic, biological level,
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we are defined not by the atoms that make us up but by the dynamic pat-
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terns we trace out as we move through the world. The most important thing
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about life is that it occurs out of equilibrium, driven by the second law. To
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stay alive, we have to continually move, process information, and interact
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with our environment.
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In human terms, the dynamic nature of life manifests itself as desire.
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There is always something we want, even if what we want is to break free of
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the bonds of desire. That’s not a sustainable goal; to stay alive, we have to
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eat, drink, breathe, metabolize, and generally continue to ride the wave of
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increasing entropy.
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Desire has a bad reputation in certain circles, but that’s a bum rap. Cu-
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riosity is a form of desire; so are helpfulness and artistic drive. Desire is an
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aspect of caring: about ourselves, about other people, about what happens
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to the world.
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People are not inanimate rocks, accepting what goes on around them
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with serene indifference. Different people might exhibit different levels of
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care, and they might care in different ways, but caring itself is ubiquitous.
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They might care in an admirable way, watching out for the well- being of
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others, or their caring might be purely selfish, guarding their own interests.
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But people are inescapably characterized by what they care about: their en-
19
/>
thusiasms, inclinations, passions, hopes.
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When our lives are in good shape, and we are enjoying health and lei-
21
sure, what do we do? We play. Once the basic requirements of food and
22
shelter have been met, we immediately invent games and puzzles and com-
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petitions. That’s a lighthearted and fun manifestation of a deeper impulse:
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we enjoy challenging ourselves, accomplishing things, having something to
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show for our lives.
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That makes sense, in light of evolution. An organism that didn’t give a
27
crap about anything that happened to it would be at a severe disadvantage
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in the struggle for survival when compared to one that looked out for itself,
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its family, and its compatriots. We are built from the start to care about the
30
world, to make it matter.
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Our evolutionary heritage isn’t the whole story. The emergence of con-
32
sciousness means that what we care about, and how we behave in response
33
to those impulses, can change over time as a result of our learning, our in-
34
teraction with others, and our own self- reflection. Our instincts and unre-
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flective desires aren’t all we have; they’re just a starting point for building
36N
something significant.
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Human beings are not blank slates at birth, and our slates become in-
01
creasingly rich and multidimensional as we grow and learn. We are bub-
02
bling cauldrons of preferences, wants, sentiments, aspirations, likes,
03
feelings, attitudes, predilections, values, and devotions. We aren’t slaves to
04
our desires; we have the capacity to reflect on them and strive to change
05
them. But they make us who we are. It is from these inclinations within
06
ourselves that we are able to construct purpose and meaning for our lives.
07
The world, and what happens in the world, matters. Why? Because it
08
matters to me. And to you.
09
10
•
11
The personal desires and cares that we start with may be simple and self-
12
regarding. But we can build on them to create values that look beyond our-
13
selves, to the wider world. It’s our choice, and the choice we make can be to
14
expand our horizons, to find meaning in something larger than ourselves.
15
The movie It’s a Wonderful Life has unmistakable religious
16
underpinnings— it’s Christmas Eve, and George Bailey is saved from kill-
17
ing himself by the intervention of a guardian angel. But as author Chris
18
Johnson has pointed out, what changes George’s mind isn’t words of angelic
19
wisdom; it’s the demonstration that his life had a tangible, positive effect
20
on the lives of other people in the town of Bedford Falls. Real stuff, here on
21
Earth, the lives we actually lead. In the end, that’s the only place meaning
22
can possibly reside.
23
The construction of meaning is a fundamentally individual, subjective,
24
creative enterprise, and an intimidating responsibility. As Carl Sagan put
25
it, “We are star stuff, which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”
26
The finitude of life lends poignancy to our situations. Each of us will
27
have a last word we say, a last book we read, a last time we fall in love. At
28
each moment, who we are and how we behave is a choice that we individu-
29
ally make. The challenges are real; the opportunities are incredible.
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34
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46
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What Is and What Ought to Be
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david Hume, the eighteenth- century Scottish thinker whom we’ve
encountered before as a forefather of poetic naturalism, is widely
regarded as a central figure of the Enlightenment. When he was
only twenty- three years old, he began work on a book that would turn out
18
to be extraordinarily influential, A Treatise of Human Nature. At least, it
19
would be judged so by history; at the time, Hume’s ambition to write a
20
bestseller fell somewhat short, as he lamented that the book “fell dead- born
21
from the press.”
22
We should give Hume credit for trying to be a lively writer, even if the
23
reading public didn’t necessarily agree. In one famous passage, he sardoni-
24
cally remarks on what he sees as a curious tendency among his fellow phi-
25
losophers: a predilection for suddenly declaiming what ought to be true
26
when they had previously been describing only what is true.
27
28
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with,
29
I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time
30
in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a
31
God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of
32
a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copula-
33
tions of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition
34
that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change
35S
is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as
36N
this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or
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W h At I S A n d W h A t Ou g h t t O b E
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David Hume. (Painting by Allan Ramsay)
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affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and
20
explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given,
21
for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation
22
can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different
23
from it.
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25
While it’s amusing to think of propositions copulating with each other,
26
Hume’s sentences admittedly do go on a bit. But his main point is clear:
27
talking about “oughts” is an entirely different kind of thing from simply
28
talking about what “is.” The former is passing a judgment, saying what
29
should be the case; the latter is merely descriptive, saying what actually hap-
30
pens. If you’re going to perform such a magic trick and call it philosophy,
31
you should at least have the consideration to tell us how the trick is done.
32
Modern thought has distilled the point down to a maxim: “You can’t derive
33
ought from is.”
34
There is an apparent problem here for naturalism: if you can’t derive
S35
ought from is, then you’re in trouble, because “is” is all there is. There isn’t
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anything outside the natural world to which we can turn for guidance
02
about how to behave. The temptation to somehow extract such guidance
03
from the natural world itself is incredibly strong.
04
But it doesn’t work. The natural world doesn’t pass judgment; it doesn’t
05
provide guidance; it doesn’t know or care about what ought to happen. We
06
are allowed to pass judgment ourselves, and we’re part of the natural world,
07
but different people are going to end up with different judgments. So be it.
08
•
09
10
To see why it’s impossible to derive ought from is, it’s useful to think about
11
how we can ever derive anything from anything else. There are many such
12
ways, but let’s focus in on one of the simplest: the logical syl ogism, paradigm 13
of deductive reasoning. Syllogisms look like this:
14
15
1. Socrates is a living creature.
16
2. All living creatures obey the laws of physics.
17
3. Therefore, Socrates obeys the laws of physics.
18
19
This is just one example of the general form, which can be expressed as:
20
21
1. X is true.
22
2. If X is true, then Y is true.
23
3. Therefore, Y is true.
The Big Picture Page 66