Once Upon a Time you had Meaning

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time, you had meaning.  And the reason you knew you had meaning was because you had a Mom and a Dad who told you so, a God who loved you, and a community who needed you.  Once upon a time, if something happened to you, a significant number of people would mourn your death.  Not only because you were a good person and a good friend, but also because the community would suffer without your presence and skills.  Now, for the vast majority of people, you can barely count on one hand the number of people whose life would be truly altered by your passing.  For the most part, no one cares about you anymore.  Your skills are ubiquitous, you have no true community, and God doesn’t exist.  So what, you may ask, is exactly the point??

We have created a society that now offers almost none of the things that make people truly happy.  Family, community, spiritual belonging; these are the foundational and primal building blocks of human happiness, and they are rapidly disappearing.  With the destruction of the family, the church and the community, the existential reasons people have traditionally had for their very existence are in danger of receding into the past.  And the outcome is predictable.  Isolation, depression, anxiety, despondency, drug abuse, and death.

Human culture evolved over millennia to satisfy the human condition.  Over thousands of years, humans refined their relationship to themselves, to each other, and nature to create cultures and societies that were most advantageous in creating the conditions for human flourishing.  And the reason we know this, is because it worked.  Humanity has flourished like no other creature.  Pair-bonding and families evolved because people naturally thrive best in families.  Communities formed because humans naturally work best in communities.  And religion formed because humans are spiritual animals in need of purpose.  It isn’t likely that any of these basic cultural structures would form, and remain, unless they were useful and advantageous.  And it is also unlikely that they would have formed in the way that they did if they did not conform to how human beings naturally work.  In other words, these cultural structures formed in the way that they did because of how human beings are biologically wired.  The inverse may be a more important point.  Family, community and faith did not create how humans interact with each other and the world.  Rather, they are the product of how humans interact with each other and the world.  This is a critically important point.  Because if true, then these structures, or equally powerful and compatible replacements, are potentially necessary to human flourishing.  And in the absence of such structures, it may well be that humans will have a difficult time finding meaning, support, and purpose.  In fact, it may be impossible.  If these social structures are exactly and specifically designed and evolved by humans to be in harmony with how we are biologically wired, then finding replacements better than those developed over millennia of evolution and fine-tuning, may be beyond our ability to conceive or create.

The generational arrogance of today’s world tells us that such structures are archaic and unnecessary.  That we have evolved beyond, and perhaps never needed them.  That the single parent home is as equally beneficial to a child’s welfare as an intact bonded pair complimented by an extended family.  That Facebook is an adequate proxy for a community. And that belief in a God is beneath us.  However, a utilitarian view reveals that this is simply not so.  How do we know?  Because it doesn’t work very well.  The evidence shows that as we strip away these support structures, human flourishing becomes more difficult.  Life becomes harder.  Even as we have cast aside much of the hard labor of our ancestors through technology, our overall happiness as a people decreases.  The great scourge of the West is that as our physical burdens diminish, we paradoxically become less happy, less fulfilled, and less purpose driven.

With the growth of the state and the market as the corporeal manifestation of rational thought, we can now provide every material thing - for every one.  Where once upon a time a community was needed for protection and production, the market and the state now provide protection and production in scales far beyond the ability of a community to provide.  Where a family was once required to ensure that children would flourish, the state and the market provide sustenance such that a single person can raise two or three children alone.  Where religion was once required to provide a moral framework within which to live, a bureaucratic state now provides codified law.  The net result is that people are inclined to abandon these traditional social structures.

And why would we be surprised to see humans abandon the family, the community, and God?  They are, after all, annoying.  They require rules and fealty and responsibility for them to function properly; and for them to provide the optimal level of happiness for the most people.  One has a duty to one’s family and spouse.  One has a duty to one’s community.  One has a duty to one’s God.  Duty requires sacrifice, and who the hell wants to sacrifice?  Who willingly sublimates themselves to the good of others, and to the rules of a God in heaven? 

However, duty is part and parcel of the evolution and functioning of these social structures.  They require fealty and sacrifice to work.  A religion is only effective in helping people flourish inasmuch as people are willing to follow its rules and believe in its proscriptions.  The community is only a community to the extent that people truly care for one another and are willing to surrender their immediate personal wants to the long-term needs of the community.  A family is only a family inasmuch as its members are willing to forego their personal desires in order to do what is best for the family.  Functioning communities, families and religion require such sacrifice.  The choice to sublimate our desires to family and community fundamentally cuts against our innate selfishness.  And our social structures fill a critical role in moderating those selfish impulses.  Without these structures, humans have an extremely difficult time moderating them on their own.  They provide a framework and set of rules that help guide people in making decisions that are ‘best’ for themselves and best for their community.  I am reminded of a phrase – ‘The rules of God are designed to protect you.’  In the same way, the rules of the community and the family are designed to protect you.  To protect you from yourself, and to protect those selfsame structures which provide the framework that allows the most people to flourish in the long term.  And indeed, it is in the fulfillment of our duty to these structures that we are rewarded with purpose, accomplishment, and belonging.

The utility of religion, family and community cannot be overstated.  And their utility is demonstrated in the fact that they are uniquely suited to provide human beings with the best chance at happiness, and a functioning society within which to thrive.  The history of the development of these institutions is a chicken or egg question that strikes at the very heart of the tabula rasa formulation of human development.  According to this ‘blank slate theory’, humans are born a blank slate and it is through interactions in society that their preferences, intellect, personality, and beliefs are formed, with biology playing only a very minor role.  To the extent that this is true, one must recognize that the very social structures within which humans develop, have been shaped by human beings to closely conform to the biology of human beings themselves.  In other words, whatever social structures shape human beings, by and large the evolution of those structures were shaped by the biological needs of their creators.  It can be no other way.  The social influences that serve to create who we are, in that sense, are biologically derived.  Trees turn toward the sun, frogs eat insects, human beings create families, communities and religion.  Humans did not need a society to tell them to do so.  Somewhere, long ago, at the intersection of instinct and intellect, the idea that human beings should live together in groups, raise children, and worship, was self-evident.  And the evolution of those structures across millennia occurred in an iterative fashion of trial and error.  Things that worked remained, for example, pair-bonding.  Things that didn’t work tended to diminish or disappear, for example polygamy/polyandry.  The reason, for example, that the great religions have flourished and have persisted over time is because they are attuned to how human beings think and act.  The idea that we can do away with these social structures with the goal of rewriting the social forces that create us, in order to create a better us, is foolhardy.  As we discard those social structures, we also discard the nourishing and regulating influences that they provide; such as love, belonging, temperance, selflessness, and purpose.   Unless we are wise enough to create new structures, from whole cloth, that are equally aligned with how human beings work, the outcomes we are searching for will elude us. 

As our society evolves, we are now engaged in a great experiment.  Never before have humans experienced a time when we did not need families, communities, and religion in the way they have existed for millennia.  And we are unsure of how living without them really works; and what impact it may have on how we live and thrive.  Clearly there are significant unanticipated downsides.  The social structures that humanity has created over thousands of years are the most effective forces for human flourishing ever devised because they are exactly aligned and attuned to the biological structure of how human beings work.  Human beings flourish under the right conditions in the same way that a tree in fertile soil will flourish.  We are creatures that have biological needs far beyond food, water, and shelter.  The extent to which the social structures that humanity has labored to build over many hundreds of generations have provided for them, we discard them at our peril.