Controversation.com

[This one is less politics, more philosophy. I doubt it will ever find it's way into a newspaper.]


A friend asks me: "Does our drive to make life better and easier ultimately betray us?"


I respond:

If I understand your question correctly, you are asking if our attempts to be comfortable ironically lead to discomfort.

I assume that you’re not using the word “better” in a moral sense; the answer to any such question would be obvious – following the moral path inevitably leads to discomfort, and no one, to my knowledge, has ever suggested that following the moral path is easier. So, yours is a question solely of physical comfort.

In short, the answer to your question is yes, our endless search for comfort has indeed made us uncomfortable. However, it’s a unique kind of uncomfortable.


To explain, let’s take a look backward.

More than any other nation, America embodies the Western view of things. Without a history as rich as Europe or Asia, without a religious culture as deep as the Middle East or Israel, and without the trappings of divine monarchy sprinkled across Great Britain, America, from its genesis, has been steeped in industriousness, scientific thinking, and the inevitability of progress.

In carving this country out of the wilderness, we mercilessly subordinated nature to the will of man. The pioneer farmer saw nature as merely so much raw material: trees were felled to clear the fields, and the lumber was used for fuel and buildings. Cattle were bred for milk and meat, and the predictable cycle of the seasons gave us crops.

This unromantic view of nature reflects the core of our way of life. We have seen that nature can be deconstructed scientifically, which means we can study it and predict its effects, which means we can put it in a bottle and consume it at our leisure. And we have done just that. Our skyscrapers, airplanes, and vaccines are a testament to our sovereignty over the natural world.

But there is now, and has ever been, a very different view of nature nipping at the back of our minds. The romantic vision of the noble savage is born of our longing for simplicity. We are trapped in a cubicle, surrounded by towering piles of papers and staplers, and we resent the freedom of our imagined Indian Brave, who races barefoot across the grass, unhindered by faceless bureaucrats or computer generated phone bills. Intellectually, we know that a laborer in modern day America lives more comfortably than any Indian Chief in history, but there is something mesmerizing about the Chief, and something missing from our unending rat race.

The hypocrisy of our jealousy is plain. The avid members of the Sierra Club, those courageous few who embrace nature as a force to be revered, would never object to open heart surgery, birth control pills, or solar powered scooters. And yet these are products of a view that does not revere nature in the slightest.

Recent clamoring over global warming provides another example. The fear-laced monologues we are forced to endure from Al Gore and Richard Gere are themselves fueled by scientific data gathered from weather stations, satellites, and innumerable computer models – all of these created by surgically dismantling the natural world. We have pushed steel instruments into the heart of nature, extracted a sample, and declared that nature is beyond our reach or understanding. How preposterous.

But this over-reverence of nature is merely a symptom. My aim is not to belittle those who are awestruck by the magnitude of nature; A lone man squaring off against a sunrise should feel small. But the cars in our garages and the freezers in our kitchens demonstrate the truth. We do not feel inferior to nature, any more than a plowman feels inferior to his oxen.

The source of our existential malaise is clear: a lack of purpose. Once we were sure of our purpose in life, and now we are not. Our hyper-rational view has given us an endless supply of baubles and trinkets, and we no longer strive toward happiness, but toward objects that make us comfortable, safe, and well-fed. We’ve been told these things should make us happy, and yet they do not. The no-nonsense, non-mystical, eminently reasonable approach to existence has informed us that life has no purpose, and so we should pile up as many calories and orgasms as possible before we cease to exist.

But if the only reason to exist is to be amused, then why exist at all? Why dirty up the planet with our feet if we have no good reason to be here? Without purpose, how can we be valuable? And without the conviction that our lives are valuable, how can we be happy? No matter how much ambrosia we drink, how many roller coasters we ride, or how many conquests we claim, nothing heals the wound inflicted by the Western view – the rational revelation that our lives are meaningless.

This is why we envy the Brave and the Chief, and why many among us yearn for that primal existence. They had the one thing that the Western view cannot give us, the one thing that leads to true happiness. They had purpose. True, their purpose was brutally simple: to survive another day. But how gloriously uncomplicated! How easy to understand! If only we could embrace such a single minded outlook, we could hammer off the chains of the modern world and return to a life of purpose.

Alas, we are not so fortunate. We are still reeling from Galileo. Our mythology, which once placed us squarely in the center of things, has been irreversibly obliterated. We are left trying to reconcile the knowledge that we are phlegm on a celestial handkerchief with our driving need to believe in something greater than ourselves.

This is the discomfort I spoke of earlier. We have successfully surrounded ourselves with artifacts that sate our appetites, but in doing so, we have adopted a world view that has destroyed our ability to be happy. Like the man who sells his soul to the devil for fame and fortune, we find that, without a soul, we cannot enjoy our wealth.

Luckily, there is a deceptively easy remedy: Find a purpose. Something, anything, more important than yourself. Discover it, serve it dutifully and honorably, and be happy. Only in serving something beyond ourselves can we move out of the shadows of our ancestors, and beyond them. They had the singular purpose of protecting their own life, but today we can serve greater masters. Where once a Brave could kill a buffalo to feed his tribe, or build a hut to house his family, now a man can invent hydroponic farming to feed hundreds of thousands, or discover penicillin to save millions.

For the savage, being self-absorbed was a prerequisite to survival. His focus was himself and his immediate surroundings, as it must have been if he was to continue living. But we are safe from the constant hazards of a primeval existence. We have built a fortress of steel against the fury of nature, and freed ourselves from a life of constant peril. Our challenge now is to break free of the self-induced narcissism that was necessary to get us this far, and acknowledge that there must be a greater purpose in life than frivolously amusing ourselves, even if science says otherwise.