Voltaire said: "If the heavens, despoiled of his august stamp could ever cease to manifest him, if God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Let the wise proclaim him, and kings fear him."
Well, almost. Today atheists and naturalists proclaim that there is no extrinsic meaning of life: that there is no outside purpose that humans can look to as a guide and explanation for human life. The universe simply does not care.
What many naturalists say seems to be 'we have to find our own meaning in life', or 'we have to create our own sense of purpose', which sounds a bit rubbish. What sounds rubbish is in short the methodological individualism it seems to imply, which is frankly just lazy. Nobody has ever created the meaning for his or her own life, and that's the way it is. It's true that the human body is capable of 'taking the reigns' of life to a certain extent, but what it takes the reigns of is really an issue.
I saw some video by Daniel Dennett quite a while ago where he talks about free will (found it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cSgVgrC-6Y), don't watch it whatever you do it's loooong and rubbish, but basically he takes free will and 'naturalises' moral responsibility to reflect the freedom that we can assume to have as human agents. He examples a brick, which either hits or doesn't hit you based upon your reactions, and your choice of whether to react or to act against your dodging instinct is taken as a choice in the naturalistic sense (i.e. you can choose whether or not to get hit by the brick). Extrapolating this idea allows us to imagine a power of being able to act otherwise which we can then legitimately say permits a sense of moral accountability: a general idea based upon events of social interaction. So even if the universe is determinate, the sphere of control created by the human body and described by language is a real one, and realising this may help us to work with it to increase freedom. Even without the semantics he spends forever drooling over, this seems to work.
Not a terrible argument (and boy does he bore the tits off me - even the audience falls asleep), but what Dennett has achieved in re-casting free will is something many naturalists do – ignore that the nature of moral accountability should be understood as generated by social discourse which does not common-sensically derive from biology. Though I can agree that some relation between people in history can be a genetic cause, the idea that bodies generate moral discourses is such a weird idea that it actually makes the body something incredibly alien, perhaps requiring talk of collective bodies and so on. To think that freedom is straightforward once people clear away the clutter of cosmic thinking is to utterly neglect the fact that human moral instincts are conditioned wrongly and that their common-sense reality is faulty. For sure having a body implies spheres of control, but what are they? What do human beings really do? Is dodging a brick enough for you? Are you now sold on naturalism and baldness? Maybe you are a brick!
I'd take issue with arguments such as Dennetts by asking: what does taking the reigns of our lives really mean? Here's a video on 'Blue Sky Thinking', which if you live in a cave like me, is a corporate buzz-word:
A quote from the woman:
“Why is everybody paying attention to: 'is it going to be
advertising or is going to be public relations?'. I don't even think
that that's the right question to be asking. The question that we
have in front of us is – how are we going to build great new
exciting programs for our clients that integrate all of these
great opportunities, whether its paid media, earned media. And I
actually think that that's the question we should be asking. But
it's not about 'will the advertisers win, or will the public
relations companies win?', it's about 'who at the end of the day is
able to integrate all disparate kinds of elements in the most unique
and integrated communications programs that also live on in
perpetuity that how a stretch of time and look at some long-term
measurement balls(!)', it's those kinds of programs that are really
going to make the client be
glad he spent – he or she spent – so much money on marketing
programs.”
I think watching this video demonstrates what I very much needed to say – balls.
The lady in the video is certainly enlarging her spheres of control – or her measurement balls – by offering a genuinely intriguing question in perpetuity that how (no, stop)... well anyway she is certainly having a full-on vision. However, in my view she really isn't. It is actually a big deal how powerful accepted methods of reasoning seem, and this entirely regardless of whether they are right or wrong, beneficial or harmful, truth telling or deceitful. That fact should not simply pose a challenge, or cause a bit of worry, as if human beings can just 'go with it' and make reasonable adjustments to their lives. It's a harmful, harrowing fact that is worthy of the worst results of superstition, hatred and fear.
You can take for granted that I don't think that the lady in Blue Skies Thinking is advocating a step towards naturalism, even among the colleagues and businesses she made the video for, and even if I take her view to mean advocating creative, intuitive, holistic business models, whilst others are stuck in traditional business values. In fact, check out the delightfulness of the rhetoric in the video description:
“But how do we get to the BIG IDEAS that live in us but aren't necessarily proactively awakened because we are already meeting our goals and it appears we are doing well overall? The tragedy is, those ideas can stay dormant or, even worse, wither and never see the light of day — if we don't pause and allow ourselves to dream.”
Who could disagree with
that? Well, perhaps, someone who doesn't think dreaming has very
much to do with business, which stifles true dreaming. I
commend to you the thought that naturalism is not served by
businesswomen becoming adaptable and holistic about their future
business strategies. It looks like it is, for sure, but that idea of
naturalism is just a reflection of the business image of life, and
does not stand in any way meaningfully outside it. You may say
'well, it is a form of life' and I would agree – there is a
complete and effective explanation for all aspects of business
culture, just as there is for all forms of religious culture and
everything else (...perhaps people are so amazed that something is alive that they don't care what it is?). But I would not agree that naturalism has to steer
me toward accepted culture by virtue of the fact that describing
human life tends to do so.
The critical possibilities that Dennett hints at at the end of his
lecture, one an image of a fish leaving his bowl to 'make adjustments', leave a lot to be desired, or, rather, everything to be
desired. If people are to explain their circumstances naturalistically,
without therefore transforming them, what I ask is the point of naturalism?
Does an errant brick really
testify to the redundancy of the supernatural as an explanation of
moral instinct? How has it done that? What has Dennett really done?
Nothing!
From
what I understand of the 'naturalism is everything you're already
thinking' school of naturalists (read: all naturalists you will ever
know), the creation of an extrinsic meaning to life doesn't have to
be true, it simply has to be effective. And I would say to this that
if naturalism simply redescribes the history of social and moral life
as the effectiveness and the persistence of power, rather than
supernatural commandment (for example), then, well, there's no trick,
there's still supernatural commandment. Why is this? Well, there
are some ideas and forces that just melt away, that when given a natural
explanation simply vanish from human minds and hearts and they are
liberated, but what can be treated like this? And why? To believe the realists (as I'll call them) is to think that the devil has a name: Rumpelstiltskin!
But
not everything that is terrifying will fly out of the window on a
ladle.
Oh
and I reckon the meaning of life is a class issue.
Aaaand.....
SCENE!
V
