First Day

You will need me less after today

At least not in the same way as before

Some day you will be the one to lift me up

To drive me there, to help me fix it

To explain, to help me see

Growing as I fade away

I hope to help you on your course

There is no time to waste

For it's a short privilege that you are

My daughter, my son.

Cynicism

“I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're led to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.” - Ken Burns

Standing on the sidelines and making witty commentary is much easier than a full-throated engagement in the fray.  It’s easy to ridicule what has not worked, it’s much harder to dream up the solutions.  So, for many, cynicism has become the default mode.

Cynicism is created when hope meets experience and experience shows hope up.  We leave high school or college with grand ideas of how the world can be a better place.  We wonder why our parents seemed jaded.  We embark on careers full of hope, believing a little inspiration and perspiration go a long way, until many of us hit the walls of organizational politics, bureaucracy, or most depressing of all, people who can’t or don’t want to be helped.  Eventually, most of us settle for making a living and doing good where we can.  We smile a little at those who still think they can make a difference, but mostly we entertain ourselves with witty, cynical comments.

It’s embarrassing to admit that our dreams of bettering humanity have failed.  It’s not the right thing to admit that society is still plagued with poverty, crime, illiteracy, and poor health.  Indeed, it seems these problems are likely getting worse.  While we lock our doors at night and look for the best schools for our children there is still a part of us that resents ourselves for fleeing instead of engaging the problems.  So what do we do?

Fear

A clean page

A pictureless frame

An empty suitcase

No bridges burned

No lessons learned

Never say the wrong thing

Never say anything at all

Fear of looking a fool in the everyday

Is to throw it all away

Beginnings

We all have a beginning – a start date.  There was a time when we were not.  This fact is frequently brought back to me as I listen to my children.  Young as they are, they are fascinated by their birth stories.  They find it hard to think there was a time before them.  I find it difficult too.  They want to find their place in the story.

 
Adults too are fascinated by our past, and in particular the past of our ancestors.  The story of how we came to be is after all not just our story but the story of those who came before us and, directly or indirectly, caused us to be instead of not.

Why do children love to hear about their beginnings?  Why do we as adults desire to learn about not just our personal pasts, but the history of our families?  I believe we are fascinated by the journey.  We want to see how far we have come from Point A.  We may not yet have reached Point B, or even know what Point B is, but we want to see progress. 

Time

No time to waste

Days that never end

No time like the present

Days over before they begin

Chasing, ticking, counting

We do not set the pace

Too much or too little

No time to say goodbye

Finale?

“Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.”  (1)

We have an inbuilt desire to do things that matter.  But what if everything we build and love and fight for is gone someday?  Without a trace.  As if it never was.  Would it matter that we existed for an instant in the face of an eternity without us?  The inescapable answer is that it would not.

The problem is that we know, with the rarity of absolute certainty, that we will die. 

However, modern science tells us the universe is not about us.  It tells us via evolutionary biology that we owe our existence to chance.  With all the potential apocalyptic disasters looming over our heads, it is possible that we as a species will not endure forever. We know we have our own expiration date.  Yet, the thought of our non-existence causes us great angst.

 “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.”  This is how Paul of Tarsus, the writer of much of the New Testament, which is the second part of the Christian Bible, summed up life if death is our final curtain call.

But even hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, doesn’t work out.  We can’t do what we want because of limitations that all of us (to some extent or another) face.  We may lack the material resources: money, power, or physical capacity, to do what we want.  Further, more often than not, our desire to do something will conflict with someone else’s desire to do something else.  Someone may prevail (there is a possibility that neither person will get what they want) but it may not always be you.  We also know that many aspects of our lives are beyond our control.  Disease, natural disaster, war, economic collapses, and political convulsions, can all radically alter the course of our lives.  As we are all too painfully aware, there is little we can do to insulate ourselves from these things.  So the best we can hope for is to strive to eat, drink, and be merry as it is not within our power to achieve even this modicum of happiness.

Why do we feel this need for significance in the face of our insignificance?  Is it some kind of cosmic joke?  If so, I don’t hear too much laughter.

The Bible reassures us that there is a meaning to all of this.  The writer of Ecclesiastes, a part of the Old Testament, the first part of the Bible, outlines the meaningless nature of life coming to the conclusion that life only has meaning because God judges everyone in the end.  The Bible tells us there is a life after this – heaven and hell.  After advising those who reject the resurrection of Jesus, the central element of Christianity, to “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”, Paul points out the difference for Christians is that we have a hope because the end of this life is not our end.  For those who believe and obey Jesus, who defeated death, there is a hope that will never be destroyed.  Paul writes: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (2)

You may choose to reject the idea of eternal life through the death and resurrection of Jesus, but if this life is all there is, any attempt to find meaning is doomed, fulfillment is fleeting, and significance illusory.

(1)           1 Corinthians 15 v.32.  King James Version.

(2)           1 Corinthians 15 v. 55. Kings James Version.

Summer Rain

Summer rain leaves little trace
Of endless torrents
That so soon before promised to wash the day away
I venture out in mindless complacency
Lacking wonder at the restoration
Hasn’t it always been this way?
A few scars of lingering puddles
Show the lie of my easy ways

Conspiracy Theory

Many today are obsessed with conspiracy theories. They believe that hidden from view those with great power and influence manipulate everything for their personal gain. Behind wars, economic disasters, disease lies the guiding hand of an unseen group of politicians and bankers who really rule the world. They think there is a double-game; a powerful group of kingmakers and breakers meeting in secluded luxury to decide the fate of the world; that they are not being told the truth; that something deeper is going on.

We humans will never be satisfied until we can explain everything and remove every mystery. Science has also got into the act with the search for theories that explain everything and the quest for the end of inquiry. Philosophers have also sought to find great forces that cause the changes that we see around us. Karl Marx theorized that class warfare was the driving force. Adam Smith believed in the invisible hand that guided human commerce. In addition, we think the explanation will boil down at its core to some overriding cause or principle behind everything.

Today, we want to see that cause as something physical or material and not metaphysical such as an omnipotent God. Indeed, religion and Christianity in particular, are theorized to be great conspiracy theories at their heart. The wildly popular novel the Da Vinci Code, purported to expose a conspiracy to conceal the fact that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene. Even though numerous authorities have exposed this theory to be pure hokum, more than eighty million people have read this book.

Why do we look for a cause that links everything together? What if instead of a hidden group in control of everything, there is no one pulling the strings. Chaos. Every man and woman for his or herself? Frightening? Definitely. But we don’t think like that.

The Bible provides an answer why we have this sense of something deeper going on. That reality is not all that meets the eye. The Bible presents a world where there is an unseen spiritual dimension that determines what occurs in the physical world.

In the movie the Matrix, the hero Neo has an inkling that there is more to life than his hum-drum existence as a corporate cubicle-clone. Neo’s eyes are opened after he comes into contact with Morpheus and his cohorts. The grey everyday world in which he has existed was a sham all along. This movie exploits the familiar feeling that surely this can’t be all there is.

Plato described this feeling as living in a cave sitting in front of a fire watching shadows on the cave wall made by people and objects that pass the entrance of the cave. He claimed that like the cave dwellers we only see shadows of reality in our everyday existence and not the true reality that exists outside of the cave.

Some might argue that one day science will demystify this sense of the spiritual. But this claim is profoundly unscientific. Science deals with what can and has been proved. So until science proves this spiritual sense away, this argument has no power. To claim it is an answer is to make science a religion.

This idea that for all we know, our everyday physical world is a shadow of something greater, obviously has legs. Plato’s cave allegory and the Matrix are separated by over two thousand years. The sense that we live our lives in monochrome while a technicolor universe lies hidden behind every curtain - from time to time brilliantly shining through to expose the drabness of the quotidian - has not diminished since ancient times. Try as we might we can’t seem to shake the sense there is something else happening on a greater stage.

Tomorrow

I build and break for you
I weep and pray for you
While today passes unloved

It’s easier today - a day of light
After the night of dark and rain
But that doesn’t change
The working out in the end

That sun follows rain
That joy follows pain
That there is no tomorrow without today.

A Post-Modern World?

Today there is much talk about how we live in a post-modern world. What does that mean? What does it mean to assert that we have moved from modernism to post-modernism? Has the nature of truth changed or just our view of it? What was the motivation for this change – whatever it is?

Let us define the terms. Modernism is the view that asserts that there are objective truths out there to be discovered. It maintains however that these objective truths are material truths that can be discovered by empirical scientific discovery.

Modernism, marked a change from what went before as it explicitly rejected the existence of spiritual or metaphysical truths; modernism was driven by the Enlightenment and the explosion of scientific discoveries that followed. In other words, that everything about our world, where we came from, art, love, hate and the morality that binds us could be discovered and broken down into material, empirical terms.

Before modernism the prevailing view was that our world had a material as well as a metaphysical or spiritual dimension. It was also held that we humans had a dual nature – a material physical body and a spiritual soul. [1] The traditional answer to why we have a drive to be good, to why we are exhilarated by great art, to why we dream of utopia, was that these concepts, which were grounded in a higher spiritual reality, touched our souls in an intangible way. Throughout much of the world it was believed that Christianity explained this higher reality.

The end goal to which modernism was travelling was to make sense of the world without metaphysics – without God. Modernism wanted to answer these questions about morality, art, love and human aspiration, without resorting to positing the existence of a Supreme Being. But modernism concerned with only examining the tangible proved not to be so good at explaining the intangible.

The end point of modernism in a philosophical sense was logical positivism, a philosophical movement that held that any statement that was not a logical tautology or that could not be empirically tested and verified was meaningless. [2] This left ethics, art, love out in the cold.

Post-modernism is a reaction to the failure of modernism to account for essential facets of humanity such as poetry, politics, love and morality. Since objective answers to these questions proved impossible to come by so there was a migration to a different paradigm of truth that was subjective. Post-modernism rejected of the dogma of objective empiricism and instead insisted that truth was based on community. The post-modern worldview asserts that our values about ethics, art, politics, love and hate evolved over time as humans evolved and formed societies. [3] Post-modernism is therefore another attempt to come up with satisfying answers to the essential human questions without the need to talk about metaphysics and spirituality. Its solution is that there is no objective truth and we haven’t discovered it because we’ve been looking for something that isn’t there. On this view all of our current values are the result of historical accident and could have been otherwise – they are contingent.

According to a post-modern view, truth is pragmatic, subjective and contingent. Truth is made not discovered. But this also means that truth changes over time. Nothing is absolute. Nothing is guaranteed.

The problem with post-modernity is that if truth is contingent and subjective, nothing has any meaning. If our concepts of truth are based on society they could change at any moment, and there is no basis for calling action something right or wrong, beautiful or hideous. Everyone is right and wrong at the same time.

So I don’t think that post-modernism provides meaningful answers. Many people insist that the prevalence of post-modernism is a death knell to belief in the spiritual and therefore to traditional Christianity. However, I think the opposite is true. The failure of modernism and the inherent contradictions at the heart of post-modernism show that attempts to reject a spiritual or metaphysical dimension to this world do not cut the mustard. Indeed, belief in spirituality among “non-religious people” is marked. [4]

Instead I think there are cosmic clues that alert us to the fact that there is more to the world than meets the physical eye – a spiritual as well as a material dimension to our world. Our desire to be good, our desire for utopia, our love of art, our wonder in the face of nature, our fear of the end are some of these clues. The modernist project to ground these clues in the physical world has come up empty, the post-modern attempt to ground them on society has not provided any answers to the big questions just denied there are such big questions to be answered.

What’s the upshot? First, new atheism is in trouble. Much of the current crop of new atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, are modernists. They answer questions about morality, love, society and art by reducing them to material terms. If modernity has been replaced by post-modernity, this approach has been widely rejected. Second, post-modernism doesn’t provide meaningful answers. If you want meaningful significant answers they must be objective. Searching for objective answers about morality, art and love inevitably leads to contemplation of the metaphysical or the spiritual. The surge in interest in spirituality provides evidence for this thesis. Human attempts to answer these questions in terms of science and society have failed. Maybe that’s because we had the answer all along.

1. Plato. Republic. Trans. Waterfield, Robin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; Descartes. Discourse on the Method and the Meditations. Trans. Sutcliffe, F.E. Penguin Books. Middlesex: 1971.

2. See, for example, Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1952.

3. See, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed., Robert Audi. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1995; 634-35; Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, Anscombe, G.E.M., Hacker, P.M.S. and Schulte, Joachim trans. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009; 99, Investigation #261; Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

4. See Hemmingway, Mollie Ziegler. “Look Who’s Irrational Now”. Wall Street Journal 19 Sep. 2008: W13. Available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178219865054585.html.