The “crisis of meaning” is a failure of imagination

Toward a more positive masculinity

In the classic interview turned book, The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers summates Joseph Campbell’s vast body of work, which often deals with the many challenges of existence: grappling with death, discovering a mono-narrative that captures the enormity of the world, deriving meaning from the untold tragedies humans have faced throughout time.

Moyers effectively wants to know how people derive meaning from all this. Campbell famously responds:

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

There’s been an increased interest, for better and worse, in Campbell’s hero’s journey. In one modern retelling, the “monomyth” symbolizes the strong man’s ascension to dominate the worldly plane. Gilgamesh isn’t the humbled warrior returning to become a more benevolent king, he’s a dictator wielding ultimate power over his dominion. 

While interest in this mythological take cuts across political lines, the fascination with “the hero” among right-wing masculinity influencers has been rampant, many of whom talk about the “loss of meaning” plaguing “modern society.” (I’ve also seen this repeatedly in anti-vax circles, implying the hero would be the one battling the “anti-science” findings of modern medicine. There too meaning is derived in the struggle against Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Government, Big ______.)

I noticed this language when my Conspirituality co-host, Julian Walker, recently tweeted a series of excerpts from the podcast, Triggernometry. Cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker discussed the “crisis of meaning” on Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster’s right-leaning show. 

Kisin asks Pinker if he recognizes this crisis. Pinker replies, “well, I recognize that people say that,” then proposing his longstanding argument that enormous opportunities for meaning and purpose exist, even on a global scale. He continues,

If we made people richer and healthier and lived better experiences and more knowledgeable, safer, less likely to get killed in wars and genocides and street crime, what’s so meaningless about that?

The clip went viral with hundreds of comments, many expressing the sort of sophomoric regressions common on that site. But a couple commenters pursued this “crisis of meaning” line of thinking.

Julian asked for clarification, to which he replied:

This isn’t the only time a god has been invoked when it comes to the concept of meaning. Earlier this week, I received a reply to my last post that also discussed the need for religious intervention in modern life. Oddly, it follows a diatribe against critical race theory and DEI, but here it is in full:

I agree with Berry that CRT and DEI should be eliminated because it IS a “left-wing social engineering agenda,” which will likely lead to state-sponsored sex-change surgeries for minors (at least here in California.). [sic] I’m not super religious, but clearly, we’ve swung to [sic] far left and we need to come back to the center, so a little more of God in politics would be welcomed for me.  

The absurdities of that first sentence perhaps offer insight into the second: society isn’t what I expected, so we need more metaphysics in the laws that govern us. This was followed by a response email, where they claimed that social engineering should be left “to the artists, intellectuals, and religion to influence the morals of society and culture.”

There’s a lot going on here; I only want to focus on the notion that recovering meaning requires a metaphysical intervention in society, as that’s often a default reaction whenever the idea of something “lost” is suggested. This is a strange take given how many competing metaphysics exist in the world, among disparate groups of religion as well as within them.

Returning to the first tweet, taking “the west” as “America”—we could extrapolate out to all colonizing nations and would get a similar result—the idea that meaning has been lost requires a time when it wasn’t. And I’m having trouble identifying any era between 1492-1964 when “meaning” meant the same thing to everyone.

For example, manifest destiny, first expressed by newspaper editor John O’Sullivan in 1845 in regard to white expansion into Oregon territory in the quest of securing the contiguous landmass, provided meaning for tens of thousands of midwestern farmers, gold speculators, Christian missionaries, and slave owners concerned about “property.” These varied groups adopted a near-religious fervor as the makeshift Pacific Northwest governing body handed out free land to white male speculators—talk about government handouts! Believing themselves divinely ordained, it’s undoubted they were filled with meaning, doing their god’s work to fulfill the mission of one completely white-ruled landmass, sea to shining sea.

This isn’t hyperbole. Oregon was the only state founded with black exclusionary laws on the books. During the 19th century, Oregon lawmakers:

• Made it illegal to move to the territory (and later, state) if you were Black; if you already lived here, you were granted a period of time to leave

• Pushed indigenous tribes to the outskirts with the least fertile land

• Put a number of Chinese exclusionary laws on the books, which stopped them from entering the territory, while simultaneously benefiting from the cheap labor that Chinese migrants offered

So the question: white American men, and by extension their families, obviously benefited from their sense of meaning. What about everybody else? Is meaning only available to those lucky enough to be able to acquire the power to institute it? 

When I hear people suggest a “return” to religious, spiritual, or metaphysical principles in order to derive meaning, the first question to mind is: at whose expense? 

And for those who reflexively think: no, this is a metaphysics for everyone, fine—but don’t pretend there was a golden age when meaning meant something for everyone. I have yet to locate it in the historical record, and no one has replied with a satisfactory answer that suggests such a time ever existed.

Which brings us back to Pinker’s point: make society safer and resources more available to everyone and we’ll have a better shot at implementing meaning that makes sense for everyone.

And, to Campbell’s: admitting we want to feel alive is different from seeking meaning. What makes me feel alive is certainly different from what many other people find pleasurable, and vice-versa, ad infinitum through all the jewels of Indra’s net.

Any “crisis” of meaning is actually an inability to draw meaning from the reality of your situation—which is truly a problem for many people. Meaning is valuable. We just need to reframe our understanding of it, because heaping grievance upon grievance to what we’ve lost doesn’t help, especially considering what never actually existed cannot be lost.

A number of commenters called Pinker juvenile for suggesting such pedestrian goals of discovering meaning in the everyday. Yet that’s always been the challenge, one that practices like Buddhism have had a much better time explaining, and practicing, than anything in the Western canon: meaning exists in the mundane.

Or, meaning is what we make of it. It’s not waiting there to be discovered, but rather to be identified, fought for, and continually pursued. And if your meaning comes at the expense of others, you might want to consider reframing your goals.