At this point it really should be better understood, but isn’t, that the only thing that gives meaning to David Brook’s life is inspiring a warm tingling desire in philosophy majors to commit a public act of hara-kiri.
In other, perhaps less rigorously trained individuals, the reaction may be somewhat more restrained and akin to the feeling one gets right before rigorously separating a toddler from his toy.
In either case, the desire is an overwhelming compulsion to oh…lord…make…it…stop.
But, it won’t stop. We can’t make it stop.
And the dripbeat goes on.
If mockery could defeat him, he would have already died a million deaths.
But it’s the stone cold unavoidable conclusion that all our learning and training, all the tools we have acquired to understand and explain the human condition, are like chainmail against the Mongol horde of pretentious foolishness that Brooks brings to the battle.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall win the whole argument, and see another Brooks column three to four days hence?
Shall he make an enemy of meaningfulness?
Shall you pen a rejoinder?
“What,” you ask, “can you possibly mean when you say that ‘Meaningfulness tries to replace structures, standards and disciplines with self-regarding emotion?’”
You mean that people want to feel that their lives have meaning, that their existence isn’t pointless. And that’s selfish. It’s selfish because it’s not the “he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” kind of meaning that provides structure and a common vocabulary.
John the Evangelist can confer some meaning on our asses, but your kind of meaning is “a paltry, irreducible, and contentless substitute” based “solely on emotion.”
…it’s subjective and relativistic. You get meaning one way. I get meaning another way. Who is any of us to judge another’s emotion?
Because it’s based solely on sentiment, it is useless. There are no criteria to determine what kind of meaningfulness is higher. There’s no practical manual that would help guide each of us as we move from shallower forms of service to deeper ones. There is no hierarchy of values that would help us select, from among all the things we might do, that activity which is highest and best to do.
Because it’s based solely on emotion, it’s fleeting. When the sensations of meaningful go away then the cause that once aroused them gets dropped, too. Ennui floods in. Personal crisis follows. There’s no reliable ground.
Far be it from me to “bathe luxuriously in my own sense of meaningfulness” here, but these words are not defined the way that David Brooks thinks they are defined.
He doesn’t think that characters from history like Nelson Mandela and Albert Schweitzer and Abraham Lincoln did what they did merely to get a tingly feeling, which is true. But he doesn’t show that they did what they did for any higher reason than that it provided meaning to their existence. Oh, yes, they “had objective and eternally true standards of justice and injustice,” but so do I and you and pretty much everyone who is the least bit morally serious. I do what I do because acting according to my values gives my life meaning.
Yet, remarkably, and contra Brooks this doesn’t trump happiness.
The person leading a meaningful life has found some way of serving others that leads to a feeling of significance.
Second, a meaningful life is more satisfying than a merely happy life. Happiness is about enjoying the present; meaning is about dedicating oneself to the future. Happiness is about receiving; meaningfulness is about giving. Happiness is about upbeat moods and nice experiences. People leading meaningful lives experience a deeper sense of satisfaction.
Evidently, they invented the word ‘fucktard’ for a good reason.
Some of the happiest people I have ever met were housewives whose entire existence revolved around selfless giving, usually with a mind to the future happiness of their husbands and children. They were happy because nurturing the well-being of their loved ones gave them all the meaning they required, and existential angst didn’t enter into the equation unless and until death and the hereafter entered into it.
Happiness is a gift that comes easiest to those with uncomplicated minds, simple tastes, and modest, achievable ambitions. Such lives are almost guaranteed to grant a deeper sense of satisfaction than the lives of deep thinkers and egotists who strive to leave an outsized stamp on the universe. I don’t think there is any sense in which Abraham Lincoln was happy, and even less so a sense in which he was satisfied. Yet, to the degree that he summoned the courage to make huge, consequential decisions and see them through, he did so precisely because he only found meaning and satisfaction in pursuing his eternal moral code, which also happened to be secular, even for the time.
It takes a certain kind of conceit, however, to rate Lincoln’s life as superior to the happy housewife whose concerns are more mundane and whose satisfaction more easily attained. Her happiness is real, and it is enviable. It does not need to be more than it is. One is no more dedicated to the future than the other.
Brooks never contemplates that the only meaningful kind of life that he actually values is actually the kind filled with melancholy, disappointment, and constant struggle. Think Jesus at Gethsemane, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” Think Socrates as he contemplates the hemlock, “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” (Translation: my death is the recovery from an illness).
Fuck, think of drunk Richard Nixon talking to the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.
Happiness has got nothing to do with it, but it’s nice if you can get it.
That’s what we mean when we say that everyone needs to find their own meaning to life, because we can’t all find it watching the goddamned Mets. We’re not all going to be in the last history book to burn up with the Sun.
The philosophy of meaningfulness emerges in a culture in which there is no common moral vocabulary or framework. It emerges amid radical pluralism, when people don’t want to judge each other. Meaningfulness emerges when the fundamental question is, do we feel good?
I hate to keep hitting David Brooks with The New Testament since it isn’t his Testament, but he loves it so much. He could familiarize himself with some of its wisdom like, I dunno, The Mote and the Beam? How’s this for a common moral vocabulary: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
This is broadly understood to be Jesus’s way of telling future David Brooks to zip their pie holes about the meaningfulness of other people’s lives.
Jesus didn’t tell people that they would feel good. Jesus didn’t feel good. He wasn’t fucking happy.
He lived a meaningful life, though, didn’t he? I mean, we’re still talking about him, aren’t we?
And isn’t that the kind of immortality that Brooks wants for himself and believes we should want for ourselves, too?
But, for whatever reason, some of us just want to watch the goddamned Mets.
Not me, of course, but there you are.
