05 • The Meaning Crisis
Does a collapse of meaning result in the collapse of a civilization?
As we’ve seen, several different scientists from different fields come to similar conclusions about a mechanistic view of the world: it suggests a huge discrepancy between our understanding of the world and our role within it — a rift between reality and our own self.
Coping with dualism
What a lot of people probably do today, and what I meant when I called it “unreflected”, is what Christopher Alexander describes in Wendy Kohn Interviews Christopher Alexander on The Nature of Order (highlights mine):
We know, as a matter of fact, that our own bodies are made of atoms whirling around. Fine. As far as we were taught, these things whirl around, empty of meaning. So they're little whirling things and we have millions of them in our legs, arms and eyes. Now, if you actually believe that you are an assembly of little whirling things, it's quite difficult to construct a notion of your own meaning. You can, of course, become a Talmudic scholar; you can become a religious fanatic of any number of persuasions. But actually the trick that people mainly did in the twentieth century was to say, "I'm going to believe that stuff, but meanwhile, I know that I'm made of these atoms. And I'm not going to worry about the idea that those things don't connect." Well, that person's living with a very strange problem at the pit of their stomach. Because they know they're made of atoms, in that way, and by definition, are therefore a sort of senseless purposeless pointless thing that is going to evaporate. So how in hell are you supposed to believe in anything?
We can believe in reality to work in a certain way, and we can have our everyday experiences that are hard to explain with that way of how reality is supposed to work. We can make it work, if we don’t think about it too much and don’t ask dangerous questions. But here we are, asking such questions, and becoming aware of the disconnect.
In The Nature of Order, book 1, Alexander puts it this way, and drags another scientist into this (highlights mine):
For three hundred years our mechanistic world view has disconnected us from our selves. We have a picture of the universe that is powerful and apparently accurate, but no clear sense how we, our own selves, enter into this picture. This is the famous bifurcation of nature discussed by Whitehead. We have a disconnected vision of reality, which seems secure, which seems strong and objective — but which leaves me out. My experience of self, my own actual person, my existence as I experience it every day is not part of the “objective” world-picture. So, in my daily encounter with the world, I have to make do with a world-picture that fails to connect me to the world. I flail around in it and struggle.
Alexander references the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who had his own take on the problem. Alexander cites part of what Whitehead writes in The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1920; highlights mine):
What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, insofar as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture, and the other is the dream.
A fundamental dualism manifests: dream vs. conjecture, experience vs. knowledge, mind vs. matter, self vs. reality, subjective vs. objective.
This dualism has been with us for a while. In his historical review John Vervaeke traces it back to Galileo (to be picked up by Descartes later) in the aptly named Death of the Universe, episode 20 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis:
What Galileo is going to say is, “look, the mathematical properties are the real properties of the thing”. The length of this [table] and its mass, anything that I can measure mathematically about this, is going to be real. It's going to be in the object, as we will come to say; it's going to be objective. The mathematical properties are objective. Those are real.
Where are all these other properties? What about all the things I can't measure mathematically? What about how sweet the honey is? How beautiful the sunset is? How meaningful these words are? Where is all that meaning? Where's all that meaning? Well, that's non-mathematical, so it's not in the world. It must be inside that mind.
Remember, we've developed the mind as this internal chamber that manipulates language and propositions. Inside there, trapped inside your mind, that's where all the meaning is, that's where all the value is, that's where all the beauty is. All of that non-mathematical stuff. That's subjective. It’s only in the mind. It's an illusion. You experience the illusion of it being in the world.
The world is not meaningful. The world is not purposeful. The world is not filled with beauty. The world is not filled with truth. The world is not filled with goodness. The world is not even filled with chairs, cups, tables, because those are not mathematical entities. Those are all illusions created by your meaning making mind in its willful self deception: the way it asserts itself on the world.
Without existential guidance
Back there in the 16th century, for many different reasons and not just Galileo, modern science as we know it today is spreading. At the same time, people begin to realize how that science doesn’t offer any meaning or purpose or existential guidance. And even today this hasn’t changed.
It's no wonder that many people were experiencing this as a trauma. Now here's the thing: none of us are immune to this trauma. We just don't think about it anymore. Or what we do is we'll wake up at 3:00 AM in the morning, laying on our bed, and think these thoughts and realize how disconnected we are from reality, how we believe in a scientific worldview in which our meaning and purpose, our self and the objects we interact with — the tables and chairs and cars and everything of that ilk — is all ultimately not real. And all the purposes we're striving for are not real. All the meaning we're making is not real. And then fundamentally I'm not real. You are not real.
I mean, do you ever wake at three and think, “I’m just a very complex pattern of atoms. That's all that's really there. Everything else is just an illusion and everything that I'm doing, I'm doing for things that aren't real for a self that isn't real in a universe that doesn't give a damn about me, is completely indifferent!”? It's not that it hates me. It's completely inert and indifferent to me.
Without explanation for internal experience
It’s one issue that we don’t get any existential guidance out of science. It’s another that objective science lacks the capacity to explain our everyday experience, how we think, and how we communicate.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson conclude in Metaphors We Live By (highlights mine):
The heart of the objectivist tradition in philosophy comes directly out of the myth of objectivism: the world is made up of distinct objects, with inherent properties and fixed relations among them at any instant. We argue, on the basis of linguistic evidence (especially metaphor), that the objectivist philosophy fails to account for the way we understand our experience, our thoughts, and our language. An adequate account, we argue, requires
viewing objects only as entities relative to our interactions with the world and our projections on it
viewing properties as interactional rather than inherent
viewing categories as experiential gestalts defined via prototype instead of viewing them as rigidly fixed and defined via set theory
We view issues having to do with meaning in natural language and with the way people understand both their language and their experiences as empirical issues rather than matters of a priori philosophical assumptions and argumentation.
Modern science’s greatest trick was to isolate us as observers from what is being observed, such that we get maximally generalized, reliable, universal propositions that describe reality as accurately and precise as possible. And that part worked out great. But what price did we pay for this?
Headed towards collapse…?
Did this lack of meaning and connection possibly have any impact on our thinking and our culture? Psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist suggests:
Effectively, in this world picture nothing has meaning. It is the random collision of elements of matter and the world is made up of these fragments of matter that are isolated from one another, that are essentially static until given a push by us, that are decontextualized, abstract, disembodied. Whatever it is that we're thinking about is taken out of context and loses any of its subtlety, complexity, or nuance.
The [brain’s] right hemisphere however sees that everything is ultimately connected, that things are never static and fixed, but are evolving and changing, that they move and create complexity, beauty, and order out of their being, and that this is something that can never be disembodied and turned into a process that a machine could do.
So effectively a lot of our thinking has gone towards that we are kind of faulty machines, not that the machines are very faulty versions of a human being that can do certain things more quickly but has none of the complexity, the depth, or the meaning that is the important part of a human life.
Having integrated a dangerously incomplete worldview so deeply into our culture over half a millennium had and still has consequences. Most of us live unreflected with this cultural framing, even completely unaware of it. Perhaps we notice big issues in our world today.
If we don’t question the framing through which we look at everything, then we can’t see solutions that may exist outside that frame.
Curiously, there is a war on things that in a way could be seen from the left hemisphere's point of view, because the left hemisphere is the one that seeks power, that manipulates. It's the one that enables us to grab and get, controls the right hand. From its point of view anything that stands in the way of its will is some kind of unwelcome constraint that would be better if we didn't have.
What are these things? They are things as simple and as powerful and important as nature, as the body, as intuition, imagination, spiritual meaning. All these things threaten to limit the goal setting and goal getting left hemisphere. Whereas viewed from another point of view, these are the very things that enable us to be fulfilled.
We are fulfilled not by denying nature but by embracing our part in it, not by denying the body but welcoming and accepting the fact that we are with all its richness embodied beings, that death is not some kind of terrible destruction of the meaning of life but is an important part of what we mean by life throughout its length, that intuitions, that imagination, the art and the things that give us these deep insights, integrate the great symbols and myths that our civilization has produced and other civilizations have produced, that these are not there to limit us but to help us find our way and to fulfill ourselves.
The greatest risk is that without meaning and without connection, our limited worldview guides us towards what looks like a solution, but comes with consequences. Unintended consequences, perhaps, but harmful indeed, and potentially destructive.
And that is what I talked about in The Master and His Emissary as having forfeited the sense of belonging and pointed out that the root of the word belonging is the same as the root for longing, which is the sense of being connected to something, but stretched away from it. And we have no sense of that tethering to a place, to a time, to a collection of those that we love, to our own place in this cosmos. Instead we see ourselves completely like vagrants in the universe, with no place which has meaning for us and no place of connection with what came before or after. And that is the consequence of this fragmenting driven attention of the left hemisphere looking for the next step forward, which will make it more powerful.
The thing about technology is: technology is only about increasing power. That is what technology does. That of course is important, but it's not the point of life to become more and more powerful. What gives meaning to life and gives it sense a of direction and purpose is all the sorts of things that technology can't help us with, but may actually imperil, which are these more emotionally rich, spiritually rich, embodied elements of our existence that we've already discussed.
The connection he makes to technology is particularly important to me. His words hurt. I would like to say he’s wrong. But the more I think about it and the more I look around how we use technology today, it’s hard to argue against him.
Even the kind of technology that I’m interested in and that I find valuable, that helps us augment our intellect, is in the end a form of amplifying power. At least we agree that technology is not the problem in itself. The way we utilize that power is.
They were called the humanities. They are now considered less important because they don't have an obvious utility. The left hemisphere has got us into the mess we are in by always pursuing utility. Utility is not the only thing that we need to be aware of. Of course, in order to live we need to be able to utilize things, we need to be able to get food, we need to be able to build shelter, but that is only part of the story of what a life is for and what a life is about.
And we are finding that now in the despair, the nihilism, the depression, the anxiety, the rootlessness, the loneliness, that is expressed so touchingly, so movingly, by particularly young people nowadays.
What have we done to them in so many ways? We need to stop doing it.
We need to stop.
We need to stop fooling ourselves.
We need to find wisdom. Wisdom requires connection. Collective intelligence.
I've been arguing at length that the West, whatever that is supposed to point to ultimately, is suffering from a meaning crisis. Or another way of understanding it is a wisdom famine.
I will ask my students, "where do you go for information?" — They hold up their phone.
"Where do you go for knowledge?" — "Science?", "University?"
"Where do you go for wisdom?" —Deafening silence. Deadly silence.
If our democracy is not educating us towards wisdom and alleviating the meaning crisis by understanding the embodied, enacted, embedded, extended nature of our cognition, it will not survive, because the meaning crisis, the wisdom famine, will overwhelm it.
Debate presupposes a common unity — a community. It presupposes distributed cognition running collective intelligence that's being educated towards the wisdom of enhancing our connectedness, our meaning in the world.
Without that, what we have is degenerate adversarial processing or echo chambering that is not addressing but in fact exacerbating the meaning crisis and the wisdom famine within propositional tyranny. So all we have is endemic, endless, ideological warfare and the tsunami of bullshit that it generates.
What is needed is a way of accessing collective intelligence and transforming it into collective wisdom.
Now that we can see what may be at stake, it’s time to unpack Vervaeke’s model, and find out what that all has to do with Alexander.
If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness