Politics and Meaning: More on the Conservative Disadvantage

Here again is my Substack entry "The Conservative Disadvantage."  In it I wrote, "We don't look to politics for meaning. Or rather, we do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere." Thomas Beale charitably comments (edited):

Just a short note on that post: your observation about meaning is  one of the most penetrating I have read for a long while -- it's one of those truths hiding in such plain sight that no one sees it. This phenomenon of the true conservative "not looking to politics for meaning" is deeper than the usual formulations according to which Marxist and other utopian ideologies are replacements for the old religions. This is because the whole question of where 'meaning' (and therefore worth) in life is found is the most fundamental question of the human condition. It's a Scruton-esque observation as well -- perhaps he even said something like this, although I don't remember it as pithily expressed as your version - - but he certainly thought that meaning for real people was in their daily lives well lived within clubs, theatres, the garden, nature.

In fact, re-reading your text, it's almost a shortest-possible definition of what it means to be (small-c) conservative by describing its negation. I particularly like the line 'A conservative could never write a book with the title, The Politics of Meaning.' 

Your characterisation of the conservative atheist I think is very nice as well.

My thanks to Thomas Beale for these kind comments.  Here are some additional remarks about meaning and the political to clarify and fill out what I wrote and perhaps ignite some discussion.

1) There is a distinction between 'existential' and  semantic meaning. Our concern here is solely with the first. There is also a distinction within existential or life meaning between ultimate and proximate meaning. When we ask philosophically about the meaning of  life we are asking about the ultimate and objective point, purpose, end, or goal of human willing and striving, if there is one.  We are asking whether there is an ultimate and objective purpose, and what it is.  Both of these questions admit of reasonable controversy. Some say that human life has no objective purpose. Any purpose it has must be subjective. Others say that it does have an objective purpose, but then disagree bitterly as to what it is. But that there are proximate and relative meanings in human lives is uncontroversial.  For one person, writing poetry is highly meaningful, for another a silly and meaningless waste of time.  

2) When I say that the conservative does not look to politics for meaning, I am referring to ultimate meaning: he does not look to politics for ultimate meaning.  One could be a conservative in my sense and find political activity proximately meaningful.  One could not be a conservative in my sense and find political activity ultimately meaningful.  For the conservative understands something that the leftist does not. He understands that  political activity cannot be our ultimate purpose because the political is not of ultimate value. This raises the question of the relation of the teleological to the axiological. The meaning-of-life question has both a teleological and an axiological side.

3) Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning

Teleology. Meaning bears a teleological aspect in that a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life.  It is difficult to see how a human life devoid of purposes could be meaningful, either proximately or ultimately, and indeed purposes organized by a central purpose such as advancing knowledge or alleviating suffering.  The central purpose must be one the agent freely and self-transparently chooses for himself. It cannot be one that is assigned ab extra. The central purpose must be both nontrivial and achievable.  A life devoted to the collecting of beer cans is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of triviality while a life in quest of a perpetuum mobile is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of futility.  But even if a life has a focal purpose that is freely and consciously chosen by the agent of the life, nontrivial, and achievable, this still does not suffice for ultimate meaningfulness.

Axiology. A meaningful life also bears an axiological aspect in that a meaningful life is one that embodies some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental value at least for the agent of the life.  A life wholly devoid of personal satisfaction cannot be called meaningful.  But even this is not enough.  The lives of some terrorists and mass murderers are driven by non-trivial and non-futile purposes and are satisfying to their agents.  We ought, however, to resist the notion that such lives are ultimately meaningful. A necessary condition of a life’s being ultimately meaningful is that it realize some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental objective value.  If so, a radically immoral life cannot be a meaningful life. Or so say I.

This might be reasonably questioned. According to David Benatar, "A meaningful life is one that transcends one's own limits and significantly impacts others or serves purposes beyond oneself." (The Human Predicament, Oxford UP, 2017, p. 18) By this definition, the lives of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were meaningful, as Benatar grants. (19) Well, can a radically immoral life be a meaningful life? I say No; Benatar leaves the question open:

One response is to acknowledge that wicked lives can be meaningful, but then say that we should seek only positive meaning. Another option is to say that a life is not meaningful unless its purposes or ways of transcending limits are positive, worthy, or valuable. (19)

I pack quite a lot into the concept of an ultimately meaningful human life.  Such a life is one that is purpose-driven by a central purpose that organizes and unifies various peripheral purposes; a purpose that is freely  chosen by the liver of the life as opposed to imposed from without by the State, for example; a purpose that is neither trivial nor futile, and thus achievable; a purpose that is objectively morally permissible, and beyond that, objectively the best and highest life that a human is capable of; finally, a purpose that is redemptive.  But there is no space now to expand upon this last clause.  

4) But must a conservative seek an ultimate objective meaning or purpose? No, because he might not believe that one exists.  He would not be irrational in so thinking.  David Benatar serves as a a good, perhaps the best, example.

5) I have just set the bar very high, impossibly high some will say.  As I see it, one can count oneself a conservative while rejecting the conception of an ultimately meaningful life as I have defined it. 

What one cannot do as a conservative is seek ultimate meaning in the quotidian round, in "daily lives well lived within clubs, theatres, the garden, nature" to quote Beale glossing Scruton.  There is no ultimate meaning to be found there, but then again there might not be an ultimate meaning. One would then have to take whatever meaning one could get from mundane pursuits and makes friends with finitude.

Another thing a conservative qua conservative cannot do is look for meaning where the leftist looks for it.

6) A  fundamental error of the leftist is to seek ultimate meaning where it cannot be found, namely, in the political sphere, in sociopolitical activism, in the wrong-headed and dangerously quixotic attempt to straighten "the crooked timber of humanity" (Kant) by collective human action, to bring forth the "worker's paradise," to eliminate class distinctions, to end 'racism,' and 'sexism' and 'homophobia,'  'transphobia,' and other invented bogeypersons, to end alienation and the natural hierarchy of life and spirit in all its forms, and to transform the world in such a way that all meta-physical and religious yearnings for Transcendence are finally squelched and eradicated,  and to do so no matter how many 'eggs' have to be broken to achieve  the unachievable 'omelet.'

The leftist rightly sneers at mere bourgeois self-indulgence, material acquisition for its own sake, status-seeking, pleasure-seeking however refined, the 'lifestyles of the rich and famous,' etc. We conservatives who seek the true Transcendence can agree with leftists about that. But we reject their destructively cockamamie schemes and say to them: better the bourgeois life, or even the life of Nietzsche's Last Man, than your mad pursuit of the unattainable.

7) As for The Politics of Meaning, that is an actual title of a book by a pal of Hillary Clinton, Michael Lerner. It came out in 1996.  I wasn't referring to it specifically but mocking the notion that existential meaning worth attaining could be attained by political means.

Comments

[Thomas Beale]

Dear Bill,

A small comment on the axiological question, and whether the likes of Hitler, Pol Pot etc had meaningful lives. The argument against (yours) is an argument for a universal, possibly normative, morality by which existential meaning in the lives of others can be reliably judged. By implication this says that one should not think one can invent one's own meaning, but should instead undertake a search for that universal framework.

So I would say that your claim (versus Benatar's) is an argument that achieving transcendent meaning requires knowledge of and faith in something that is outside the self, greater than the self, and is a source of truth. Perhaps this is a definition of divinity? Collectively we must all be looking for the same divinity - sources of truth can't admit the existence of competitive alternates. One step further might suggest that it is an argument for the existence of God - understood as a divine source of truth - if we agree that meaning can in principal be found in life. For those who recognise the mission but never achieve it, the existence of such a God is not in question, only the path is obscure. At least such people understand the gravity of the challenge.

A couple of further implications would seem to follow:
1. Can Benatar's argument be distinguished from that of post-modernists and Leftists who think meaning is self-created?
2. Is a quest for the meaning of life really just the same thing as looking for God?

[BV]

Thanks for the comments, Thomas. In answer to your two questions.

1) For Benatar no human life has what he calls "cosmic" meaning, but a life can have a high degree of what he calls "terrestrial" meaning. This is presumably subjective and self-created. For Benatar, our predicament is an existential vise: we are squeezed between life which is objectively bad for all, no matter how fortunate they are, and death which is also objectively bad for all. Since for B. life is objectively bad, it can have no ultimate meaning in my sense.

2) I don't think these two quests are the same from the POV of the quester. An atheist might seek the meaning of life.