Beauty and uncertainty - the art of science

‘Data becomes sensation’ in Halo.  Photo: Claudia Marcelloni CERN

Wonderment, beauty, uncertainty. These are the qualities that scientists repeatedly cite as being at the heart of their work. We see how these elements are to the fore in an article on an effort to translate the findings of astrophysicists into forms that the general public can appreciate, revealing the "frameworks" scientists use to understand their data. 

Halo is an art installation produced by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, artists who like to dramatise extreme cosmic events with visual aids. In their latest effort they have converted raw data culled from subatomic particle collisions at Cern in Switzerland, where they have been working as artists, into a melange of light, sound and curious tactile effects. “We have put data into a form where you can feel it,” says Jarman. “Data becomes sensation.”

Inside Halo, 384 vertical wires are arranged in a circle surrounding visitors, each throbbing out the patterns of data in sync with the lights. If you touch a resonating wire, you can convince yourself you’re feeling the universe coming into being. 

Jarman says Cern scientists have welled up on stepping into Halo, apparently perceiving in it a simulation of the elegance they find in equations and theories. “For me,” says Professor Antonella De Santo, the Sussex University physicist involved in the project, “this is the first time I have sensed the scientific beauty I experience in my career in artistic form.”

[Halo is about] getting humans to experience what goes on beyond the limits of human experience, the vast forces of nature operating on Earth and beyond, or shifting the imponderables of quantum physics into visual and auditory form.

Neither Jarman or Gerhardt have scientific backgrounds. Rather, they are making a kind of outsider science art. That outsider perspective gives them a refreshing sense of what science amounts to. “We think of science as all about facts,” says Jarman. “But what are facts? And what is data? A lot of what scientists know is more like fiction. What we’re doing is revealing their frameworks in a way that everyone can understand. Without a framework, we couldn’t know anything. But that framework isn’t fixed. It’s unfinished business.”

Professor De Santo agrees. “The best scientists are humble. They don’t presume to know everything. They live in uncertainty.” Indeed, for her that humble stance is what guides her work, which is at the cutting edge of the new physics that goes beyond what is known as the Standard Model. That model, she explains, told us there were 17 building blocks of nature: six quarks, six leptons, four force-carrier particles, and the Higgs boson. “But it was incomplete. It didn’t include gravity. It said neutrinos don’t have mass, which they do. And it didn’t include dark matter. I don’t believe in a theory of everything. I’m not arrogant enough to suppose we will ever know everything.”

This blog has several posts on the beauty of the world around us, as well as the degree of ignorance that remains as to how the world works. I invite you to check out the archive using the menu on the right.

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Where technology does NOT empower humanity

Photo source: Netflix's Black Mirror

The battle to achieve recognition of human dignity goes on into the 21st Century. It is a battle because some in the elites of the political and corporate worlds, and especially of academia, would have the social masses capitulate to demands that they keep their heads down and their mouths shut while those controlling our social structures ease the path for new technological forms to take over.

In a discussion posted on YouTube in early May between political philosopher Michael Sandel of Harvard Law School and historian Yuval Noah Hariri of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the topic arose of the likelihood of success of the "project" to improve society through greater appreciation of certain values relating to human dignity as compared to the transformation of social structures through technological development where free will yields to mechanism, as Michel Houellebecq envisages it. 

Sandel:

Some years ago I was teaching a course on ethics and biotechnology … and we were discussing various aspects of the project of re-engineering human nature…. One day we invited James Watson… who had won the Nobel Prize for describing the structure of DNA, and he was talking about cognitive enhancement through genetic alteration, and he was very much in favor of it…

I asked him: “Do you consider having a low IQ to be a disease in need of a cure?” He said, “Yes, of course, because people with low IQs live very difficult lives. They have trouble making a living and so on.”

A student raised her hand and asked: “Well, given that's the case, why don't we try to reform the economy and societies so that people with low IQs don't live such hard lives?”

Watson's reply was: “We're never going to be able to change society. That's way too hard. That's why we need to use genetic engineering to solve this problem.”

Sandel continues: 

And I found that a revealing but chilling answer, not only because of its eugenic sensibility, but also because it seemed to concede so readily the project of moral and political improvement, as if to say that human agency is impotent in the face of that project. Therefore, better to repair ourselves to fit the world, the social roles, that are beyond human repair or reform. That's the worry that I think represents the fundamental concession to the moral and political disempowerment of humanity.

Harari takes up the issue:

…There are many successful attempts to better human society, not through the invention of some new tools, some new technology, but by changing the values, the stories, the structure of society itself. 

One of the biggest achievements of humankind has been the drastic reduction of violence over the last few generations and even though it owes something to a technical invention – the nuclear bomb – to a large extent it was done by changing human values in society. … [Political parties] also had enormous success, and when it comes to racial inequality, to gender inequality, they really managed to improve things and not by inventing a new technology. 

So this fixation that the answer to any problem we have is just to invent a new technology…. That's extremely dangerous, first of all, because it gives up so many other things that we can do and, secondly, because it ignores the main problem that, okay, you invent the technology but then the decision what to do with it is not in the hands of the tool, it's in the hands of the same society. So if you have done nothing to change the society and its values, you just invented a new tool. Then if the society has evil values, it's now just more powerful to do its evil things. You have done nothing; you just made things worse.

Harari points out that artificial intelligence machines may try to force humans to comply with their wishes, to which Sandel comments:

I suppose that we could conclude by agreeing that even the smartest smart machines can't tell us how they should be used. That is ultimately for us as democratic citizens, which suggests a project not of manipulation but of education and of persuasion. 

Harari:

Yeah … but I would just say that maybe part of what is fueling the political crisis we are seeing around us is this deep sense that time is running out, that if humans don't exercise their agency in the near future they will lose that agency.

I mean all previous technological inventions in human history … empowered humanity, but the current wave of technological inventions for the first time … endangers human agency [as] we see a shift in power from humans to algorithms.

Therefore, it is imperative that people everywhere strive to maintain a expansive sense of the dignity of the human person, building on the success in banning slavery, in the declaration human rights, but looking ahead to the banning of  the death penalty, the banning of euthanasia and abortion based on the ulimate value of human life, and the restructuring of economic principles to end the scandalous economic inequality worldwide.

One final thought: It's surprising that Harari continues to use the deep term "evil" in talking of values that a society may have. With his evolutionary humanism, where ethics is simply a set of rules people think will make life easy, you would expect him to use "negative" or some such neutered term. 

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Good luck or bad luck or God's will?

An elderly, hard-working Chinese farmer and his son had a single horse. They used the horse to plough their field, to sow the seeds, to gather the harvest, and transport it to market. The horse was essential for the farmer to earn his livelihood.

One morning, the horse broke the fence and ran away into the hills. When the neighbours found out that the only horse the farmer had, had run away, they came to comfort him. They said: “Your only horse has run away just before the planting season. How will you till the land? How will you sow the seeds? This is unfortunate. What bad luck!”

The farmer replied: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?”  

A few days later the farmer’s horse returned along with two wild horses. When the neighbours found out the news, they said: "Now you have three horses! You can till the land much faster. Maybe you can buy more land and get a bigger harvest and make more money. Or you can sell the other two horses. Either way, you will be a rich man! What good luck!"

But the farmer replied: "Good luck, bad luck - who knows?"

Next morning, the farmer’s son started training the wild horses so that they could help till the land. While attempting to mount one of the wild horses, he fell and broke his leg.  The neighbours came once again and said to the farmer: "This is really unfortunate. It's just before the sowing season. Your son won't be able to help you. What bad luck!” 

The farmer repeated: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?”

A few days later, the emperor's men visited the  village because a war had started and they forced the eldest son from each family to join the army. When they came to the farmer’s house they saw the son with the broken leg. He would not be of much use in the army and so they didn’t take him. The neighbours, some of them with teary eyes, came once again to the farmer and commented: “Your son  is the only one not taken to go to the war. Breaking his leg was a stroke of good luck.“ 

The farmer calmly replied: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?” 

That's it; that's the story.

It's a favourite piece for motivational speakers, as here. Zen teachers use it too. But those inspired by the Bible to seek the will of God know the attitude of the old farmer is what must be in our heart and mind to find the peace that Jesus offers.  

Take heart from this selection:

Jeremiah 29:11 - "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

Esther 4:14 - "Perhaps you were born for such a time as this."

Romans 8:28 - And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Psalm 33:11 - The plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of His heart through all generations.

2 Peter 3:9 - The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

Psalm 32:8 - I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with My eye upon you.

Proverbs 3:5-6 - Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.

Jeremiah 1:5 - Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

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Yuval Noah Harari and the materialistic mindset

Harari, who needs to break out of the prison of his postivistic worldview

Historian Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says something in a video conversation with Harvard’s Michael Sandel that is surprisingly feeble, given it comesfrom someone who has written three non-fiction bestsellers. In these he offers the world a list of declarations about how humans have got to be at the homo deus stage of history, and how a dramatically different future awaits us. What he says is this:

I think that many of the big events of history we still don't have a good explanation for them. Why did Christianity rise to become the dominant religion in the Roman Empire and then spread from there? I've never read a convincing argument why it was Christianity and not any of the other many religions that were on offer in the supermarket of ideas of the Roman Empire.

It's praiseworthy that a high-flying academic should be so humble, but this could be a case where there is an explanation that is not limited to the materialistic view that Harari embraces in his major writing, as we shall see later in this post. Someone who is open to the real world might say that, yes, the spread of Christianity is inexplicable, unless we at least posit the possibility that the power of the Holy Spirit turned a small group of frightened Galileans into a band of emboldened apostles who urgently went into the world telling everyone how much God loves them.

This is not nitpicking, as Harari, for all the success of his published works, is among the group of academic writers who are so beholden to the materialism common among academics that “they fail to do justice to the complex, multi-layered human organisms” of which they treat. 

Harari views humans as “an animal of no consequence” and a state of contingency is the nature of our existence – “It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now.” Therefore, for Harari, “it is pointless to waste time searching for purpose or meaning”, as Nick Spencer writes in his critique of the Harari mindset exposed in his books.

Just how significantly the chains of Harari’s materialistic outlook restrict the depth of his work is revealed in such statements as “As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has no meaning” (Sapiens); “to the best of our scientific understanding”, he states in Homo Deus, it is clear that Christians through the centuries and modern liberals are “all equally delusional” in identifying any kind of meaning in life. 

Spencer responds:

How exactly a scientific “viewpoint” or “understanding” – whatever Harari means by that – could detect “meaning” and “purpose”, and what it would look like, is far from clear.  

In a deeper dive into nihilism, Harari states that “universal and immutable principles of justice” like equality, liberty and human solidarity, are merely the product of our imaginations, and that they are not real but exist only because they are useful: “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate and forge a better society.” And again: “There are no such things as rights in biology.”

Spencer objects: 

For Harari, only biology is “real”. Living things are real. Human organisms are real. But the stuff that comes out of their heads – like rights, liberty and dignity – is not.

…In essence, if you adopt a thoroughgoing materialistic and positivistic approach to reality, insisting that only the material and measurable is real, then – amazingly – you will discover that reality is ultimately material and measurable.

All this naturally breeds a determined reductionist attitude to humans themselves. If only material stuff is real – and, importantly, if only physical sciences are able to detect what is real – it follows, as he says in Homo Deus, that “according to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations.” Notice the opening qualification: “according to the life sciences.” Similarly, a few pages later, “If science is right and our happiness is determined by our bio-chemical system, then the only way to ensure lasting contentment is by rigging this system.” Or, once again, according to neuroscience, the “deeper parts of your mind know nothing about football or about jobs. They know only sensations.” Harari waves the word “scientific” around like a trigger-happy guerrilla, brandishing the barrel at any moral or metaphysical truth claims that peak out from the undergrowth. Happiness? Goodness? Freedom? Beauty? Holiness? Science cannot find them. 

After a while of this, the reader is naturally tempted to ask why science is the only legitimate tool for understanding reality or human life? After all, if you’ve only got a hammer in your toolbox, everything will be a nail. Harari’s answer lies in the material/imaginative divide on which he bases everything. The imaginative — the category into which he conveniently put most of what makes human life meaningful — doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It is merely parasitic on what is real: our bodies, or our biology, or neurochemistry, or bodily sensations, or whatever. That being so, only those things that can detect, measure and alter biology, neurochemistry, and so on need to be considered. Human life is biology. Biology comprises knowable facts. Debates can be resolved and futures decided by recognition of said facts and manipulation of said biology.

…Thus, when writing about abortion in Homo Deus, Harari reasons that although devout Christians oppose abortion and many liberals support it, “the main bone of contention is factual rather than ethical.” Christians and liberals “believe that human life is sacred” and that murder is a crime. They simply disagree “about certain biological facts: such as whether human life begins at the moment of conception, at the moment of birth or at some intermediate point?” No matter. Biologists are here to help, for they are “more qualified than priests to answer factual questions such as ‘Do human fetuses have a nervous system one week after conception? Can they feel pain?’”

This is so muddle-headed that it’s hard to know where to begin. “Devout Christians” and “liberals” (at least the thoughtful ones; we can leave the head-bangers of both sides out of any serious debate) agree about the “biological facts.” They both accept, broadly speaking, when foetuses develop a brain, a central nervous system, a beating heart, and so on. They both agree, broadly speaking, when a foetus may start to experience sensations or feel pain. They disagree on the existential and ethical significance of all of the above. The “biological facts” are not in dispute. It is what they mean in terms of ultimately contested concepts — such as “life,” “rights” or “dignity” — that is hotly disputed. But if you have systematically dismantled any sense of objective “meaning,” this avenue is necessarily closed to you. 

The fact that Harari apparently honestly believes that “biological facts” will resolve such disagreement over abortion points to nothing more than the inadequacy of the positivist approach he adopts when discussing our species. More cynically, it is an example of what happens when you banish concepts like “meaning” from a debate — because science can’t find it in your neurochemistry.

Apart from all else, Harari’s work declares his ignorance about Christian beliefs, whether he is discussing the soul, Genesis, or our eternal destiny. Similarly, he confuses happiness with pleasure; and he is simply fails to appreciate how limiting his dichotomy is between the “real” and the product of the “imagination” such as mathematics, ethics and aesthetics. For instance, given findings in the social sciences we know that, with regard “goodness” and “beauty”, human universals do exist. Further, as Spencer notes: “Aardvarks, livers, and chromosomes will cease to exist. [The number] 17, π, and i will not. Which has a greater claim to being real?”

Fundamentally, this post has shown that Harari is writing as a member of that strand of science – and it is just one strand – that serves as a straitjacket on the depth and extent of members’ vision. The weaknesses in Harari’s argument as to the remaking of the human into a complete “experience machine” firstly highlight, as Spencer concludes, “how that which is real cannot simply be reduced to what biologists (or even Harari’s frequent, catch-all ‘scientists’), can measure", and secondly, it “underestimates the extent to which humans are quite attached to the more holistic, humanistic, emergent understanding of themselves”.

One might add that people know that they possess a deeper reality than that of being a purely - purely - biological organism, and so any attempt to manipulate one person as "an indeterminate blob", to use Robert Nozick's words, is an attack on everyone. Human dignity is something that has to be recognized and defended, as history has made clear.

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Parents cop blame for the misguided young

As an observer of where concern arises about the future, I often see the finger pointed at the society that has produced the college-age or twenty-something generation. Misguided young adults have been sent on their way into life in such a state that they are bound to suffer a painful fall, but in the process of that psychic collapse all the signs are that they will make society as a whole suffer.

In a post on this site created a few days ago I wrote how "the snowflake generation" had not been brought up to comprehend that everyone has to face suffering in life, and that maturity is apparent through a person's acceptance of sacrifice, as well as the necessity of tolerance, as against arrogance and the belief that happiness equates with pleasure. 

An American journalist and author, Rod Dreher, is one of those concerned at the poorly prepared younger generation, particularly because of their lack of insight into the human condition, especially our innate weakness. He recorded with agreement in his Daily Dreher blog on Substack these thoughts of a correspondent:

I think that they [young people] don't believe in human fallibility because they haven't experienced it. They think that if only "the right people" were put in charge of everything, those "right people" could fix all the world's problems quickly and easily. Young people in all places and times have considered themselves infallible, at least for a time, but I think this phenomenon is uniquely present in certain sectors of modern American society.

If you're an American student at an elite private university or flagship state university (e.g. in one of the wokest places on Earth), you probably had a pretty sheltered upbringing. (I would know because I am part of this group!) You think that prosperity, safety, and justice are easy, and that if only we ran the whole world like the suburb you grew up in, everything would be all right. 

What will it take to get young people to recognize human fallibility? I think we need to get them to really experience what life is like outside of their sheltered environments. Get them to volunteer in daycares, nursing homes, homeless shelters, or prisons. Get them to join the military, the Peace Corps, or missionary organizations. They need to experience birth, death, sin, responsibility, deprivation, and futility. They need to learn that life is complicated and that you can't wave a magic wand that will fix everything. Ultimately, we need to get our most affluent, influential, and therefore sheltered young people reacquainted with reality.

Dreher concludes that post with this:

Parents who have shielded their children from every failure are creating monsters. I spoke recently to a teacher who had to endure a miserable ordeal at his school with the parent of a student who had made a D on a paper in his class. The student’s father phoned the teacher enraged over the grade. The dad said it would affect his daughter getting into college. According to this teacher, Dad genuinely believed that his daughter deserved an A for effort, and raised hell when the teacher refused to budge. [...] That poor girl. The day is coming when she’s not going to know what hit her.

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Science and atheism don't make the grade

Source: Quillette

Gallup polling has found that the percentage of Americans who are not attached to a church, synagogue or mosque – though they may still have religious belief – has dropped below 50 per cent for the first time. (See details here.)

This figure is not surprising given the rapid decline in general loss of association (affiliation) with any religious belief system at all – though, once again, this does not reflect a lack of belief in God or the spiritual realm of life.

One thing that stands out from this information is that the society we live in envelopes us in an atmosphere that produces a mindset that we are barely aware of. It’s the old story of the fish saying goodbye to family in the sea at the start of a journey to find the ocean. The mindset that younger Americans in particular are reflecting is that which Europeans have absorbed in different forms since the 1600s throughout the Age of Reason and its associated materialism, as well as from the upheaval in forming nation states which had to accommodate a diversity of religious beliefs. Secularism in Europe produced not impartiality surrounding forms of religion but an aggressive anti-religion stance fomented by the intelligentsia and other branches of the elite. This is what we are seeing increasingly in the United States.

I want to pick on some of the issues arising by referring to an article under the title “America’s New Religions” that widely-read journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote for New York Magazine in 2018 – “The truth doesn’t age!” Sullivan is an English-born Catholic, and he has spent his professional life in the United States.  I will let you read his views on the new cults that have developed in the political sphere, to focus first on what religion really is and how even atheists are expressing religious belief. He writes:

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer. (There’s a reason, I suspect, that many brilliant atheists, like my friends Bob Wright and Sam Harris are so influenced by Buddhism and practice Vipassana meditation and mindfulness. Buddhism’s genius is that it is a religion without God.)

In his highly entertaining book, The Seven Types of Atheism, released in October [2018] in the U.S., philosopher John Gray puts it this way: “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” It exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive.

Science is not the answer to religion, which involves the human search for meaning, where our need to understand forces us to rise above the information that research provides:

Science does not tell you how to live, or what life is about; it can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning. Art can provide an escape from the deadliness of our daily doing, but, again, appreciating great art or music is ultimately an act of wonder and contemplation, and has almost nothing to say about morality and life.

Ditto history. My late friend, Christopher Hitchens, with a certain glee, gave me a copy of his book, God Is Not Great, a fabulous grab bag of religious insanity and evil over time, which I enjoyed immensely and agreed with almost entirely. But the fact that religion has been so often abused for nefarious purposes — from burning people at the stake to enabling child rape to crashing airplanes into towers — does not resolve the question of whether the meaning of that religion is true. It is perfectly possible to see and record the absurdities and abuses of man-made institutions and rituals, especially religious ones, while embracing a way of life that these evil or deluded people preached but didn’t practice. Fanaticism is not synonymous with faith; it is merely faith at its worst. That’s what I told Hitch: great book, made no difference to my understanding of my own faith or anyone else’s. Sorry, old bean, but try again.

What about capitalism or “progress” as the ground of our being?

Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning. In this respect, Steven Pinker [the writer of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, 2018] is one of the most religious writers I’ve ever admired. His faith in reason is as complete as any fundamentalist’s belief in God.

Progress in meeting our material needs or in understanding how to better organise society is all well and good…

But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs. And this matters. We are a meaning-seeking species. Gray recounts the experiences of two extraordinarily brilliant nonbelievers, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, who grappled with this deep problem. Here’s Mill describing the nature of what he called “A Crisis in My Mental History”:

“I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world. … This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream … In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’”

At that point, this architect of our liberal order, this most penetrating of minds, came to the conclusion: “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” It took a while for him to recover.

Russell, for his part, abandoned Christianity at the age of 18, for the usual modern reasons, but the question of ultimate meaning still nagged at him. One day, while visiting the sick wife of a colleague, he described what happened: “Suddenly the ground seemed to give away beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless.”

I suspect that most thinking beings end up with this notion of intense love as a form of salvation and solace as a kind of instinct. Those whose minds have been opened by psychedelics affirm this truth even further. I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It said “Loving kindness is my religion.” But the salient question is: why?

Society is bereft of so much that the human ecology needs in order to live life abundantly:

Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. Unlike any humans before us, we take those who are much closer to death than we are and sequester them in nursing homes, where they cannot remind us of our own fate in our daily lives. And if you pressed, say, the liberal elites to explain what they really believe in — and you have to look at what they do most fervently — you discover, in John Gray’s mordant view of Mill, that they do, in fact, have “an orthodoxy — the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion.”

But, says Sullivan, “the banality of the god of progress” soon becomes apparent because whatever the fruit of belief in progress might be, “… [it] never quite slakes the thirst for something deeper”. Sadly, however, as the bastions of Christianity are overrun, liberal democracy loses its defences, prompting the lost sheep to direct their deep yearning for satisfaction to politics instead.

Therefore, two years on from the publication of his article, Sullivan’s insights into the inadequacy of "progress", and the implausibility of atheism, give rise to the hope that the West, in particular, will soon feel humble enough to appreciate afresh how Christianity is the source of God-given truths, so giving a rock-like foundation to meaning in life for us all.

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Suffering in the eyes of the snowflake generation

It's not just Generation Z (born from1997) either!

Young adults in the West are often referred to as "snowflakes" because of their fragility, that is, their inability to endure adversity, with their intolerance of an opposing point of view and their belief in entitlement erupting from the self-centredness typical of the 21st Century. In this, there does seem to be an inability to transfer the concept of "No pain, no gain" from the world of outdoor activities to a situation where accepting sharing and self-sacrifice is embraced as foundational for personal wellbeing as well as for the health of the community.

As a consequence of being brought up in a way that shapes today's mindset of immediate personal satisfaction as central to a good life, and that the causes of suffering or struggle are marks of aggression, we increasingly see a lack of resilience in the face of difficulty, little sense of direction and the loss of meaning in life. Of all these attributes of the future leaders of society, the inability to recognise the value of suffering on the journey through life is possibly the most damaging to their psyche.

Writer Oliver Burkeman goes deeper into this matter in his review* of Jordan Peterson's Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life published this year. Burkeman, an award-winning writer on issues relating to psychology, identifies areas of public confusion about suffering:

The confused public conversation about Peterson arises, if you ask me, from the fact that there are two main kinds of suffering. There is the kind that results from power disparities between groups: racism, sexism, economic inequality. Then there is the universal kind that comes with being a finite human, faced with a limited lifespan, the inevitability of death, the unavoidability of grief and regret, the inability to control the present or predict the future and the impossibility of ever fully knowing even those to whom we’re closest. Modern progressives rightly focus much energy on the first kind of suffering. But we increasingly talk as if the second kind barely counts, or doesn’t even exist – as if everything that truly matters were ultimately political. Peterson, by contrast, takes the second sort of suffering very seriously indeed.

How to regard personal problems:

The widespread reluctance among progressives to see life as anything but a matter of power struggles helps explain, among many other examples, why a writer for Vox might perceive Peterson to be telling his followers that “the world can and should revolve around them and their problems”. He isn’t; but he does write as if each reader had a moral responsibility to treat their own situation, and the development of their own character, as a matter of life and death for them, because it is. His worst fans (whom Peterson could certainly do more to disown) make a similar mistake. The resentful whiners of the men’s rights movement imagine he’s taking their side in an identity-based fight, when in fact he reminds them – incessantly, on page after page after page – that resentment and the nursing of grievances are a direct road to psychological hell. (Rule 11: “Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.”)

Is there escape from suffering?

Still, in the end, it’s a good thing that there’s space on the self-help shelves for a book as bracingly pessimistic as this one. Ours is a culture dedicated to a belief in the perfectibility of social institutions, in our limitless capacity to know the world, and to bring it under our control, and in the infallible rightness of present day moral judgments. Peterson offers an invaluable reminder that we’re finite and inherently imperfect; that we can’t control everything, or even very much[...] Above all, we can’t escape suffering, or, as Peterson puts it with characteristic extravagance, “anxiety, doubt, shame, pain, and illness, the agony of conscience, the soul-shattering pit of grief, dashed dreams and disappointment, the reality of betrayal, subjection to the tyranny of social being, and the ignominy of aging unto death”. And our only hope of making it bearable lies in facing it, alongside others, as fully as we can.

The best stance in the face of pain:

Peterson’s final rule is to “be grateful in spite of your suffering”. This carries the implication that you ought to accept your lot in life – which is an offensive thing to say, of course, to someone fighting the impact of poverty, sexism or racism. But it’s very wise advice for anyone facing the universal catastrophe of having been born. Even if we managed to achieve the utopia of justice and equity, we’d still be stuck with the pain of being human. And courage and love – plus the laughter you won’t find in the pages of this book – really are the only ways to cope with that.

* Read the review in full here.
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