The Anti-Human Age: So What?

 

Drew Carey killed God for me. This cosmic crime was perpetrated years before the comedian hosted The Price Is Right. I didn’t ask him to. It was an unintended favor. A favor I appreciate to this day. The problem was that when God died, meaning died with him.

I was a Sunday School teacher at my Grandma’s church when I was 15, but as my twenties approached, my faith was beginning to falter. My brain loves science, and the contradictions were stacking up, forming an altar to disbelief I couldn’t continue to ignore. I was nineteen when I lost faith altogether, living and working at my aunt’s bed and breakfast, a magnificent antebellum mansion built in 1853. I was a huge fan of The Drew Carey Show, and when Drew’s book, Dirty Jokes and Beer, came out, I had to read it. Inside were dirty jokes and drinking stories, but there was also Drew’s compelling argument for atheism. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was reading in bed when I realized God had died in me. I put the book down beside me and went back and forth about it in my mind.

Am I really an atheist?

Yes.

I sat up and declared, “Grandma must never know.”

What remains after the rejection of religion? A meaning-shaped void. The universe is vast, but despite our careful excavations into its nature, our cosmic container appears unburdened by meaning altogether. This has always been a problem for me. Believing in a meaningless universe, a meaningless life, is nihilism.

I don’t want to be a fucking nihilist. It sucks, dude. Nihilism, in my experience, is felt rather than philosophical, and the implications have been a nightmare for me. Depression is a vampire, hungry for my joy, always lurking behind the curtains of my psyche. Nihilism and depression are best buddies, and boy, do they love to drink with me. I want to reject nihilism like I reject a personal god, but while it’s easy for me to imagine a godless universe, I can’t imagine a meaningful one. If I believe that life is meaningless, but I don’t want to be a nihilist, how the fuck do I manufacture meaning that doesn’t feel performative or phony?

Obviously, religion is off the table. Religion manufactures meaning, but it requires faith and the synchronicitous selection of which religion to follow. If intrinsic meaning does come from religion, it only comes from one of them, so good luck. Next option, please! Science is often seen as the opposite of religion, and I love it as much as Buzz Beer. Science doesn’t rescue us from the nihilism trap either, though, because rescue isn’t what science is for. Science doesn’t describe reality; it describes what reality does. It’s all about context. For example, moons move around planets due to mass warping spacetime. Science can tell us how things behave, not what’s at the bottom of the hole our questions dig. It cannot tell us what suffering is for or what reason we have to get out of bed in the morning besides, “Capitalism requires this of me.”

If I reject religion and science as means of meaning, where then might I dig up the meaning I need so badly?

Creating art has always been a way I’ve mined meaning. I’m currently writing a book about panpsychism, the belief that everything in the universe is conscious. Digging into science and consciousness led me to a kind of Spinozan flavored agnosticism, but I still reject the idea of a personal god. Real hard. On the subject of meaning, agnosticism, like religion and science, fails me. Agnosticism offers honesty, not warmth. It’s a shitty place to sleep.

Maybe the mistake I’m making is assuming that meaning is the kind of thing a universe can possess. There is a universe. If it’s meaningless, it’s likely inappropriate to ask about meaning. The universe is, and that may be the only thing we can say for sure about nature, religion and science be damned.

“So what?” may be the healthiest response to this question of meaning.

Don’t worry, I see that look in your eyes. I’m not experiencing a moral collapse. You can’t just say, “Jolly good, I’m going to do a genocide now!” The absence of cosmic meaning does not erase suffering, love, or consequence. Ethics do not need to descend from Olympus or Valhalla to matter inside lives capable of being wounded. I’m talking about liberation, not apathy.

“So what?” means something closer to: “Life goes on, Drew, you’ve got a game of Plinko to get on with.”

After all, humans may be unusual in how we need the universe to mean something. Other animals seek food, safety, pleasure, and survival. Just like you and me, but humans ask whether survival has a point. Our fellow animals just live their lives. This is also true of most atheists I’ve encountered. For them, the living of life itself is the meaning.

I love and respect this position, but I don’t feel it. Meaning may be a byproduct of the human need for context. Religion, like science, exists to give us context. The sun is responsible for growing our crops, so it must be a God willing that growth into being. If the crops feed humans, that God must be personally invested in human life. If God is invested in human life, our purpose becomes to serve that God. Meaning emerges through the context between the sun and the crops, between the crops and us, and between us and God. It’s pattern-making under existential pressure. Context is everything for us. Consciousness may be fundamental, but meaning appears relational. It arises when conscious beings place experience into patterns of significance.

That distinction changes the problem. If the universe lacks intrinsic meaning, meaning is not therefore fake. It may simply not be a property of universes. It may instead be a property of conscious relation. This circles us back around to the only meaning-generating objects we know of in the universe: us.

That’s terrifying because no cosmic parent demands your fealty in exchange for a meaningful life. It’s beautiful because it releases meaning from grandeur. If you’re creating your own meaning, it doesn’t have to be God, your children, or the collected works of Plato. Meaning could come from telling offensive jokes or being a contestant on The Price Is Right.

How beautiful is that?

Maybe we don’t have to defeat nihilism, we have to domesticate it. We’ve been asking the universe to possess something our consciousness already generates. Meaning is not above us, beneath us, or hidden in the machinery of nature. It happens between things: between a mind and its world, a body and its needs, a person and a future, and the context it builds in order to continue. This idea does not cure nihilism or prove that life has a purpose waiting at the bottom of the hole. It gives us a different place to dig. Regardless, we’re here, making meaning because we’re built to make meaning.

If the universe doesn’t owe you meaning, where are you getting yours? Go spin that Price Is Right wheel. You may not win the big money, dude, but maybe the experience will mean something to you.