Meaning of Life – Helian Unbound

On the Purpose of Life

There is no purpose to your life other than the purpose you choose to give it.

Is your goal the brotherhood of all mankind? Is your goal human flourishing? Is your goal a just and democratic society? Is your goal to serve some God or gods? The first cause of all of these goals, and any others you can think of, may be found in innate emotions and predispositions that exist because they evolved. They did not evolve for a purpose. They exist because at some time that was likely quite different from the present, they happened to increase the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. They are the foundation that gives rise to every single human aspiration, no matter how noble or sublime that aspiration is imagined to be.

There is no objective reason why the goals and aspirations of a Plato or a Kant are more worthy, more legitimate, or more morally good than the goals and purposes of a thief or a murderer. In the end, every human being on the planet is merely seeking to satisfy emotional whims that he has interpreted or tried to make sense of in one way or another. Any individual’s assumption that his goals are intrinsically superior to or more right and proper in themselves than the goals of others is a delusion. The universe doesn’t care.

What does that imply concerning what our goals should be, or what we really ought to do? Nothing! Nothing, that is, unless we are speaking of what some individual should do or ought to do to satisfy some idiosyncratic whim that cannot possibly be objectively more legitimate or praiseworthy than the whim of any other individual.

How, then, do we choose what are goals and purposes will be. After all, we will have them regardless, because it is our nature to have them. In the end, all of us must decide for ourselves. However, in choosing them I personally think it is useful to be aware of the above fundamental facts. The alternative is to stumble blindly through life, chasing mirages, clueless as to what is really motivating us and why. Again, purely from my personal point of view, that does not seem an attractive alternative. Blind stumbling tends to be self-destructive, not to mention inconvenient to others. I personally find it incongruous and disturbing to witness the spectacle of emotions and passions inspiring people to pursue ends that are the precise opposite of the ends that account for the existence of those emotions and passions to begin with.

I personally pursue goals and purposes that seem to me in harmony with the fundamental reason that my goals and purposes exist to begin with. In other words, my basic goal in life has been to survive and reproduce. Beyond that, I seek first to promote the survival of my species, and beyond that the survival of biological life in general. These goals seem noble and sublime enough to me personally. Our very existence seems to me improbable and awe-inspiring. Think of how complex and intelligent we are, and of all our highly developed senses and abilities. Look in a mirror and consider the fact that a creature like you could have evolved from inanimate matter. Think of the mind-boggling length of time it took for that to happen, and the conditions that were necessary for it to occur in the first place. Stunning! We are all final links in an unbroken chain of life that began with direct ancestors that existed billions of years ago. There are millions of links in the chain, and all of those links succeeded in generating new links, so that the chain would remain unbroken through all that incredible gulf of time. Under the circumstances, my personal purpose seems obvious to me. Don’t break the chain!

There is no objective reason why these purposes of mine are any more good, legitimate, or worthy than any alternatives whatsoever. They are not intrinsically better than the purposes of an anti-natalist, a suicide bomber, or a celibate priest. However, for personal reasons, I would prefer that, as others pursue their purposes, they at least be aware of what is actually motivating them. It might lead them to consider whether blindly breaking the chain, destroying themselves and harming others in the process, is really a goal worth pursuing after all.

Notes on “A Clergyman’s Daughter” – George Orwell’s Search for the Meaning of Life

A synopsis of George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter may be found in the Wiki entry on the same. In short, it relates the experiences of Dorothy Hare, only daughter of the Reverend Charles Hare, a “gentleman” clergyman with a chronic habit of living beyond his means. Dorothy’s life is consumed by a frantic struggle to maintain respectability in spite of a mountain of debt owed to the local tradesmen, a dwindling congregation, and a church gradually decaying to ruin for lack of maintenance. There’s also a problem so repressed in Dorothy’s mind that she’s hardly conscious of it; she is losing her Christian faith.

Eventually the pressure becomes unbearable. At the end of Chapter 1 we leave Dorothy exhausted, working herself beyond endurance late at night to prepare costumes for a children’s play. At the start of Chapter 2 we find her teleported to the Old Kent Road, south of London, where she wakes up with a bad case of amnesia and only half a crown in her pocket. A good German might describe this rather remarkable turn of events as an den Haaren herbeigezogen (dragged in by the hair.) In other words, it’s far fetched, but we can forgive it because Orwell refrains from boring us with explanatory psychobabble, it’s in one of his earliest books, and he needs some such device in order to dish up a fictional version of the autobiographical events described in his Down and Out in Paris and London, published a couple of years earlier.

Eventually Dorothy is rescued from starvation and squalor by a much older cousin, who sets her up as a school teacher at Ringwood House, which Orwell describes as a fourth rate private school with only 21 female inmates. At this point the astute reader will discover something that might come as a revelation to those who are only familiar with Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell was a convinced socialist when he wrote the book, and remained one until the end of his life. Mrs. Creevy, the woman who runs the school, is a grasping capitalist, interested only in squeezing as much profit out of the enterprise as possible. The girls “education” consists mainly of a mind-numbing routine of rote memorization and handwriting drills. Dorothy’s attempts at education reform are nipped in the bud, and she is eventually sacked. In Mrs. Creevy’s words,

It’s the fees I’m after, not developing the children’s minds. It’s not to be supposed as anyone’s to go to all the trouble of keeping a school and having the house turned upside down by a pack of brats, if it wasn’t that there’s a bit of money to be made out of it. The fee comes first, and everything else comes afterwards.

Orwell later elaborates,

There are, by the way, vast numbers of private schools in England. Second-rate, third-rate, and fourth-rate (Ringwood House was a specimen of the fourth-rate school), they exist by the dozen and the score in every London suburb and every provincial town. At any given moment there are somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand of them, of which less than a thousand are subject to Government inspection. And though some of them are better than others, and a certain number, probably, are better than the council schools with which they compete, there is the same fundamental evil in all of them; that is , that they have ultimately no purpose except to make money.

So long as schools are run primarily for money, things like this will happen. The expensive private schools to which the rich send their children are not, on the surface, so bad as the others, because they can afford a proper staff, and the Public School examination system keeps them up to the mark; but they have the same essential taint.

Recall that the book was published in 1935. The Spanish Civil War, in which Orwell fought with a socialist unit not affiliated with the Communists, began in 1936. In that conflict he had his nose rubbed in the reality of totalitarianism, socialism that had dropped the democratic mask. The experience is described in his Homage to Catalonia, which is essential reading for anyone interested in learning what inspired his later work. There he tells how the Communist legions attacked and destroyed his own division, regardless of the fact that it was fighting on the same side. Totalitarianism has never recognized more than two sides; the side that it controls, and the side that it doesn’t. He saw that its real reason for existence was nothing like a worker’s paradise, or any other version of “human flourishing,” but absolute, unconditional power. The nature of the system and the power it aimed at was what he described in 1984. When A Clergyman’s Daughter was published, that revelation still lay in the future. It may be that in 1935 Orwell still thought of the socialists as one big, happy, if occasionally quarrelsome, family.

Be that as it may, the real interest of the book, at least as far as I’m concerned, lies at the end. There, more explicitly than in any other of his novels or essays, Orwell takes up the question of the Meaning of Life. While down and out, Dorothy had lost her faith once and for all. In spite of that, after Mrs. Creevy sacks her, she finds her way back to the family parsonage, and takes up again where she left off. She suffers from no illusions. As Orwell puts it,

It was not that she was in any doubt about the external facts of her future. She could see it all quite clearly before her… Whatever happened, at the very best, she had got to face the destiny that is common to all lonely and penniless women. “The Old Maids of Old England,” as somebody called them. She was twenty-eight – just old enough to enter their ranks.

She was not the same women as before. She had lost her faith, and yet, she meditated,

Faith vanishes, but the need for faith remains the same as before. And given only faith, how can anything else matter? How can anything dismay you if only there is some purpose in the world which you can serve, and which, while serving it, you can understand? Your whole life is illumined by that sense of purpose.

Life, if the grave really ends it, is monstrous and dreadful. No use trying to argue it away. Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching?

Her mind struggled with the problem, while perceiving that there was no solution. There was, she saw clearly, no possible substitute for faith; no pagan acceptance of life as sufficient unto itself, no pantheistic cheer-up stuff, no pseudo-religion of “progress” with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of steel and concrete. It is all or nothing. Either life on earth is a preparation for something greater and more lasting, or it is meaningless, dark and dreadful.

Here we see that, even in 1935, Orwell wasn’t quite convinced that the Soviet version of a Brave New World really represented “progress.” And while democratic socialism may have later given him something of a sense of purpose, it wasn’t yet filling the void. Dorothy considers,

Where had she got to? She had been saying that if death ends all, then there is no hope and no meaning in anything. Well, what then?

At this point, the true believers chime in. They know the answer. Bring back faith, and, voila, the void is filled! So many of them honestly seem to believe that, because they feel a need, the thing needed will automatically pop into existence. They need absolute moral standards. Therefore their faith must be true. They need a purpose in life. Therefore their faith must be true. They need human existence to have meaning. Therefore their faith must be true. They must have unquestionable rights. Therefore their faith must be true. And so on, and so on. Orwell is having none of it. Dorothy muses on,

And how cowardly, after all, to regret a superstition that you had got rid of – to want to believe something that you knew in your bones to be untrue.

Orwell provides us with no magic solution to this thorny problem. Indeed, in the end his answer is singularly unsatisfying. He suggests that we just get on with it and leave it at that. As Dorothy glues together strips of paper, forming the boots, armor, and other accoutrements required for the next church play, she has stumbled into the solution without realizing it:

The smell of glue was the answer to her prayer. She did not know this. She did not reflect, consciously, that the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable. She could not formulate these thoughts as yet, she could only live them. Much later, perhaps, she would formulate them and draw comfort from them.

and, finally,

Dorothy sliced two more sheets of brown paper into strips, and took up the breastplate to give it its final coating. The problem of faith and no faith had vanished utterly from her mind. It was beginning to get dark, but, too busy to stop and light the lamp, she worked on, pasting strip after strip of paper into place, with absorbed, with pious concentration, in the penetrating smell of the gluepot.

Orwell didn’t want A Clergyman’s Daughter to be republished, unless, perhaps, in a cheap version to scare up a few pounds for his heirs. No doubt he considered it too immature. We can be grateful that his literary executors thought otherwise, else we might never have known of his struggles with the Meaning of Life problem so early in his career. He didn’t spill much ink over the problem later on, but we must assume that he had found some more inspiring purpose to strive for than just “getting on with it.” Weak and in pain, he fought to complete 1984 on his death bed with incredible tenacity and dedication. It was a gift to all of us that didn’t follow him to the grave, but lived long after he was gone as the single most effective literary weapon against a threat that had materialized as Communism in his own day, but will likely always lurk among us in one form or another.

And what of the Meaning of Life? That’s a question we must all provide an answer for on our own. None of the imaginary super-beings we have dreamed up over the years is likely to materialize to trivialize the search. And just as Orwell wrote, whether we care to deal with the problem or not, there is no objective solution. It must be subjective and individual. It need not be any less compelling for all that.

E. O. Wilson’s “The Meaning of Human Existence:” Doubling Down on Group Selection

It’s great to see another title by E. O. Wilson. Reading his books is like continuing a conversation with a wise old friend. If you run into him on the street you don’t expect to hear him say anything radically different from what he’s said in the past. However, you always look forward to chatting with him because he’s never merely repetitious or tiresome. He always has some thought-provoking new insight or acute comment on the latest news. At this stage in his life he also delights in puncturing the prevailing orthodoxies, without the least fear of the inevitable anathemas of the defenders of the faith.

In his latest, The Meaning of Human Existence, he continues the open and unabashed defense of group selection that so rattled his peers in his previous book, The Social Conquest of Earth. I’ve discussed some of the reasons for their unease in an earlier post. In short, if it can really be shown that the role of group selection in human evolution has been as prominent as Wilson claims, it will seriously mar the legacy of such prominent public intellectuals as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, as well as a host of other prominent scientists, who have loudly and tirelessly insisted on the insignificance of group selection. It will also require some serious adjustments to the fanciful yarn that currently passes as the “history” of the Blank Slate affair. Obviously, Wilson is firmly convinced that he’s on to something, because he’s not letting up. He dismisses the alternative inclusive fitness interpretation of evolution as unsupported by the evidence and at odds with the most up-to-date mathematical models. In his words,

Although the controversy between natural selection and inclusive fitness still flickers here and there, the assumptions of the theory of inclusive fitness have proved to be applicable only in a few extreme cases unlikely to occur on Earth on any other planet. No example of inclusive fitness has been directly measured. All that has been accomplished is an indirect analysis called the regressive method, which unfortunately has itself been mathematically invalidated.

Interestingly, while embracing group selection, Wilson then explicitly agrees with one of the most prominent defenders of inclusive fitness, Richard Dawkins, on the significance of the gene:

The use of the individual or group as the unit of heredity, rather than the gene, is an even more fundamental error.

Very clever, that, a preemptive disarming of the predictable invention of straw men to attack group selection via the bogus claim that it implies that groups are the unit of selection. The theory of group selection already has a fascinating, not to mention ironical, history, and its future promises to be no less entertaining.

When it comes to the title of the book, Wilson himself lets us know early on that its just a forgivable form of “poetic license.” In his words,

In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention. Intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.

Wilson is right when he says that this is what most people understand by the term “meaning,” and he decidedly rejects the notion that the existence of such “meaning” is even possible later in the book by rejecting religious belief more bluntly than in any of his previous books. He provides himself with a fig leaf in the form of a redefinition of “meaning” as follows:

There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used, and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning.

I rather suspect most philosophers will find this redefinition unpalatable. Beyond that, I won’t begrudge Wilson his fig leaf. After all, if one takes the trouble to write books, one generally also has an interest in selling them.

As noted above, another significant difference between this and Wilson’s earlier books is his decisive support for what one might call the “New Atheist” line, as set forth in books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Obviously, Wilson has been carefully following the progress of the debate. He rejects religions, significantly in both their secular as well as their traditional spiritual manifestations, as both false and dangerous, mainly because of their inevitable association with tribalism. In his words,

Religious warriors are not an anomaly. It is a mistake to classify believers of particular religious and dogmatic religionlike ideologies into two groups, moderate versus extremist. The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism. Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things.

and, embracing the ingroup/outgroup dichotomy in human moral behavior I’ve often alluded to on this blog,

The great religions… are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world. Their exquisitely human flaw is tribalism. The instinctual force of tribalism in the genesis of religiosity is far stronger than the yearning for spirituality. People deeply need membership in a group, whether religious or secular. From a lifetime of emotional experience, they know that happiness, and indeed survival itself, require that they bond with oth3ers who share some amount of genetic kinship, language, moral beliefs, geographical location, social purpose, and dress code – preferably all of these but at least two or three for most purposes. It is tribalism, not the moral tenets and humanitarian thought of pure religion, that makes good people do bad things.

Finally, in a passage worthy of New Atheist Jerry Coyne himself, Wilson denounces both “accommodationists” and the obscurantist teachings of the “sophisticated Christians:”

Most serious writers on religion conflate the transcendent quest for meaning with the tribalistic defense of creation myths. They accept, or fear to deny, the existence of a personal deity. They read into the creation myths humanity’s effort to communicate with the deity, as part of the search for an uncorrupted life now and beyond death. Intellectual compromisers one and all, they include liberal theologians of the Niebuhr school, philosophers battening on learned ambiguity, literary admirers of C. S. Lewis, and others persuaded, after deep thought, that there most be Something Out There. They tend to be unconscious of prehistory and the biological evolution of human instinct, both of which beg to shed light on this very important subject.

In a word, Wilson has now positioned himself firmly in the New Atheist camp. This is hardly likely to mollify many of the prominent New Atheists, who will remain bitter because of his promotion of group selection, but at this point in his career, Wilson can take their hostility pro granulum salis.

There is much more of interest in The Meaning of Human Existence than I can cover in a blog post, such as Wilson’s rather vague reasons for insisting on the importance of the humanities in solving our problems, his rejection of interplanetary and/or interstellar colonization, and his speculations on the nature of alien life forms. I can only suggest that interested readers buy the book.

Atheism and the Virtue of Deceit; Musings on the Purpose and Meaning of Life

According to fellow atheist Bart Ehrman, whose books are an excellent tonic for the true believers, there are many clergymen who are no longer believers themselves. I suppose they have many ways of rationalizing their behavior to themselves, one of which is the belief that by deceiving their flocks they are actually doing “good.” Journalist David V. Johnson recently defended this point of view in an article he wrote for 3 Quarks Daily entitled, “A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists.” “Undergraduate Atheists” is one of the many pejorative terms used by philosophers with delusions of grandeur in referring to the infidel triumvirate of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. An atheist himself, Johnson, takes issue with what he calls the “Undergraduate Atheist Thesis,” or UAT, which he states simply as the belief that, “Humanity would be better off without religious belief.”

Johnson begins by giving a highly distilled version of “San Manuel Bueno, Martir (Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr),” a novella by Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. The action takes place in the village of Valverde de Lucerna, where the spiritual needs of the people are ministered to by Don Manuel, a saintly Catholic priest. He has a run in with Lazaro, a local who has returned from a sojourn in America as a confirmed atheist. The two spar for a while, until the scales finally fall from Lazaro’s eyes, and he concludes that Don Manuel is right when he advises, “Leave them alone, as long as it consoles them. It is better for them to believe it all, even contradictory things, than not to believe in anything.” But wait, there’s a twist. It turns out that, like Lazaro, Don Manuel is also an atheist. However, convinced that they must preserve the “happiness” of the villagers, they continue ministering to their spiritual needs, never revealing the truth about their own unbelief, until both die in the odor of sanctity.

The story is a lot more complex than the dumbed down version given by Johnson. For example, Don Manuel is himself very unhappy, tormented by what seems to him the meaninglessness of life and the knowledge that he will die with no hope of the hereafter. He is not so blithely convinced of the rightness of what he is doing as Johnson suggests, and agonizes over whether he is really serving the villagers best interests by deceiving them. He has half convinced himself that Christ himself was also an atheist, etc. It’s actually a very interesting read, and there’s an English version at the above link.

Be that as it may, Johnson embraces his simplified version as an antidote to UAT. As he puts it,

…demonstrating the truth of UAT would require an enormous calculation of the two competing scenarios. It demands that we add up all the good and bad consequent on human beings being religious, from the beginning to the end of human history, and all the good and bad consequent on human beings not being religious. We are then supposed to compare the two totals and see which version of human history winds up better.

According to Johnson, such a calculation is hopelessly complicated, and we therefore “have reason to suspend judgment about UAT.” In fact, what is hopeless is the notion that we shouldn’t make judgments until we know every fact that might have some bearing on the case. Fortunately, Mother Nature knew better, and gave us the capacity to decide based on limited data as befits creatures with limited intelligence. We would never make any decisions if we always waited until we were certain about their outcome.

I might add that this familiar wrangling over whether religion is “good” or “bad” is really neither here nor there as far as the question of whether God actually exists is concerned. After all, what does it matter if the argument is decided one way or the other if there actually is a God? Is anyone really going to risk frying in hell for quadrillions and quintillions of years, just for starters, by defying God and explaining to Him that he is “immoral” because, on balance, belief in Him hasn’t made mankind’s lot “better?” If there is no God to begin with, then one isn’t likely to suddenly pop into existence merely because we have determined that things would be “better” that way. In other words, the bearing of this whole argument on whether there actually is a God or not is nil.

Of course, all this is irrelevant to Johnson. After all, he’s an atheist himself. His “Anti-Undergraduate Atheist Thesis” is not that Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris are wrong about the non-existence of God. Rather, it is that a self-appointed elite of atheists should bamboozle the rest of us into believing in God in spite of that “for our own good.” Plunging ahead with his indictment of these “New Atheists” he writes,

Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and their followers have something remarkably in common with religionists: they claim to know something (UAT) that cannot, in fact, be known and must be accepted on faith. The truth is that we cannot know what humanity would be like without religious belief, because humanity in that scenario would be so much unlike us that it would be impossible to determine what it would be like in that alternate universe. Their inability to acknowledge the immense calculation that would be required is unscientific. Their conclusion is as intolerant and inimical to the liberal tradition as the ranting of any superstitious windbag.

Of course, based on his own logic, those who embrace Johnson’s Anti-UAT are also “claiming to know something that cannot be known,” and must hang their heads and join the ranks of the “ranting, superstitious windbags.” However, he spares that faction such harsh judgment, apparently because he happens to belong to it himself. As he puts it,

I suspect the scales might tip the other way. Why? For the same reasons as San Manuel Bueno’s. The psychological consequences of religious faith — the deep satisfaction, reduction of existential anxiety and feeling of security and meaning it provides — would represent an enormous and underappreciated part of the calculation. Imagine the billions of believers that have lived, live now, or will live, and consider what life is like for them from the inside. Consider the tremendous boon in happiness for all of them in knowing, in the way a believer knows, that their lives and the universe are imbued with meaning, that there is a cosmic destiny in which they play a part, that they do not suffer in vain, that their death is not final but merely a transition to a better existence.

This the triumphant vindication of life in The Matrix. Far be it from me to attempt any judgment of which of these two competing atheist world views is “better,” or whether either of them is even “good.” As my readers know, I don’t admit the possibility of making an objective judgment one way or the other. However, I certainly do have some thoughts concerning my own subjective opinion of what’s “good” for me. I might add in passing that the Spanish “villagers” did as well, because they expressed their fury at those who were “enlightening” them by destroying churches in Barcelona and other parts of Spain at the start of the Spanish Civil War. I don’t care to have anyone feeding me a pack of lies based on their conclusion that it’s for my own good. I’ve found that most of us, regardless of how ignorant we might appear to those who imagine themselves our intellectual betters, are very astute at deciding for ourselves what’s “for our own good,” and certainly better at it than any self-appointed intellectual elite. Furthermore, it seems to me that, regardless of what ends we happen to have in mind, we are a great deal more likely to achieve them if the actions we take in pursuing them are based on the truth rather than on pleasant lies. Indeed, the very ends we seek will vary strongly depending on whether we choose them based on facts or illusions. That will be the case regardless of how good we are as a species at ascertaining the truth, and regardless of whether we can ever have a certain knowledge of the truth or not. Certainly, the truth is illusive, but we are more likely to approach it by actually seeking it than by promoting illusions that are supposed by the self-anointed guardians of our spiritual well-being to be “for our own good.”

As for the notion that our fundamental goal in life should be the pursuit of some kind of illusory and drugged happiness, I consider it absurd. Why is it that we are capable of being happy to begin with? Like almost everything else of any real significance about us, we can be happy because, and only because, that capacity happened to increase the probability that we would survive and reproduce. It follows that, to the extent that we can even speak of an “objective” end, happiness is purely secondary.

What, then, of the purpose and meaning of life? I can only speak for myself, but as an atheist I find a purpose and meaning and grandeur in life that seems to me incomparably preferable to the tinsel paradises of the true believers. All it takes to come to that conclusion is to stop taking life for granted. Look at yourself in the mirror! It’s incredibly, wonderfully improbable that a creature like you, with hands, and eyes, and a heart, and a brain, not to mention all this “stuff” around us are even here. As a “purpose” and a “meaning of life” it may only be my subjective whim, but I have a passionate desire that this little flicker of life in the middle of a vast universe, a flicker that may very well be unique, will continue. For it to continue, it is not necessary for me to be happy. It is necessary for me to survive and reproduce. Beyond that it is necessary for me to seek to insure the survival of my species, and beyond that to seek to insure the survival of life itself. Are these things objectively necessary? In short, no. In the end, they are just personal whims, but I’m still passionate about them for all that. Why? Perhaps because virtually everything about me exists because it happened to promote those goals. If I failed to pursue those goals, I would be a sick and dysfunctional biological entity, and it displeases me to think of myself in those terms. Hence, my, admittedly subjective and personal, purpose in life.

But why should “I” have a purpose in life? Don’t “I” blink into existence, and then back out of it in a moment? What could possibly be the point if I’m only going to be here for a moment, and then cease to exist forever? I think that question is motivated by a fundamental confusion over who “I” am. After all, what is really essential about “me”? It can’t be my conscious mind. I am quite confident that it really has just popped into existence for a moment, and will soon die forever. It follows that my consciousness can only be ancillary and secondary to what is really essential about “me”. It would be absurd, and quite unparsimonious of Nature, if everything about me were to suffer the same fate.

So the question becomes, what is it about me that won’t necessarily suffer that fate? It is, of course, my genes. In three and a half billion years, they, and the precursors that gave rise to them, have never died. That have all been links in an unbroken chain of life stretching back over an almost inconceivably long time, and that can potentially stretch on an inconceivably long time into the future. “I” am the link in the chain that exists in the here and now, and that will determine whether the chain will continue, or be snuffed out. I know what my choice is. It is a choice that, as far as I am concerned, gives an abiding meaning and purpose to my life. It is also, of course, a “selfish” choice, and I have nothing to say about what others “should” do, because there is no objective answer to that question. You must decide for yourself.

UPDATE: Jerry Coyne’s reaction to Johnson’s article may be found here.