Jim Rutt: What is your concept of the meaning crisis and why do we need to awaken from it?
John Vervaeke: …The meaning crisis has two components to it, the perennial and then the pertinently present. Perennial is the idea that the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent, [also] make us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior. That cognition is very complex, it is very dynamic, very self-organizing, very recursive, very embodied and enacted, and one-shot kind of interventions to try and ameliorate that self-deception are pretty doomed to fail. As I’ve talked about before, you need complex ecologies of practices that can ameliorate that self-deception and then enhance that fundamental adaptive connectedness that’s at the core of cognition that people experience as meaning in life, which is a very high-value item for them. And when you’re doing those two together in a coordinated fashion, I think that’s a very good understanding of what wisdom is. One way of talking about meaning crisis is that, while we have plenty of good places to go for information and knowledge, they’re all contested but they’re readily available, it’s unclear to people where they should go to cultivate wisdom. Now, wisdom is not optional, so either they try to make the legacy religions somehow work, or they try to cobble something together in order to ameliorate these things. You can see this in one of the largest and growing demographic groups, the “Nones”, who have no official religious belief, they largely describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Which means, to my mind, they’re seeking something like wisdom and meaning but they’re doing it autodidactically, which has all of the perennial threats and risks of autodidactic education. And so you have a wisdom famine. These ecologies of practices as I mentioned earlier, they have to be honed (homed?), they have to be situated and lived by a community of people that will support you as you try to engage in them, and correct you and challenge you when it’s needed the way we always have when we’ve engaged in cultural education. And so, the present problem is the thing that used to hone the ecologies of practices are the legacy religions, and for a lot of historical and other reasons they are now non-viable for a lot of people. So you have a wisdom famine, people are looking but they can’t really find what they’re looking for by and large in the world religions. We’ve tried political alternatives that have drenched the world in blood, so we’re sort of traumatized about that. And so we’re stuck.
Rutt: Let me stick in just a question, you often refer to these as pseudo-religious ideologies as responses to the meaning crisis, and that’s a bad attractor on the road forward…
Vervaeke: Yes very much. I’ve often said to put on my tombstone Neither nostalgia nor utopia. We can orient pseudo-religiously backwards, and you get fundamentalisms and you can do that forward-looking with proposals for utopia, and then of course you get totalitarians. And of course you can mix and match those in wonderfully bloodthirsty ways. And so, what we’re trying to do, Jordan and I and other people, is we’re trying to say how can we help people address the perennial problems of self-deceptive self-destructive behavior, a sense of absurdity, alienation, pervasive anxiety, all the other symptoms that are showing up, how can we properly give that a home and situate it within our current worldview. And then an extra dimension that has come out in my covnersations with Jordan is how can we orient that so it can deal with the incredible accelerating rate of the complexification of our sort of technological milieu. And so that’s the meaning crisis as briefly as I can make it.
Rutt: One last distinction, and I find this to be a very useful hook for people to hang on when they’re first starting to make sense of this, the distinction between meaning OF life versus meaning IN life.
Vervaeke: Yes, and this probably one of the ways that I would distinguish religion from the-religion-that’s-not-a-religion. The meaning OF life is some metaphysical proposal about something that is a plan or a destiny for you and you must find it, in some important fashion. It’s been pre-authored and pre-ordained and there’s various ways in which that can roll out. It can be pre-ordained by an agent, it can be pre-ordained by a cosmic force like karma or something like that. The idea is that the meaning of life is to find that and figure out how to orient yourself properly to it. Meaning in life is at best agnostic. I tend to be rejective of meaning of life because it presupposes a teleology to the universe that I find absent, but lets put that aside. Meaning IN life is agnostic, it says no no what we’re talking about isn’t that metaphysical plant, we’re talking about the enacted senses of connection you have to yourself, to other people, and reality, that make life worth living given the inevitable futility, failure, frustrations, and loss that beset human life. What is it that you’re connected to that makes life worth living. That’s meaning IN life.
-from The Jim Rutt Show podcast #170 on December 1, 2022
