Finding Meaning in Modern Times
In 1992, IN HIS Francis Boyer Lecture entitled “The Cultural Revolution and the Capitalist Future,” Irving Kristol explored the growing gap between our thriving capitalist economy and our unraveling bourgeois culture. Regarding the economy, he showed how capitalism had produced a widely shared prosperity that put paid to arguments in favor of the socialist alternative. Regarding the culture, he showed how succeeding waves of elitist opposition to our inherited moral, aesthetic, and spiritual norms and sensibilities had issued in a nihilistic anticulture, hostile not only to religion, family, patriotism, and traditional morality, but even to the promise of Enlightenment reason itself.
Concluding with a look to the future, Kristol foresaw both good news and bad. In the short run, he was confident that the nihilism preached by our elites would not prevail politically, because our sensible, bourgeois, property-owning democracy breeds its own antibodies that “immunize it, in large degree, against the lunacies of its intellectuals and artists.” For the long run, he was much less sanguine:
But a society needs more than sensible men and women if it is to prosper: It needs the energies of the creative imagination as expressed in religion and the arts. It is crucial to the lives of all of our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendent meaning, a world in which the human experience makes sense. Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than to experience one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.
Bourgeois society . . . has produced through the market economy a world prosperous beyond all previous imaginings – even socialist imaginings. . . . [But] this world, with every passing decade, has become ever more spiritually impoverished. That war on poverty is the great unfinished task before us.
Irving Kristol was second to none in his appreciation of America’s political genius and commercial spirit. He esteemed the blessings of freedom and prosperity, and he extolled the bourgeois virtues that make them possible. But he also knew that freedom and prosperity are not ends in themselves and do not alone guarantee a life with purpose, a life with meaning, a life of genuine human flourishing. And he was concerned that the very successes of the American enterprise might tragically lead us to neglect higher human goods.
This essay begins where Kristol left off. Twenty-five years on, how fares the struggle against our spiritual impoverishment? Are we Americans, despite our continuing freedom and prosperity, really losing the quest for a meaningful life?
It would be easy to argue that life in America is spiritually more impoverished than ever. As evidence, one might cite the rising respectability of public atheism and the falling off of religious observance; the eclipse of the ideal of work as vocation; the emptiness and coarseness of the popular culture; the weakening of marriage and family ties; the failure of higher education to nurture the hungry souls of our young, and the huge increase in clinical depression among college students; the decline of patriotism and national attachment; and new expressions of doubt about America’s future, fueled by a strident cynicism on the left and a growing despair on the right.
But this picture is at best incomplete. As Charles Murray points out in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, marriage, industriousness, law-abidingness, and religiosity are alive and well among the cultural elite, even as they are in decline among the lower classes. Nationwide, many of our social indicators show a partial repair of earlier unravelings. Community service is on the rise, as is private philanthropy. There is once again a proper respect for the armed forces. And despite their superficial cynicism, America’s young people – not only among the privileged – continue to harbor deep desires for a life that will prove meaningful, a life of love and work, service to God and country, and pursuit of truth or goodness or beauty.
All in all, there is reason to believe that our deeds and practices – if not also our spiritual prospects – are better than the dispiriting speeches and theories that garner the most notoriety. But this hardly means that the campaign against spiritual poverty has been won. What most decent Americans still practice or know in their bones, they do and know despite the strenuous and unceasing efforts of intellectuals and the popular culture to persuade them otherwise – efforts whose doleful consequences are all around us. But to wage a truly winning war on spiritual impoverishment, we need much more. We need a newly inspirited cultural elite, one that, as Murray puts it, confidently preaches what it practices. And we need institutions that will once again educate our elite in the sources, the ideas, and the beliefs that guide us as a people. But first, and most, we need a full-throated intellectual defense and celebration of what most Americans still tacitly know and live by. And this requires an account of why and how our most worthy practices answer to our deepest human aspirations and longings. In what follows, I offer the outlines of such a defense and such an account.
Before proceeding further, a brief stipulation. For most people in the West over the last two millennia, finding transcendent meaning in life has been centrally linked to biblical religion. For committed Christians and Jews, it is God’s will and plan that make order out of chaos, not only in nature, through the Creation, but also in human life, through His moral and spiritual instruction. In Western Europe, much of the growing spiritual malaise and loss of cultural confidence can be attributed to the so-called “death of God,” the loss of belief in a superintending deity. But in the United States, the announcement of God’s death is premature, to say the least. Although more Americans than ever are religiously unaffiliated, 92 percent say that they believe in God, and 81 percent say that religion is very (55 percent) or fairly (26 percent) important in their lives – this despite tremendous intellectual energy and a slew of best-selling books devoted to undermining this blessed condition.
For present purposes, however, I propose to leave organized religion to one side. Each faith has its proper exponents and defenders, and generic arguments from the outside will not satisfy the doubting Thomases regarding the truth of God’s existence or the goodness of His teachings. Let us look instead at the secular realms of human life where many Americans still find deep meaning and in which they live as if life still makes sense. I have in mind four such realms: work; love and family; community and country; and the pursuit of truth. Most of the life-affirming activities in these realms are accessible to most Americans, and all have this in common: we practice and pursue them not as diversions or escapes from reality, but because they answer truly to our deepest aspirations: to live a life that makes sense, a life that is worthy of the unmerited gift of our own existence.
Meaningful Work: Exercising Our Human Powers
Nearly all Americans must work to live. But there is also virtue in this necessity. Above and beyond the benefits of remuneration, there is dignity in earning a livelihood, in providing not only for oneself but also and especially for one’s family. Among the rising generations, gainful employment is an early sign of maturity and the first step toward self-reliance. Holding down a job requires not only know-how and competence, but also the virtues of diligence, dependability, and the exercise of personal responsibility. Unemployment, even if compensated, is demoralizing, degrading, and dehumanizing to any self-respecting adult who wants to work.
Yet even the moral praise of industriousness and self-reliance comes up short if we are looking at work as a possible source of transcendent meaning. For this we need an account of work as intrinsically satisfying, quite apart from the income it produces or the virtues it engenders. We need to consider work, as Dorothy Sayers put it, “not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives