How is that for an ambitious question? So what is the meaning of life? Well, if you ask most people from a complex, industrial society, you will get a lot of unsure answers. Occasionally, you will get an answer rooted in religion such as, “The purpose of life is to serve God,” but what that entails is not often explained apart from “do well unto others.” If you ask that society’s renowned scientists what they believe the meaning of life is, the answer becomes even more convoluted, qualified and cautious. The implication is that as intellect increases, certainty decreases.
Ask any native or non-industrial society about the meaning of life and you’re much more likely to get an answer, but you can see they have a certainty that is absent from people living in an industrial society and definitely absent from scientists or other professional thinkers.
The chorus response to this certainty from the peanut gallery of industrialized minds is that since knowledge tends to increase doubt, it is the primitive nature of native societies that prevents them from doubting their understanding of the universe. There is however another possibility — that “educated” scientists are so far removed from natural life that they cannot interpret its most basic concepts.
Natural Ways of Being
To native societies, the meaning of life is to live and to die. That’s it. In the natural world, what is dead nurtures that which is alive. The death of one animal or plant feeds or nurtures another. Later, what is alive now will die and will provide the nutritional resources for new life. It is circular. As theologian Stephen Jenkinson puts it, if you want to plant a tree, you don’t place it in a pile of seeds; rather, you place it in dirt. Dirt is everything that has died before. This cycle, while far from steady and predictable, is always present in an ecosystem.
Non-industrial societies almost always emphasize a way of life and death composed of selflessness and giving. In life you take what you need, and when you die you give back to that which is still living. This cycle of giving and receiving isn’t just essential to an ecosystem, its essential to all healthy relationships. I give of myself now and you give of yourself later. It is expected and understood that we will do this for each other, and in this way, we provide each other with security.
The best, most joyous relationships are ones in which a person gives of themselves without a selfish motivation and is seen within healthy families and especially with children not indoctrinated into a commerce system. Within this context, the answer to the meaning of life is simple: to give of ones self and to sustain life. Without pressure to be productive or justify ones own existence, there is no insecurity; a person is content.
Industrial Ways of Being
Within an industrial society, the concept of mutual benefit is much rarer. Since an industrial society emphasizes production and efficiency, giving back is seen as a waste of resources. These societies are by design destructive harvesters of life. This ultimately makes them suicidal, because even mechanized societies require the natural world both for the air we breath and for the energy to power its machines (though not a week goes by an article in a publication like the Economists or Foreign Policy Magazine doesn’t look for a solution to “natural limits” ). However, in the short run, industrial societies being selfish and exploitative are far more effective and quickly displace the natural world that nurtures it.
For individuals within this society, the situation is much the same — it is exploitative, production based, and sees life as having no inherent value because it cannot be easily quantified on a spreadsheet.
Basically, there are two opposing viewpoints in the world today with respect to values: One champions the belief that all people are inherently valuable, not because they are productive or useful, but merely because they are alive, and that everyone aught to be treated just as well as if they were you or a member of your close family.
On the opposite is the system championed by industrial civilization, especially the United States: that of individuality, value based on productivity, and minimal identification with those outside of a person’s immediate social circle or family. In an industrial society, competition and individuality are emphasized. Since giving of yourself results in increased insecurity, the practice is discouraged. Of course, you can never truly be secure, resulting in a hyper-competitive rush for resources, hoarding material goods, and developing personal skills that will enable you to survive. Within this context, personal meaning is easily lost and security is hard to acquire.
Practical Effects of Industrial Values
How does this play out in our daily lives? It means that fewer and fewer people are seen as worthy of sacrifice. If a Wal-Mart is set to enter a community, disrupting local commerce and displacing sustainable local businesses, a person who is highly individualistic will see immediate benefits to low prices, enhancing his own personal security and that of his family’s at the expense of the community as a whole. In the same way that industrial society exploits nature for short term gains, the individualistic man destroys the community in a desperate hope to maintain his footing.
Individuality in the extreme leads to widespread insecurity since people rightly believe they are on their own, expected to be productive in order to have any value at all. This insecurity leads to paranoia, which leads to aggression and an obsession with control. In an industrial society, poisoning the water and food supply makes sense if the benefits outweigh the personal costs. Communal values do not exist.
Without healthy relationships for support, the individual seeks security in other ways. Even with an enormous focus on industrial production, the individual still must face his or her mortality — a death that is lonelier than it would ever be in a nature based society. Death in this environment truly is pointless. Life has no meaning and death has no meaning. Is it any wonder why scientists, the priests of industrial societies, cannot accurately diagnose this illness, why they cannot identify the real meaning in life? It’s easy to understand the value of life when you are not so divorced from it’s basic function, when your identity isn’t rooted in exploitation.
Science and Technology
So why do people in industrial societies, and scientists in particular, find the meaning of life to be so alien?
Ask most industrialized people what a scientist is and you will probably get an answer like, “someone who uses the scientific method.” Since the scientific method has the ability to sort facts from falsehoods in a way that is clearly verifiable, it has taken on an almost church-like role in telling people what is and what is not true. A scientific consensus is as good or even better than your own experience. Any attack on science is seen an attack on the scientific method, and therefore on reason itself, but science is not just the neutral acquisition of knowledge.
Science comes from the Latin word “scientia,” meaning knowledge. Technology is the use of knowledge for power. Therefore, the scientist acquires knowledge to leverage power. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but for industrial societies, this means power to assess and harvest resources, to increase efficiency, to mathematically qualify information into actionable conclusions. Basically, technology leverages knowledge to gain power over nature and exploit it.
Almost all science is funded by corporations and governments to promote production and control. Without a profit or power motive, funding rarely materializes. There is little interest in knowledge for its own sake. It’s naive to say science is neutral when 99 percent or more of it is done for purposes relating to control and profit.
Is it any wonder now why scientists often have no understanding of the meaning of life? His relationship with the world is exploitative and he sees everything living as a potential resource to be quantified or used — even other human beings do not escape this designation. This one-way method of taking, never giving, avoiding death at all cost, provides great short term power.
Scientists and their accolades in the industrial society look to science to provide an answer to the existential strain that one can never truly be independent, that death is always lurking around the corner, that life in industrial society is isolating and lonely.
Today, scientists look forward to the “technological singularity,” a term used to describe the period where machines are capable of intelligence equal to that of humans, estimated to occur within the next 20 to 30 years. They also believe that this will ultimately facilitate the merging of human consciousness with a machine.
The goal of this technology is similar to the goals of all past uses of technology and consumerism: to defeat death! With the merging of man and machine, they hope to finally succeed. Since life requires death to nurture it, the end of death will also be the end of life as it has been defined for all of human existence. Mankind’s quest to conquer nature and death (and life) will finally be complete.
Knowledge does not have to be destructive. They say “scientia est potentia” or “knowledge is power,” but knowledge does not have to be power. But to ignore the industrial use of knowledge and science as a power instrument to defeat individual death (and by extension, defeat life for everyone else as we know it), we risk losing the meaning of it all. If the industrial world is a prison devoid of meaning, the new post-death, post-life world will be without hope as well.
