What if I didn't find Meaning meaningful?

How do we find meaning in life? Theists -- even open-minded ones -- often speak of a sort of meaning that I really don't understand. Here's Quixote, who is ever-thoughtful in both senses of the word, opining quite honestly on the subject of meaning:

"Atheists have purpose in their lives. They find meaning. They stare at the heavens just like theists. If purpose and meaning are illusions, they are darn good ones. We are all fools. Atheists themselves are only slightly less deluded than theists in this area.

...

"Again, we do not seem to get meaning from matter. Meaning is more consistent with an intelligence behind the universe."

It's not just theists, either. I met an atheist guy at a party once who said that as far as he was concerned, the meaning of life was looking for it -- not creating it, but looking for it. "Maybe there's meaning out there," he said.

How the heck can there be meaning out there? The only meaning I've ever seen was very definitely in here. In my mind!

Seriously, I don't get this. When I say 'meaning', I'm not talking about a property of the universe. I'm talking about my mental state, or perhaps another person's mental state. When I say something means something, I mean that it means something to me, or to you, or to us as part of a shared understanding. There is no echo of some bigger concept. There is no sense in which I am using 'meaning' as a flawed substitute for Meaning with a capital M. This is the only meaning I know and as far as I can tell in my youthful state it is the only meaning I'll ever need.

Apparently, not all atheists agree. John Evo speaks of "trying to play that via rationality I can create meaning". Evidently, for him, (human-)created meaning is not quite enough. I note this with all sympathy and have no desire to pathologise it. It fascinates me. Why do I not feel this way? Authors Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett both surely have to take some credit. The fact that I adopted this notion of meaning prior to my teens may also contribute to my inability to conceive of other possibilities. Whatever the reason, for me 'meaning' is the easy question. Before reading John Evo's post I honestly thought theists just brought that one up because they were deluded and brainwashed.

So I have some questions. If you do believe in, or wish for, or are able to imagine some idea of Meaning beyond the ordinary meaning which simply refers to a state of mind, how would it interact with little-m meaning? What if I didn't find Meaning meaningful? Would that be possible, in your opinion?

Is Meaning just an extra thing that some people find meaningful?

Stopping to Think

The Nonbelieving Literati -- the atheist book club started by the Exterminator -- had a striking success of sorts this last round. John Evo, choosing the next book for the Literati to read, decided to pick a classic that would be completely new to him, and we loosely associated literate atheists settled down, each in our own corner, to read The Plague by Albert Camus.

The results were stunning -- see the Spanish Inquisitor for an overview. Pick a Nobel prizewinner and you get posts all over the show, some thoughtful, some critical, some on smaller themes, some on larger ones, and nearly all of them making powerful points. I was particularly impressed by the Lifeguard's post, which took some of the scariest ideas in the book and faced them head on, starting with the disconnect between the way we live our lives day to day and the moments when we actually stop to think about the meaning of it all:

Think about it. Every day you wake up. You wonder what you’ll have for breakfast. Should I just stop at Dunkin Donuts? No, I’m trying to lose some weight for the beach season. . . . All of these things cease to matter ten minutes later when a car comes crashing across three lanes, skidding 360 degrees on a rainy parkway just twenty feet in front of you on the way to work.

Life, it appears, has a funny way of reminding us just how irrelevant our everyday lives are.

Sometimes it seems like nobody bothers to ask the real questions. But the truth is, I think most of us do. We don't question our foundations all the time, but every so often, we all have to face the broader questions about where we find our motivation and what we want from life. Philosophy is more common than you think.

Art is more common than you think. When I was a child, for some reason I thought painting and music and dancing and the like were for kids. For kids, because they just might grow up to be good at them, and for the lucky few adults who actually did grow up to be real artists and musicians and dancers. But you know what? A few years back, I found my grandmother pulling out her set of pastels and carefully drawing a vase of yellow flowers. It wasn't much better than the good end of kids' drawings, and I thought it was a little weird for an old woman to be picking up a new hobby, but I figured it was kind of nice, really. Maybe you didn't have to give up that stuff when you got older after all.

A few months ago, I was getting into Nana's car and I had to shift a picture off the passenger seat. It was a wave, in glorious colourful blues and greens, the richness of the pastels in full display. I was impressed. And my grandmother? She smiled in that slightly shy, proud sort of way, as I might smile if you were kind enough to compliment one of my poems, and said "Actually, I'm particularly proud of that landscape on the back seat, there, the one with the red-roofed house. I think it's my best one so far."

If you put the work in, you really can get well beyond what your average mildly talented kid can produce. She might never sell a picture. I might never publish a poem. But we're both doing something worthwhile. Art is not just for those who might earn a living from it. Art is for those who might gain a little life from it.

Religion sometimes sells itself as a source of meaning. The alpha course is a good example. And whilst I don't advocate using your desire for meaning as a measure of the truth of a story, I think there's a lot to be said for organisations that give people the opportunity to explore these sorts of questions together. Here's one interesting example calling itself the School of Philosophy. I only have my brief exploration of their website to go by, but they appear to be refreshingly broad. Looking at this flyer advertising their Cultural Day, I conclude that they're not entirely free of what we skeptics refer to as 'woo', but nor does their entire programme rest on nonscientific mumbo-jumbo. Rather, they appear to be taking inspiration from all manner of thinkers from all times and places. Lack of dogma -- I approve. This sort of inclusive participation in the search for meaning and joy in life is a really good idea.

An atheist who seeks meaning or self-expression might take a course like this, or study poetry, or become fascinated by astronomy as a source of awe in the universe. The sort of philosophy that you learn in a university can be very mind-expanding, too.

If you're thinking of creating an atheist group in your region to discuss these sorts of things, though, might I suggest a book club?

Objectivity

I think it was sometime last year that I had a Christian, in the course of a friendly but challenging conversation, pull the 'everything is subjective' argument on me. I gather the argument is basically "All of our experience is subjective to some extent, framed by our human minds, and none of our experience is absolutely certain, so I can believe whatever I want." It's an inventive defence; I shall not accuse it of being borrowed from postmodernists (atheist or otherwise), for postmodernists owe something to Soren Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard was a devout Christian who did use this argument in a fashion at least vaguely similar, albeit with much more depth and the insertion of several other fascinating ideas that I don't quite agree with but which expand my mind nevertheless. At the time, I simply conceded that arguing against that idea might take a little more thought than being able to simply point to the evidence. But I've thought further on the subject, and by now I think I can offer a defence.

Let me start by conceding outright that of course we are trapped in our own minds; we do filter what we see through a subjective lens. Yet objectivity makes its way in, nevertheless. Suppose we're wandering along in our subjective experience, dum de dum, subjective subjective subjective, and we notice categories, yes? For example, some of the things we experience are experienced as being 'black' (whatever that means), some are 'white', some are 'coloured'. The edges of those categories might be blurred, but we can generally say that some things definitely fall more into one category than another. The boundaries between categories can also shift depending on time and place. Some things feel cold to the touch, some things feel hot, but which way such things are felt depends heavily on what we have been touching previously.

Now, as we're wandering along in our subjective experience, we might notice a category of perceptions which do not tend to shift depending on time and place and the experiencer and the method of experiencing. For example, temperature as measured by a column of mercury doesn't shift in the same way that subjective perception of heat does. To take a more interesting example, we can measure the structure of a crystal with X-ray diffraction, and we can measure it with an electron microscope, and when we do, we find a strong overlap between the two different methods of perception -- things which don't shift depending on the method of measurement. Or, yet another example, working from the hypothesis that all animals have a common ancestry, we might guess their relationships by looking at them, and we might guess their relationships from similar structures in their DNA. If the guesses tend to agree, well that's an indication that this 'distance of relationships' property really is measuring something that belongs somewhat to the category of perceptions which do not depend heavily on the method of perception.

So tell me, what name do we give to this category of things which remain constant depending on the method of perception? Why, 'objective', of course! The word 'objective', like most words, has some variations in meaning, but this is at least one definition which seems to me to be well thought out, and worth keeping. The observation that there is some subjectivity in all of our experience does not negate the usefulness of this category. Moreover, if we wish to know what things we can rely on to remain constant and predictable, it is in the category of objective perceptions that we should be looking.

Science is an attempt to identify members of this 'objective' category. Given this fact, I am inclined to consider the notion of consilience as being science's central point. Consilience refers precisely to the sort of situation I have described above -- to situations where several different types of measuring, of guessing, of perceiving all come to the same conclusion. If my characterisation of objectivity is allowed to stand, consilience is by definition objectivity's hallmark. As such, any idea which wishes to attain the status of 'objective' must pass a scientific test -- a test which varies the conditions and/or the method of perception, and still gets the result which our earlier generalisations would have predicted. The bigger the variation in circumstances of the test, the stronger an indication of objectivity it is.

Ideas that do not show this sort of consilience cannot be said to be 'objective' in this sense. People's ideas of God, for instance, depend heavily on the culture in which they were brought up. If there is any consilience to be found here, it will certainly not be found in the extraneous trappings and extra details which vary from place to place. Yet the variations are so large, encompassing even differing ideas about how many gods there are, that it is difficult to see how any objectivity in this matter may be found. Perhaps someday somebody will show an idea of God which does stand up to scientific tests, which does display consilience. Until then, though, I remain an atheist.

Euthyphro: The Ins and Outs of Morality With God

The Euthyphro dilemma -- so called, because an early version is related in Plato's dialogue between Euthyphro and Socrates -- amounts to the observation that, if we believe that some universal notion of goodness or morality is imposed on the universe by God (or by the gods, in the case of the ancient Greeks), then we seem to be forced into one of two options. On the one hand, it is possible that God chose to set up a particular morality because He knew it was the morality. God, in this picture, is generally considered to be (non-tautologically) good, conforming to the true morality precisely, and showing us right from wrong in a way that is in line with this true morality. In this picture, morality is actually separate from God, and God, being good, follows it and also enforces it to some extent.

When theists defend God on grounds that He knows better than us, and always has a good purpose in mind, they seem to be working within this first framework: God is aiming for something (objectively) good, so trust Him on that.

The other possibility is that goodness is just whatever God says it is. In that case, if God says it's right to kill babies, then it's right to kill babies. In fact, if you believe God did, as in the Bible, say to kill babies, then killing babies was at that point the right thing to do. To say that 'God is good' is pretty meaningless in this picture -- all it says is that God does what God wants God to do.

There are also 'mixture' versions. For example, some Christians say that since God made this world, God has the right to do whatever He wants with this world, and we ought to follow along with that. If we take this as referring to an objective moral statement along the lines of "if you make something, you have total control over it and it ought to obey you", then essentially these Christians are saying that there is some outside -- even potentially outside of God -- objective morality, it's just that that morality means, firstly, that we should do what God wants, and secondly, that since no-one created God, God can do whatever He wants. Frankly, I think this idea gives you the worst of both worlds and I have no idea why it is so popular.

Then there are those who say that God can do whatever He wants -- but aren't we lucky that He wants what is good for us? Such people distinguish between one sort of 'good' which is defined as 'whatever God wants', and another sort of 'good', which is defined in an almost utilitarian fashion, in terms of what makes us human beings happy and fulfilled and all the rest of it, and which God happens to like, isn't that nice? If you believe that, I guess I can understand why you praise God's goodness despite defining 'good' in terms of God -- presumably you're praising the fact that God's notion of goodness happens to coincide with your own.

I think it says something, however, that it is this coincidence with what we believe to be good that so often provides the clincher with respect to how God's goodness is viewed. It's quite rare (and, in my case, almost always nauseating) to find someone who embraces the second option of the Euthyphro dilemma without pause, excusing any and every aspect of the 'Problem of Evil' with the idea that morality is just whatever God says it is. A tsunami killed millions of people, and orphaned a whole lot of innocent kids? That's not evil, it's good, because it's what God wanted, and good is whatever God wants. No, you don't hear that very often.

I'll keep my human notions of what is good, and never mind that there appears to be no God. And if I ever discover God, then yes, I'll dare to measure Him against that notion. Unlike my fellow human beings, an all-powerful God doesn't need my sympathy or my compassion, and if God causes evil in the lives of human beings, I'll dare resist and be not resigned to a universe ruled by an amoral or immoral God. I won't give up without a fight.

Challenging the Paramounce of Happiness

In my last post on morality, I mentioned that I am approximately utilitarian, and promised to explain how my viewpoint differs from utilitarianism at a later stage. So, while there are further responses to some of the points LL brings up that I could mention, and a whole host of related subjects that might keep me blogging for weeks if I wanted to stick to a single subject, for now I shall give you the post that I have actually promised.

I quite like to break utilitarianism down into two propositions:

(1) We should act in that manner that produces the greatest good.

(2) Happiness is (the only thing that is) intrinsically good.

Do you agree that happiness is intrinsically good? Do you agree that it is the only intrinsic good? I'm not going to give you my answer just yet. Still, I will tell you that just about any utilitarian will agree that 'happiness' is meant in a very broad sense here, encompassing anything from sensory pleasure to refined artistic taste and even spiritual fulfilment (although those of us who are atheists might have a slightly different definition of the word 'spiritual', of course, and some of us, mindful of the connotations, prefer to avoid it entirely). Some, notably John Stuart Mill, have argued that 'higher' notions of happiness should be given greater weight than mere pleasure. Personally, at least insofar as it only affects the person having the experience, I think it ought to be a matter of taste.

Proposition (1) has been challenged on the grounds that you can use it to justify nasty trade-offs. Ursula K. LeGuin's quite marvellous short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (PDF) illustrates this problem almost as an abstraction, describing a beautiful city where everyone lives good and happy and fulfilling lives -- but the reason they are happy is because of a single, frightened child kept in a cellar, spending its life in confusion and misery and self-hate. Is the happiness of others worth unbroken pain and despair for a single person? LeGuin doesn't seem to think so.

We might answer LeGuin's problem by requiring a rule in our utilitarian calculus which states that unhappiness is generally better shared around; a week's unhappiness for a hundred people is better then a hundred weeks' unhappiness for a single person. We might justify it with the idea that happiness can actually be appreciated better when you have been through a small amount of pain, and spreading the pain around in small bits thus maximises the trade-off in the resulting appreciation of the happiness that follows (but if you agree with that justification, then of course the rule is actually not inserted into utilitarianism but rather derived from it -- just a note). Other answers are also possible, of course; if you'd have preferred me to bring up some other answer, please do write it in the comments so we can all see it. For now, however, I am mostly interested in challenges to the idea that what is good is defined by what makes us happy.

I once attended a philosophy seminar (been to a few of those in my time) where the speaker was defending the Aristotelian notion that the purpose of human beings is to reason. Aristotle thought that everything had a purpose (telos, final cause). The purpose of a pen is to write. The purpose of rain is to water the fields so that plants can grow. And the purpose of human beings? Human beings exist so that they can reason, says Aristotle. That is what human beings are for.

Somewhere in the course of a very informal discussion after the seminar, the speaker challenged the notion that we should be aiming for happiness, with reason only as a method of getting there, using the following interesting illustration:

Look, orgasm is the highest form of happiness, right? Are we agreed on that? So suppose you had this machine -- call it the Orgasmatron -- and you could sit in it, and you'd have an IV drip or something, your life wouldn't be shortened at all, and you could just sit in it for the rest of your life and be continuously and orgasmically happy. Think seriously about this. Can you honestly tell me that you would just give up everything in your life to go sit in the Orgasmatron?

Well, would you?

I wouldn't. It would be like dying. Even with heaven included, I don't want to die.

So here is the answer I gave at the time, after I had thought for a bit. Part of what makes us happy in this life (outside the Orgasmatron) is being engaged with the world. We have to have things we care about in order to make life worth living. But then, because we have things we care about -- goals, hopes, caring for other people -- we don't want to give those things up. Not even to be continuously, orgasmically happy.

Now that's a good answer, but it's not necessarily a utilitarian one. Should we want to be continuously, orgasmically happy, over and above other purposes? If everyone already has the option of the Orgasmatron, I suspect the utilitarian answer is yes (but, please, feel free to argue). Still, I have to say, that's not my answer. Here and now, outside the Orgasmatron, I would fight to be excused the fate of being continuously, orgasmically happy for the rest of my life.

Still, I don't agree that the purpose of human beings is to reason. I think we make our own purposes. I think we should make our own purposes, weaving ourselves into the world with tireless urgency (sometimes I suspect this makes me diametrically opposed to the Buddhist notion of detachment from the world; on the other hand, trying to be detached is a purpose, so maybe not).

I think that purpose is an intrinsic good. That's not to say that there are not evil purposes, purposes which aim to destroy the happiness and purpose of others. But purpose is an essential part of what it takes to live a fulfilled, happy, successful life. And so, I think our view of morality ought to respect that, placing purpose and story right up there with happiness in the things we try to aim for -- indeed, aim with, in the case of purpose!

Thus is my utilitarianism diluted.

The Raft

When I was ten, I believed in Absolute Morality, derived from reason and incontrovertible. My mother, she of the part-time philosophy degree, subscribed not so surprisingly to the idea that morality should come from and be subject to reason and, childlike, I took the notion to extremes. I wasn't quite sure of the whole rationale, but I was jolly well going to learn more about philosophy and then I'd be able to understand exactly how to pinpoint morality perfectly. In the mean time, I was going to be consistent. There were to be no logical contradictions in my viewpoint!

Morality had been a concern of mine for a while if I remember correctly; a practical concern rather than a theoretical one. I applied myself to the problem of playground bullying. Standing by while somebody else was being bullied was unacceptable; so was even the mildest form of unkindness to those who seemed outcast. This latter principle had me patiently listening to the class geek quite regularly, although I confess I mostly tuned out his Star Wars trivia and then tried to pretend I'd been listening (he grew up to be quite hot, actually, but he was a year ahead of me so we never spoke much in high school and I doubt he remembered the girl who used to say 'Mm-hm' to him in primary school).

The fact that I considered myself required to intervene when anyone else was in trouble was actually less problematic than you might think. I know that in movies, the way it goes is that the cute little girl stands up for the little boy, who then defiantly rejects her in an attempt to regain his manly pride from the ignominy of having needed defence. However, I stood up for other people so regularly that, at least as far as I can remember, it seemed to be a generally accepted occurrence. I also never waited for thanks. I wasn't in it for thanks, I was in it for the joy of the argument -- which, regretfully, never lasted long. I used to plant my feet slightly wider than my shoulders (second position in ballet, if you must know), glare at my offending classmate and shout "How dare you? What reason did you have to do that? Go on, argue! What's your reason?" Usually by the time I got that far, they'd have given up. Satisfying though it was to hear 'Don't argue with [Lynet]' as a generally accepted maxim, I often used to wish they'd put up more of a fight.

When I was eleven, I read Sophie's World. Thus, over a year or so, as things sank in and I re-read the technical parts I had skipped the first time around, I became acquainted with a rough outline of the ideas of history's great philosophers. I knew what utilitarianism was and had a go at understanding Immanuel Kant. I knew of Hume's dictum that 'ought' cannot follow from 'is', and his notion that morality was purely emotional. At the same time, I was dealing with some major snags in my anti-bullying crusade, to wit:

(a) As kids get older, they're less likely to be intimidated by mere shouting.

(b) As kids get older, their bullying gets more subtle, and their relationships with each other start to change. My peers were entering the "groups" phase (I skipped that one at the time because it seemed ludicrous to me to blindly follow the crowd, and had to go back and learn the necessary lessons when I was older). All of a sudden, I had to deal with the fact that most of the people I might have defended were more interested in becoming accepted as part of the group than in avoiding being bullied -- in fact, they'd take all kinds of crap as long as they were still even slightly "in".

There was no way for me to properly defend people. I wasn't really needed any more.

I was also really, really lonely. Rejecting the idea of the group can do that to you.

Somewhere towards the end of the year I was twelve, I had two quiet crises. One involved me realising that I was going to have to compromise my ideals, my reason, my personality in order to get the basic human interaction I needed in order to stop me from going insane. Here, however, I'd like to talk about the other change.

My standpoint on morality had been shifting slowly, the more I learned, and it was with sincere regret that I came to the conclusion that reason alone was not enough. Indeed, at twelve years old, with too much time alone to reflect, I didn't really have a definite position on morality at all. It was at around this time that I realised that I might have to allow some of my principles to be inconsistent with each other, taking my worldview as a work in progress rather than something that had to have finished perfection at all times. That was an important step. I also decided I rather liked the idea of a sort of dialogue between logic and moral intuition, starting with intuitions, then attempting to generalise in a consistent fashion, then going back to moral intuition as a way of seeing how the generalisation might need to be modified (I forget which philosopher I got that from -- it was ten years ago, after all -- but I know I didn't come up with it myself). Still, on some inner level, I had to concede that I was sidestepping the point. Why trust moral intuition at all? Is there any 'real' morality?

I confess freely that the idea that morality wasn't built into the universe really frightened me. Indeed, when I finally allowed myself to reason and let my thoughts go as they would, I came up with this:

Well, okay, so maybe there's no morality. But if there's no morality, then it isn't morally wrong for me to pretend there is morality. So I'm just going to act like there is morality anyway. Can I stop thinking about this now?

I was aware at the time of the parallels between such thinking and religious faith as held by many people. As an illustration, consider this comment:

To me, it either is all true and He is God and totally in control [. . .] or He isn't - and if He isn't, none of this really would matter, would it?

Obviously there's a slight flaw in the assumption that nothing would matter without God, and yes, we could construct an argument that favours a secular humanist view over a theist one with exactly that flaw in mind, contending that it does matter, and that in view of the things that matter (truth, human happiness and so forth), atheism is the better position. Oh, but I have given the end of the story away! Now, where was I?

Oh, yes. If I was disturbed by the notion that there might be no absolute morality, I was almost equally disturbed to find myself engaging in such faith-type reasoning. Was I as bad as Christians after all? In the end, I found my starting point by answering no to the question 'Can I stop thinking about this now?' No, you cannot stop thinking. If your reasoning is shaky, you must face the fact. By the moral principles which you defiantly continue to use, the truth matters, so stick as close to it as possible.

If the swamp where there were no rules lay just beneath my feet, and the platform above it on which I had stood was breaking apart, then I determined to myself to build no more than a raft. Dangerous as it might be, I determined to build no edifices of dubious foundation, no vast opaque temples to block out the sight of the unsteady ground. No catechism, no false authority of tradition, no pretense that there might be epistemological safety in numbers. Only a raft.

In the Sophie's World digested version of Sartre, I found the notion that human beings, having faced the terror of meaninglessness, are free to give their own meaning to their existence. I liked it and absorbed it, but it was many a year before I learned that the ideas I was groping towards had a name and a history already in their own right, and came to realise that I was quite simply and precisely a humanist. Indeed, meaning isn't hard to find in this universe; there is meaning as long as somebody means it. Morality is harder. I wanted it to be fundamental to the universe as a whole; I had to accept that it was confined perhaps to a single species on this tiny Earth. Good and evil only exist in our minds. But I care about them anyway.

I am not resigned: A meditation on tragedy.

The last Poetry Sunday at Daylight Atheism was Edna St. Vincent Millay's Dirge Without Music. The poem itself is a beautiful, sensitive, defiant meditation on death. Yet it is not of death that I wish to speak, or not death alone. Sublime though the poem is in its entirety, in the process of responding to Ebonmuse's particular emphasis on its quiet refusal to succumb to perfect acceptance of the inevitable I have been caught, caught entirely, by the final line alone.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. It's a small, simple idea that might have meant very little to another person, or to myself at another time. Knowing this, I cannot be sure that I am able to explain what it meant to me. Nor can I be sure that it will mean anything to you, if I do succeed in such an explanation. I offer my attempt at explanation nevertheless.

Ebonmuse writes, almost coincidentally, in that same thread that "Paradoxically, there can be true beauty in tragedy, for all that I would end it in a second if I had the power." Let this be my starting point, for, friends, if I had in front of me the magic wand that would end tragedy forever, I could never pick it up. No, never! The sweetest moments of my life have been those when tragedy fell away. How many lines of flaccid free verse have I wasted on the taste of tears? On the way despair becomes a lens through which the simple details of the world seem unimaginably good in their detachment from your pain? The simple fact is that I am not sure my life would be worth living if it had no tragedy in it.

The beauty that is in despair was an observation on which I built my view of the world. It was how I dealt with the reality of despair. Let me put this in a broader context. Human beings in general have a need to find ways to deal with the reality of pain and suffering. I do not speak here of the 'Problem of Evil' which plagues so many versions of conventional theism but rather the more simple part of us that cannot help but cry out at the unfairness and pain in the world: our own pain; the pain of those we love; all pain. Compassion can only exacerbate such a feeling. How do we deal with the incredible weight of suffering in the world? How do we deal with times when we ourselves are not sure that our own suffering will ever cease?

Religions have several different types of answers that they can give to these questions*. For example, we have the idea that we suffer because we deserve it. The notion of karma in Hinduism is the most extreme and obvious version of this. Those who suffer deserve to suffer; if you would avoid suffering, behave yourself. Believing in the ultimate fairness of the universe in this way may perhaps allow people to be psychologically reconciled to the suffering that inevitably occurs. It explains what people must do to avoid it, and gives people an excuse for not worrying too much about the pain of others. As freethinkers, of course, we may well be concerned about the consequences of people choosing not to worry about the pain of others! More importantly, however, we simply have no reason to suppose that there is any such karmic justice in place. The notion cannot be of use to us, even if we wanted it to be.

Another very common religious answer is to pull in the notion of a heavenly afterlife. Never mind that you are suffering now. Some day, you will live happily ever after, and so will those you love -- at least, they will as long as they belong to the same religion you do. This answer seems to rely on a willingness to be cold towards outsiders, but that is hardly a quality that human beings generally lack. Believing in heaven, people can struggle through, even if they believe their lives will never get better, by hoping for paradise at the end. Among atheists, the question sometimes arises whether (and when) we have the right to try to take this hope from people. I shall not try to answer that question completely, but perhaps I can shed some light on the extent to which there are atheist alternatives.

I confess I once naively placed a lot of confidence in the beauty that tragedy can produce. It's almost... karmic. Certainly it is at least a shift towards balance. After the storm, after the rain, the air is still and the grass is clean, and the shaft of sunlight coming down from the clouds can be a blessing beyond belief, even beyond belief in any God. I still do think that happiness arises in part by contrasts. I do not think I have ever thought that contrast was the only contributor to happiness, but nevertheless, my experience led me to play up this aspect of things. I had known the pain that comes when your world falls apart because you built it on false premises -- a healing pain from which you emerge somewhat subdued, but wiser and stronger. I had known small failures and deep loneliness, and found the small sweetnesses in each (I still have a radiant smile left over from when getting a smile back from a stranger really meant something). And out of this I could reflect that surely the world cannot be so bad when it gives you the soft rush of small joys in compensation for hardship.

Ah, but even Pollyanna had her moment when the 'glad game' just wouldn't work any more. And in real life the world is not required to miraculously restore to you the dearly beloved things it so coldly destroys. It is these moments when the narrative fails that are the hardest. How many deus ex machinas have I screamed at in the last few years? How dare George Eliot end The Mill on the Floss with a dubiously engineered death? (I expected better, having read Middlemarch). She's not allowed to die, she has to live. Live and suffer, Maggie. Live and suffer and show me how.

The worst tragedies are off the map. Jane Austen never wrote about what it was like when the man she loved died before they could marry. Think of it! This, at a time when marriage was the dearest ambition of every woman of Austen's age and class, to have the promise of that dreamed-of home, adulthood, security, love replaced with what might be (and, indeed, turned out to be) a lifetime of spinsterhood.

Knowing you are not alone can almost seem to make this sort of thing worse. Pick yourself up. Hearts are broken every day, Lynet, even worse than your so-narratively-wrong case. Oh, don't remind me of the sheer weight of broken hearts!

Of course, we know how Jane Austen dealt with her situation. Mansfield Park has a somewhat insipid streak precisely because our poor Jane, having given up hope in this world, was resolutely focused on the next. And since her novels improved after that low point, we may assume that she did, too, somehow. That option for making it through the rough patch is not open to me. What is?

Ah, well, I have options Jane Austen did not have. My life need not revolve around a relationship (hey, hers didn't either and she still managed a lot!). I can have a career. While away the hours until I die. I know I ought not to go gentle, but the imperative to take a hold of life seems hard, sometimes. If I keep working, will life stop feeling so flat?

And so I read Dirge Without Music, and, being asked to fully comprehend "I am not resigned", realised that I had pushed away that part of it the first time I read through. It hurts, not being resigned. How many times have I told myself that I'll just have to lump it?

Oh, help me, for I am not resigned. I am not resigned, and if I were resigned, not all the calm precautions and shaky rebuilding would ever be enough to restore the shine to my broken world.

Take me back, world of narratives and dreams. I know that beautiful things can die worthlessly. I know that many dreams disappear from our lives abruptly without so much as a 'goodbye'. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

When I finished crying and went outside, the sunshine seemed less incongruous. The grass was clean, the air was still, and my remembered loss still wasn't worth it, but I -- I wandered down the street with my radiant smile just a little bit easier than it was.

*I do not mean to imply that the non-religious ways of dealing with pain that I give later are not just as deeply felt by those with religion, too, of course -- L.L. Barkat's recent post would be proof against that assumption.

Formal logic, counterfactual conditionals, and free will.

Formal logic seeks to abstract general principles of reasoning which are in some way independent of context. For example, if we know that sentence A is true, then we know that the sentence "Either A or B is true" is also true. We don't need to know exactly what A (or B) actually say in order to know that this is a valid piece of reasoning, where "valid" means that if the initial assumption (premise) is true, then the conclusion follows logically. We can write this as follows:

Premise: A is true.
Conclusion: Either A or B is true.

Here are some more valid arguments:

Premise: A and B are both true.
Conclusion: A is true.

Premise: If A is true then B is true.
Premise: A is true.
Conclusion: B is true.

Premise: If A is true then B is true.
Premise: B is not true.
Conclusion: A is not true.

Some people find this sort of thing more obvious than others. Well, all right, everybody finds those first few examples that I have given obvious, but the last one requires different amounts of squinting with your head to one side, depending on natural ability and how much practice you've had. If you can't see it immediately, suppose that both premises are true and note that if A were also true, B would be true (by the previous argument), which would make B both true and not true. As a result, A must be false.

If this all seems like so much obviousness, consider that around the beginning of the twentieth century there was a movement to construct all of mathematics from this sort of abstract logic. That this movement ultimately failed in an interesting way does not change my point that formal logic can go well beyond the obvious.

People use different types of shorthand for various logically important words like "and", "or", "not" and "if". I shall use the following:

A_______A is true.
~A______A is not true.
AvB_____Either A or B is true (or both)
A&B_____Both A and B are true.
A->B____If A is true then B is true.

One way of explaining the exact content of each of these statements is in a truth table such as the following:

__A____B____~A____AvB____A&B____A->B
__T_____T______F______T_______T______T
__T_____F______F______T_______F______F
__F_____T______T______T_______F______T
__F_____F______T______F_______F______T

The first line of this table states that, in the case where statements A and B are both true, the statement "~A" is false, and the statements "AvB", "A&B" and "A->B" are all true. Alternatively, we can look down the second column for the right to see that the statement "A&B" is only true in the case where both A and B are true.

Some of you may be slightly discomforted by the "A->B" column. I know I was, when I first saw it. Yes, the fact that today is not Wednesday means that the statement "If today is Wednesday, then I have five legs" is true. Certainly the truth table thinks so, anyway. Suppose A is the statement "Today is Wednesday", and B is the statement "Lynet has five legs". We are given that A is false. According to the bottom two lines of the truth table this means that "A->B" is true. On the other hand, suppose today is Wednesday, and I do not have five legs. Now the truth table tells us that "A->B" is false.

Now, I know you can't see me over the internet, but I can assure you that I never have five legs. So the statement "If today is Wednesday, then Lynet has five legs" is true unless it is Wednesday, in which case it is false. Got that?

In mathematics, this version of "if . . . then" works fine, because things which are mathematically false stay false; things which are mathematically true stay true. However, in real life we often want to know what things would be like if they were different. If today was Wednesday, would I have five legs? This turns out to be a very different sort of question! An "if . . . then" statement is called a conditional statement. An "if . . . then" statement in which you are speaking of what would happen if something were true is called a counterfactual conditional statement.

Counterfactual conditional statements are pretty well impossible to put into formal logic. They seem to have an inextricable contextual component which makes them impossible to describe in a contextless, abstract way. Whereas the logical "A->B" doesn't require us to know anything about what A or B actually say, the statement "If A was true, B would be true" really needs context, and some idea of what A and B are, before we can use it. This is because we are speaking of some other possible (or sometimes impossible) world where A is true, and we need context and the elusive 'common sense' to tell us how much of the current world to imagine as changed before we consider whether B would be true in such a world. Consider the following exchange:

"If I had my cousin's money, I'd be a happy woman."

"If you had your cousin's money, you'd be in jail."

It's possible for both these statements to be true in some sense, even if the first speaker would most assuredly not be happy in jail! The first statement is considering a possible world in which the speaker both has her cousin's money, and has a legal right to her cousin's money. The second statement changes the world just enough that the first speaker would have her cousin's money, but does not change the fact that the first speaker has no legal right to her cousin's money. How much of the world do we change in evaluating this sort of statement? It depends on context. Sometimes it is obvious and sometimes it isn't. Either way, we can't substitute abstract As and Bs for the statements given. We need to know what is actually being said if we want to have any hope of deciding what is meant.

Counterfactual conditionals are, I would say, absolutely fundamental to human thought. However, the fact that they don't have an exact logical meaning means that they can interact with more logical ways of describing the world in an interesting fashion. For example, consider the question of free will. Most people would, I suspect, agree that we have free will in a situation if we could have acted differently. That's a counterfactual conditional right there, and the question of what free will means can twist in exactly the way that counterfactual conditionals do. For example, sometimes a person might say "I didn't have a choice about handing him my wallet -- the man had a knife to my throat!" Now technically, you could choose not to hand over your wallet. You could die instead if you wanted to. Of course, you'd lose the wallet anyway, so it would be a rather peculiar choice, which is why most people would accept that statement without a blink. The world where the wallet is taken from your dead body rather than given by you isn't considered as a relevant possibility when evaluating whether you could have acted differently.

Do we have some sort of 'free will' beyond the fact that we could act differently if we wanted to, counterfactually speaking? I find it hard to imagine how such a thing could work. That doesn't mean such a thing doesn't exist, of course, but I'll withhold belief until I'm given evidence and/or an accurate explanation of what such free will would actually mean.

Stories

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't read The Amber Spyglass or 1984, and don't want to know plot points beforehand, don't read this (I say nothing for Brave New World because I doubt that prior knowledge of the stuff I'll say on it would make the book less interesting). I use both books to illustrate ideas in ways which give away part of the ending.

L.L. Barkat has been writing about stories recently, a subject that has to be fascinating to anyone who, like me, reads Terry Pratchett as much for philosophy as for laughs.

I need books. I've been reading one book after another ever since I first learned how. I need them for emotional expression -- I tend to feel like I haven't fully understood an emotion until I've felt it through a book character as well as through myself. Somehow, reading about someone else feeling something similar is the best way to validate the feelings that shape me (though seeing it on film or in a play is a good second). Books are my release. Books challenge my assumptions. I read books written at every level of heaviness, for every age group. I couldn't live without them.

A good story will often have all sorts of small threads, any one of which could be important to a given reader, as part of a whole which has a more over-arching message. When I first read The Amber Spyglass, I took away what I think was one of the main messages, the idea that you should lead your life fully and richly. By the end of the book, the world, nay, the multiverse, has been rearranged so that everyone must do this. Why? Because when you die and go to the world of the dead, the messengers will only show you the way out (to dissolve at last in the light) if you have a true story with which to repay them for their trouble. You must have some kind of story. If you are alive, you should live. And this highlighting of the importance of richly experiencing things is central to the book's later climax.

But when I re-read the book, years later, while I was interested to realise how it had influenced my philosophy, the most important thing to me was a smaller point, a mere expression of emotion. The Amber Spyglass has the best expression I've ever seen of what it's like to fall in love deeply for the first time and then lose it before it even starts. I needed that story. It's not actually a very common one; certainly I never found a pop song which lamented my love the way I needed to grieve for it.

Similarly, it was a minor realisation from George Orwell's 1984 that was most important to me the first time I read it. While the political insight is important, and I'm glad for that reason that I had to read it for English, the most important thing for me at first was when I got to the end where the authorities finally find a way to break him. I remember letting the book fall for a moment, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, transfixed, thinking Everybody has a breaking point. Logically, you can only value one thing above all else and it isn't usually anything particularly brave or noble; you shouldn't expect it to be. "Everybody has a breaking point," I whispered to the ceiling . . .

. . . and forgave myself.

Speaking of dystopias, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World had a rather important effect on me. It made me distinctly uncomfortable. I didn't really want to know the things it was saying. You see, my morality has always had a distinctly utilitarian bent. But Huxley's failed utopia is one which is designed to make people happy. They are brainwashed from birth to like being the way they are. If they get unhappy, there is a nice drug with few unpleasant side effects that they can take which will remedy the situation with perfect ease.

The whole set-up is creepy. Huxley creates this effect deliberately, mind, but in my view the creepy aspects that are hardest to put down to nothing more than culture shock are those which relate most strongly to the way in which the society of the book tries (with considerable success) to eliminate unhappiness from the world. Why? Well, maybe it's because the people who live there generally have no stories. Their lives are happy, if bland, but so devoid of story that even the comprehension of exciting, interesting stories is beyond them.

So that's how a story modified my view of the 'good' that we as individuals and as a society should strive to create. Sure, we should promote people's happiness, but we should also help their stories along. It's good to have a society in which people can dream for things. It's good for people to have a few problems (maybe not too many) and it's good for those problems to be solvable. Human beings need stories in order 'to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape', as Death says in Hogfather. Let's not forget it.

Have I succumbed to relativism? Nope.

Over here, I asked "Have I succumbed to relativism?"

The answer is no. I did, however, succumb to laziness in wrapping up that post. If I had bothered to think some more, I'm sure I could have answered the question at the time.

For a start, I haven't succumbed to relativism because I do not think you should blur the line between something you've postulated for the sake of your mental health and something you believe because you have good evidence for it. I do, always, distinguish between the two and I'm willing to state categorically that, in general, people should make similar distinctions.

On the other hand, I think my statement that postulates for the sake of sanity or comfort should be kept to a minimum might be negotiable to some extent. Postulates for the sake of sanity or comfort are undesirable in that they can end up blurring your perception of the truth. One should not invent them indiscriminately. A reduction in such postulates is a good thing, provided you can survive afterwards. However, there are other good things in life besides the truth. I shall not ask that everyone rate truth as highly as I do. I shall simply ask that everyone rate truth reasonably highly. There is room for difference here. There is not room for an arbitrary amount of difference, that's all.

Okay, I admit it, I lied.

I said I was a "truth fundamentalist, whatever the cost". It's not true. If I thought that believing something would damage my mental health to the point of reducing my ability to think rationally in the first place, I would have to question the advisability of believing it, even if I had good reason to think it true. Also, if I thought that believing something would result in my doing something seriously morally wrong, I might well decide to deceive myself. I play games with myself all the time: "I'm sure I can do it", "I'm a good person", "She's a good person". Is altering my beliefs for the purpose of motivating myself and others a dent in my objectivity? Probably. But I just can't help but think it morally justified.

Sometimes I worry about the grey area between this and believing in God because it helps to motivate you. The thing which stops me from endorsing religion for this reason is that religion goes so much farther than that, builds such huge structures beyond simple motivational search for meaning, that it can sometimes work in the opposite direction -- it can cause people to do wrong. But what if you don't take your religion that far? What if you value your own moral sense enough to trust it above your scripture? What if you don't have any particular scripture, you just think the world makes more sense if there is a god?

I dunno. Personally, I think it's better to curtail the postulates you make for motivational purposes. I don't think it's possible to remove everything that you believe for the sake of comfort. I do think it's best to keep such things to a minimum. But I place the truth so much higher than most people. When I look at the difference between my eldest younger sister and me -- she'd put love above truth more often than I would -- I can't help but think that there are some things about her that probably make her a better person than me.

So I find it hard to claim that my ground is the best ground. But you'll never push me off it. It's the person I am, and sometimes it's valuable.

Trouble is, "It's the person I am, and sometimes it's valuable" is true of a lot of religious positions. Have I succumbed to relativism?

Edit: No, I haven't.

The Truth

I've finally discovered the truth.

Actually, I've always had something of a love for the truth of things. My mother tells me that when I was a toddler I initially didn't believe lying was possible, and then, when I was convinced, still had trouble understanding why anyone would want to lie.

Later, when I was four or so, I vowed to myself that I would never tell lies - apart from 'polite lies' ("I like my new top, thank you Gran"). I think it was my mother who suggested the exception.

I told my first, proper, protecting-myself-from-disapproval lie when I was five. I felt guilty about it for years afterwards. My sister and I had been sneaking out the side fence (I felt so daring for sneaking about a metre into the path that led off the street to the neighbours' gate). The lie was brief. It may even have been a reply like 'nothing' to a question about what we had been doing. At any rate, my sister, who was only two, and much more inclined to tell lies in general (she cares more for love than truth, always has), seems to have been convinced that since I was doing it, it must be okay, and blithely showed our mother the gap in the fence.

Mum wasn't mad; she would have hesitated before discouraging us from exploring, in general. And if she was conscious of my having lied initially, she didn't show it, which is why I think my lie may have been imperceptible to the less idealistic adult eye. I think I almost felt more terrible because no-one but me was aware of my crime (and there was no way I was going to tell anyone).

As I got older, my notion of honesty grew. Somebody once referred to the idea of giving some real part of yourself on stage as 'honesty', and the idea took root in my head and flourished beautifully into an idea of being true to some genuine feeling when you express yourself. When I see it in other people, I actually find it the sexiest thing on Earth.

On a slightly different note, which is more truthful: a factual statement from which people might get the wrong idea, or a statement which is not strictly correct, but which is more likely to give people the right general feel? That is, is the truth of a statement in ordinary conversation best measured by its content, or by the way it will be heard?

What about poetry? I used to have trouble with Keats:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever...

Yep, that's right, folks, when the sun has turned into a red giant and long since engulfed the Earth, those crocuses on the way to college will still be a joy.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

That's the beginning of Keats' Endymion, by the way. My quiet bower is up at the top of the rhododendron tree, with the sunlight streaming through the spring leaves of the ash tree, and me, twelve years old, relinquishing pain for a while and only seeing beauty.

A poem can be 'honest' in the same way that a freely given emotion can be honest; a rich way that goes beyond what can be factually contained in a given set of literally interpreted words. This increased breadth in what can be conveyed admittedly comes at the price of complete and definable accuracy. "For ever"? No, not really. But which of us knows forever?

We are getting close to what a friend of mine (who just happens to write poetry) calls "truth of the heart" as opposed to "truth of the mind". If it conveys some truth about the way you see the world, is it okay to paint your life with metaphors? With myths, like the ancients did, personifying the power of the storm and the fertility of the crop?

Can a religious ritual act as a physical metaphor? If so, does this mean there is "truth" in it, if it embodies some genuine feeling?

When people say that religion will die, that it's just too stupid, I don't know if they are right. I do know this. The non-scientific part of us that goes into poetry isn't going to die. And there will always be people who value that way of thinking above hard objectivity, who will discard the clear evidence of their own senses in favour of "melodies unheard" (Keats again, and that line in the second verse was the part of the poem that first caught my eye; it hits me like a sharper version of deja vu).

I think it is possible to care for both ways of thinking. I suspect that we require the more objective input of our senses before the imagination could even take flight. I know we need to trust our senses in order to survive. Still, the experience of beauty, the feeling of love - these things are part of what makes survival worth it in the first place. I love science, but I have never been short on imagination.

I tend to think that the line between an imagined story and the truth or an attempt thereof should never be blurred. [EDIT: Even when I'm taking some belief as given, I almost always make a little note in the back of my mind that that's what I'm doing. Somehow that doesn't get in the way of the purpose of believing it in the first place]. Some people disagree, and always will. That doesn't make them right, but many of them are worthy people, nevertheless, who contribute to the world in other ways.

Back to Ode on a Grecian Urn:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

No, no, Keats, no! Rightfully lauded poet though you are, I will never forgive you for that one!

Edited slightly for The Humanist Symposium - but all I did was cut a basically irrelevant paragraph, alter some punctuation here and there, and add the sentence above that is declared as an edit.