This essay is a component of a series called The Big Ideas, wherein writers reply to a single query: What will we fear? You may read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
Sometime in 1993, as I walked along a street in my hometown, Carndonagh, County Donegal, Ireland, a automotive pulled up alongside me, triggering sudden dread. The window got here down, and I used to be met by the dark, inquisitory eyes of my father.
“Why aren’t you at Mass?” he asked.
I see myself, fierce and lean in a Slayer T-shirt, bristling with the fad of the nihilist. I longed to flee the claustrophobic small town and the towering shadow of the Catholic Church. For once I used to be impelled to inform the reality.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t have any faith. I don’t consider in God anymore and might’t go on with the pretense.”
I used to be met with an imprisoning silence. But what my father said next astonished me.
“OK,” he replied. “Just don’t tell your mother.”
With those six words, my father set me free to enter the dominion of the seeker, although at first, I didn’t seek very much. I had an incendiary’s ire to burn all of it down — every institution, religious or otherwise, that sought to manage the narrative of meaning or to impose orthodoxy upon my life. Now that I had solved the issue of God, I believed, I could adopt a lifetime of distraction and revelry.
But that young atheist soon recognized his error. Where there’s human being, there’s human spirit. The sensation of aliveness. The staggering complexity of personhood. The basic dignity that everyone seeks in a cosmos that can’t know them. And where there’s human spirit, there’s the pursuit of meaning. In the event you live in a post-faith world, as lots of us do, the query of our intrinsic meaning have to be confronted. How are we to define our suffering? What might give our lives significance inside an unresponsive universe? To start this conversation, one must truly encounter the self.
When Robinson Crusoe sets foot upon that desert island, he encounters a vital self that lies outside the cultural and political structures of his time, and is anxious primarily with meaning. Crusoe enters into conversation together with his God and the cosmos, and in doing so, involves know his authentic being. In other words, he becomes a person. Every considered one of us — religious, agnostic, atheist or simply plain unexamined — has that desert island deep inside as an intrinsic a part of the mind. It’s essential to reach that island by yourself and walk its ragged shores by moonlight. Perhaps at dawn you may construct a serviceable hut from the driftwood of ideas that appeals to your postmodern magpie mind that may function your own home of meaning.
But not everyone comes upon that island nor even knows it’s there.
The essential self is looking at all times for our attention, but its voice is stifled by the slam and tumult of recent life. Its voice can’t be heard amid the babel, and it’s silenced entirely before the infinite scroll of the smartphone. I even have been meditating for one-third of my life, and this essential self seems to me a side of mind that’s one way or the other higher, wheeling soundlessly in a personal sky. It’s essential to stop and look up with a purpose to find it, although in times of crisis it has been known to swoop down and hoist you off your feet with its talons.
For the generations that got here of age in a meaning-hungry twentieth century, the issue of the authentic being loomed large inside culture. Intellectuals and artists grappled with the issue until it grew passé and maybe too absurd. Then there got here a decentering turn, a time when critical theory catalyzed a politicization of the humanities. Today, artists are fixated on the political, and the dominant belief is that every one our problems might be solved by and inside society. Our seek for meaning can in fact be shaped and influenced by society, but the issue of meaning stays a desert island problem. Societies that seek to wrest control of meaning from the person invite totalitarianism or theocracy.
Today, life lived on the hamster wheel of distraction has created an absurdity inside the grand absurdity of existence. Many individuals live with partial minds not even conscious of the issue of meaning. We aren’t any longer alienated from the world, but alienated from ourselves. We should always beware a culture that has exchanged meaning for information. When conversation with the essential self grows silent, pathology is invited in. We slouch about at a loss for something we cannot quite explain. A malaise sets in that’s despair without the knowledge of despair. Some unseen, unaccountable pain have to be assuaged and we grow consumed by anger and solid about for blame. The irrational erupts from inside and seeks a goal in society. The shadow of the irrational is now in every single place about us.
In his poem “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats articulates a metaphysical law in regards to the human condition and warns of what happens to a civilization where the person loses contact with that essential self of the private sky:
Turning and turning within the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things disintegrate; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…
That which takes to the air inside us must come to perch, but that which takes flight in fog and storm grows lost. Deep beneath the vast economic and political failings of our age there lies a spiritual crisis, a tectonic shift starting to quake and tear on the bedrock of our ethical societies within the West. The trendy age has created a spiritual problem that may now not be answered by religion, nor can it’s addressed by the present faith in techno-science. We live in an age that fears silence and doesn’t contemplate the true cost of this fear.
Paul Lynch is the writer of 5 novels. His latest, “Prophet Song,” won the 2023 Booker Prize.
