I just finished reading a blog post written by a 72 year old about things she wishes her younger self could have known. I won’t link it because I’m not trying to shame anyone or start beef, but here are some of her main points, copy and pasted, not modified at all:
- There is no god.
- People lie all the time.
- Most of humanity is not very bright.
- There is no meaning to life.
- Even family and friends can take too much from you.
- Everybody is not equal. Everybody is not the same. Everybody is not well-intentioned or good. Some are downright evil.
These are not all of them, but my selection of about half. Some were practical (albeit still negative), such as “People who gossip about others with you will gossip about you to others.” But as you can see, the vast majority are negative, hopeless, and pessimistic.
Now, I don’t mean to lump together all atheists as if they’re all nihilistic Eeyores, but all the comments on this post are a resounding “Amen! Yes! I wish I had known these too!” I flicked through them, wondering if anyone else was exhausted by the draining hopelessness of the post, but every last one applauded her straight-up truth telling style.
If she was my grandma, I think I’d be dead in a gutter somewhere.
Besides the fallacy-riddled reasoning (no god or meaning…but people can be evil… maybe the not-bright humanity was self-referential?), it made me wonder why this would be touted or celebrated as a triumphal late-in-life realization.
Why applaud the void?
What beauty or substance is there in telling younger generations that everything is meaningless and nothing matters (but there are still evil people); I mean, what will you accomplish?
Compare this to the teaching of someone like Jordan Peterson. Without calling upon a higher power, he is able to come up with a reason to charge forward in life, to rise up, to better yourself, to make your bed and put your room in order. And if we as a society can take care of our own respective corners of the world, how much better would our nation be? If we each adopted a positive (and I mean in the philosophical sense…as in based on something or a substance, rather than the grandma’s apophatic philosophy of life; arguing from the negative, or from absence) mindset, what could we accomplish?
This grandma is the exact type of person who would hate JBP, I can tell. And she would hate him because rather than preaching nihilism and despair like her, he is calling people to rise up and at least find a meaning for their lives; to stand for something rather than nothing; telling them that there can be a hope for a better tomorrow, if you would only pull yourself up and aim at it.
To me, the choice of which perspective is superior is obvious, and not just because I’m a Christian.
Would I cheer for the light or the shadow to win in a fight?
Would I prefer the water in a glass or the empty part?
Would I prefer something or nothing?
Philosophers tend to agree that existence is better than nonexistence; something is better than nothing, in a qualitative sense. If you have nothing — which we cannot imagine — then you can’t start anything or go anywhere or get a foothold or go anywhere. Deconstruction without reconstruction is fruitless.
The problem with the woman’s perspective (aside from the logical fallacies, insulting language, and general despair) is that it’s based on nothing. If she’s right, then she has accomplished nothing. Because, by her own standard, if it’s all meaningless, there is nothing to accomplish. Progress is meaningless and so is being right.
Apophatic philosophy (only describing things in the negative, or by what they’re not) doesn’t lead to invention or hope or progress or bettering the world for the oppressed. Only a philosophy that says, Yes, there is good in the world despite all the bad, and there are things we can aim at that would make it better for us all, and there is an objective evil because there must be an objective good! has any hope at making the world better, or giving meaning to our lives.
Dismal posts like that bug me because on the surface they can sound right. Cynics have a way of persuading us that they’re correct, because they’re negative…they don’t need to prove it.
But fighting for substance and hope and The Good, as well as God? That takes effort and patience and again…hope.
Christians (and everyone) need hope, even when the little cynic in all of us begins to creep up.
I can’t help but wonder if the author of that post, deep down, hopes she’s wrong. If perhaps, at the floor of her being, she too longs for hope.
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Day 51 of 100 Days of Blog
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