If Life Really Is Meaningless, What’s the Point?

D. J. Tice

D. J. Tice is an editorial page writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. This article is reprinted from the Pioneer Press.

It is reckless impertinence for me to quarrel with George F. Will. That noted commentator has been enlightening and inspiring me for decades, since long before I myself became an obscure commentator.

But when a writer of eloquence and influence questions the basic meaningfulness of life it seems that somebody-even if only a nobody-ought to venture an answer.

In a recent syndicated column (at www.washingtonpost.com), Will wrote about the important things modern science-especially modern astronomy, with the help of the Hubble Telescope-has to say concerning “the origin, nature and meaning, if any, of the universe.”

Note that stylish “if any.” Will soon goes on to wonder whether life is “a cosmic fluke or a cosmic imperative”-and then suggests it makes little difference.

Will’s customary originality fails him here. This is all conventional and impeccably orthodox modern skepticism, determinism and agnosticism. It has been the very latest thing in metaphysics for centuries.

What puzzles me is why people who claim this philosophy so rarely seem to live by it. For example: Why has Mr. Will led life as he has if he seriously entertains the notion that the universe has no meaning-if he considers life either a random accident or a pointless inevitability from an iron chain of causation?

Will has devoted vast energies and huge talents to improving Americans’ understanding of political and social philosophy, history and international relations, culture, morality and baseball.

Can any of these noble pursuits have the slightest significance in a meaningless universe? If human beings are mere flukes, can fine thoughts about the affairs of flukes have the importance that Will often appears to believe they have?

Years ago, Will wrote an uplifting book called Statecraft as Soulcraft. Soulcraft, mind you. He has, in a book on baseball, endorsed the ancient Greek view that “Sport is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.”

But it doesn’t matter whether anything has meaning? Existence, a la Macbeth, may be an idiot’s tale, signifying nothing. But does that possibility, taken seriously, turn one’s soul (whatever that could be) toward the contemplation of worthy (though meaningless) things?

You’re going to need help not to see the silliness of this.

Will has expert sources for the proposition that “mankind is being put in its place.” An eminent astronomer he quotes says human beings are merely collections of matter and have no right to “particle chauvinism.” We are not so much stardust as “nuclear waste.”

Well, OK. But when a man announces that he considers himself to be merely a blob of nuclear waste, I am at a loss to understand why I should pay the slightest attention to anything he says. He is either spectacularly wrong on a pretty big point or else he is, well, a blob of nuclear waste.

In the latter case all science, all knowledge, all thought is perfect delusion. Can the vibrations disturbing one collection of particles (that is, its ideas) be “true,” while another set of vibrations in a different blob of nuclear waste be “false”? How? Is there something out there that sets a standard for truth and untruth-something that isn’t just one more meaningless pile of cosmic debris?

Nothing could be more obvious than that neither Will nor this astronomer really thinks what he claims to think. Obviously, both believe thought and the search for truth matter-and matter quite a lot.

This is the belief their labors testifies to, whatever they say. No doubt they have some rational explanation for this behavior, which they evidently prefer to keep to themselves.

Perhaps recognizing the need for some explaining, Will closes his piece by musing that science is “its own consolation.” He quotes another expert saying that “to understand the universe . . . lifts human life a little above the level of farce” toward “tragedy.”

This is nicely poetic. But it is cheating again. It is almost a kind of stealing.

To speak of understanding, of tragedy and of lifting human life to a higher level-this is to speak of spiritual things. These are qualities that exist, if they exist at all, above and beyond and apart from the mere physical facts about the particles involved.

Such things could bring “consolation” to a rational person only if the universe actually contains something more than particles and waste-some thing that gives nonmaterial things meaning.

You can’t take shelter behind things you don’t believe in.

It’s a mystery why so many modern people pretend to believe in the far-fetched modern gods of determinism and nothingness. Perhaps we are simply too proud to admit that everything we really care about depends on stuff we can’t see, even with the Hubble Telescope.

Still, the first act of human freedom, as William James said, is to choose to believe that you are free.