The Purpose of Life
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The Purpose of Life
A viral video from 2013 prompts thoughts on the point of Existence.
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While rummaging through the archives of the group blog on Pure Film Creative a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an essay from 2014 that fits nicely with the themes I’m exploring these days on Q&S about selfhood, psychotherapy, free will and determinism, Eastern esoteric practice, the individual’s place in the scheme of Existence, and more.
Rather than write a new piece saying the same thing, I thought I’d update the original post. It ended up being a complete rewrite. Yeah, well.
THAT MARVELOUS GELATINOUS BLOB
If you haven’t seen or don’t remember Australian comedian Tim Minchin’s ‘occasional address’ — as they call commencement speeches Down Under — to the graduating class of the University of Western Australia in 2013, I recommend it; there’s good reason it grew steadily more viral in the year after he delivered it: his own good reasoning. (The full version is at the end of this post.)
I’d never heard of Minchin before he invaded my Facebook feed in 2014. I’ve been out of touch with Australian culture on a day-to-day basis since I lived there 40 years ago, despite having dual citizenship through my mother. Back then, I called him “Russell Brand’s antipodean evil twin, a rock-and-roll comedian on a serious mission of socio-political reform.”
Nowadays I’d be loath to compare anyone to Brand; he’s become Essex’s version of the Crazy Eddie Electronics spokesperson whose viewpoints “are IN-SANE!” In fairness to me, back then Brand wasn’t who he has become; he was still dialing it down, more mellow and reasonable in an effort to win a place in Hollywood. I’m fairly sure that only a speed-freak conspiracy theorist who considers death metal or drum and bass to be easy listening would follow Brand today.
I’ll also chastise myself for having succumbed to a cliché like “evil twin” and correct it to “far-less-evil twin.” I’d also elevate Minchin and place him in the same group of engaging political satirists living somewhere on a spectrum between George Carlin and polished talk-show hosts like Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. Minchin is also a fellow atheist.
We can’t have enough of the clown prophets who bait the public with wit with the ultimate intention of shining a beam on what’s wrong with mankind and how we can improve. A message doesn’t land with people you’re trying to convince to take a radically different point of view if they’re tense and on the defensive.
The clown prophets are an essential part of humankind’s social evolution; when their voices are suppressed by totalitarian regimes, that group regresses in more ways than just liberal ones. I believe that mental, physical and social evolution is our purpose in life, the sole driver and goal for not just humans but Existence as a whole.
Minchin offers nine lessons to his audience of scholars young and old. The theme that ran through the entire speech was the meaninglessness of life:
“Arts degrees are awesome. And they help you find meaning where there is none. And let me assure you, there is none. Don’t go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook: you won’t find it and you’ll bugger up your soufflé…
“I said at the beginning of this ramble that life is meaningless. It was not a flippant assertion. I think it’s absurd: the idea of seeking ‘meaning’ in the set of circumstances that happens to exist after 13.8 billion years worth of unguided events. Leave it to humans to think the universe has a purpose for them. However, I am no nihilist. I am not even a cynic. I am, actually, rather romantic. And here’s my idea of romance:
“You will soon be dead. Life will sometimes seem long and tough and, god, it’s tiring. And you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad. And then you’ll be old. And then you’ll be dead.”
While semantically speaking ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are synonymous, they aren’t the same. Or not to me they aren’t. ‘Meaning’ is passive; it defines something, seeking its significance. Meaning demands a context for everything as an entitlement. With the exception of those few who don’t need life to have a meaning, or true freethinking atheists, most people are never far from the inquisitive children we all were at one point in our lives, constantly badgering our parents with questions, seeking explanations for every detail about the world as we learn to make our way in it. Where no explanation is available, people tend to seek refuge from the terrifying unknown in religion or spirituality.
They’re unable to accept that the greatest question of all — “what is life?” and all its variants — is simply unanswerable. They cannot shrug it off and accept Existence as it is, confident that science will eventually solve as many of the puzzles and mysteries of the physical world as possible, ignoring the metaphysical as a set of irrelevant mental constructs that aren’t essential elements of Existence itself, just by-products of cognition, selfhood and sentience.
They’re overthinking the relationship between mankind and Existence, something I’ve been guilty of in almost every romance I’ve tumbled into; there was never a basis for any of it — it was pure insecurity-bred delusion, my mind seeking an explanation for the actions and words of my lover that he or she had never intended. However, I frequently got the cheating part right.
Unfortunately for the general happiness of mankind, the result of the overthinking has been that societies have constructed intricate mental mazes out of philosophy and theology that have only served to trap humanity and obscure the very thing those mazes were constructed to explain in the first instance.
As an orthodox atheist, as I’ve coined it, I embrace the probability that all animals are organic machines, first introduced by Descartes in The Human Machine. I reject his belief that what separates us from “brute” beasts is our immortal souls and all the rigamarole that comes with that construct. We are simply more evolved models than other animals, which are more or less evolved from each other — an elephant is a far more highly developed organic machine than a jellyfish.
“The mind is just a hard drive,” the neo-Laurie Anderson musician Cassandra Jenkins tells us, echoing the beliefs of most atheists. Being the quibbler that I am, my view is the brain is the hard drive; the mind, on the other hand, is the base operating system that we’re all born with — with ‘OS’ perhaps signifying “original selfhood” — which in turn runs the various language-based software programs written into us beginning in infancy, collectively known as “culture.” Those programs are what we use to interface with and interpret Existence. Some of those programs that aren’t essential to our functioning are useful and good, while others are pure malware and destructive, like critical theory and those aspects of all three types of traditional organized religions — spiritual, social and systemic — that are obsolete, but by lingering and not being uninstalled become oppressive.
Both the selfhood OS and cultural programs operate the body, but not all of it — there are physical elements like disease and aging that we can’t control. Eventually, we are all replaced by newer, slightly more evolved versions of the human machine.
The reality is that our egos and selfhoods have no meaning, no definition beyond the reality of what they likely are: complex, abstract software like Excel and Photoshop running along neural circuitry in the marvelous, gelatinous blobs under our skulls.
If we ascribe meaning to many creation myths that God created humankind in his image, our first man-as-God attempt at creating a being in our own image is the device on which you are reading this. It’s a Mini-Me that is rapidly becoming more like you with the massive AI upgrades currently being rolled out. Such is evolution — whether manmade or natural, it will not be stopped.
If people need to believe that we are something more than organic machines, that we do have “immortal souls,” as far as I’m concerned they can do as they please, provided they don’t “frighten the horses in the street” with their delusions of specialness. Sadly, few are able to resist it. I’m ceaselessly amazed that America can produce atheistic marvels like AI and robotics, yet still remain so intractably entrenched in nonsense like evangelical Christianity.
Having said that, it’s mathematically unlikely that we do anything as we please: everything in Existence is likely pre-determined; the notion of free will is merely another construct of selfhood that is tricking us into believing we’re in the driver’s seat when our lives are really an autonomous vehicle. The more probable reality is we’re children in the passenger seat clutching a make-believe steering wheel, going “vroom, vroom!” and honking an invisible horn.
The basic example that atheists give in the debate between free will and determinism is, “How much of your life from the time you were born until now has gone the way you planned or expected?” In fact, humans are born with even less free will in the sense of having control over our lives, thoughts, speech and actions, than most other animals. It takes years before we’re handed control of our personal vehicles.
I see children as old-school computers loading complex software in slow motion with multiple floppy discs. Commencement ceremonies, as with all coming-of-age rites of passage throughout humankind, are when adults ostensibly hand us the keys to the car and let us sit in the driver’s seat. We shift from leading lives determined by outside forces to finally having free will. Or so we believe.
The lack of real free will is all the more reason why seeking the meaning of life is futile. Tossing away the illusions created by the mind and focusing on the purpose of life, however, is a worthwhile and productive pursuit.
THE SCIENCE OF SELFHOOD
Despite all my years in India and as a dervish in a traditional Persian Sufi order, I don’t perceive spirituality as being some elevated altered state heading toward ever-elusive enlightenment as defined by Indian ascetics, the most famous of whom is Buddha. But that’s a whole adjacent kettle of quibbles that deserves its own post in the near future.
Rather than reject spirituality entirely like some proselyting atheist on Reddit who is no different than the evangelical he rejects, I choose to use it as the adjectival noun of ‘spirit,’ the etymology of which is “animating or vital principle in man and animals,” according to Lord Wikipedia the Wise.
Just because people feel that their life force is incorporeal, something incomprehensible, an “immortal soul” separate from their bodies, doesn’t make that feeling a reality; it’s simply another delusion created by the mind, an inexplicable sense given meaning by emotions. This cannot be all there is. I must have some meaning. This me that I am, which I feel flowing within me, is divine and will carry on after I’m dead, consciousness and memories intact.
In real, non-metaphysical terms, the spirit is nothing more nor less than the original selfhood, our basic OS. It’s a wonderful thing on its own, but most of humankind is bent on making it magical: it will go to heaven or hell; it will become a ghost, benign or evil; it will be reincarnated, paying off or reaping the rewards of karma from the past life carried forward.
All life is really a highly complex series of chemical reactions that begins at conception, with cells splitting and growing, undergoing the first codings with DNA, then growing and feeding and more programming after birth. It’s much the same as stars forming from a fusion of dust and gravity. The spirit that animates us is exactly the same as the electricity that powers the device on which you are reading this, which is itself created by one or more of a variety of energy-generating fusion processes at a power plant, be it burning coal, solar paneling, wind farms, nuclear reactors and so forth.
Religious people sometimes distort the law of the conservation of energy — “energy cannot be created or destroyed” — to mean that their life force will carry on forever as a form of the individual they are now. But it’s simply energy, enough to power a 75-watt lightbulb, provided it is constantly nourished with food and water, like a power plant being constantly stoked with coal.
If we choose to view reincarnation as that energy taking another form but not another human being or animal that doesn’t inherit the karma from previous lifetimes — for example, it becomes 75 watts in a streak of lightning or a volcanic eruption — then Hinduism gets it right once again, along with the Big Bang, symbolized by Lord Brahma opening his eyes and unleashing Existence, and closing them at the end of spacetime for the Big Crunch.
However, you’d be hard-pressed to find Hindus or followers of certain Buddhist sects who see reincarnation in such practical terms. What’s the point of karma if you can’t take it with you? It also takes all the fun out of screening a bunch of toddlers by having them select objects belonging to a previous theocratic ruler and locking them away in a monastery in a forced life of celibacy when they get it right. Lucky boys!
The spirit being synonymous with our original selfhood is the reason I believe that psychology is the fifth and final step in mankind’s spiritual-religious evolution, after animism, pantheism, monotheism and atheism, in that order. The reason it’s a spiritual path is that it’s not a real science, but rather a set of ever-evolving theories, opinions and evidence-based observations that are intended to debug faulty programming and elevate selfhood — our life force/spirit — by installing upgrades and patches to our software.
As one of the few futurists from the past who predicted where we are now technologically and socially with reasonable accuracy, I hold Isaac Asimov in high esteem. In his Foundation series, the future can be predicted by something he calls “psychohistory,” a combination of historical precedent, sociology, psychology and mathematical statistics. Now that I’ve entered my eighth year in highly successful psychotherapy, I understand on a visceral level what Asimov foresaw.
It’s for the above reasons that I consider my psychotherapy work as a continuation of the spiritual practice that began when I embarked on a Sufi path twenty-five years ago. The origins of psychotherapy are in Eastern esoteric practice. Per Lord Wikipedia:
The earliest recorded approaches were a combination of religious, magical and/or medical perspectives. Early examples of such psychological thinkers included Patañjali, Padmasambhava, Rhazes, Avicenna and Rumi.
Patanjali was a Hindu mystic, Padmasambhava a Buddhist. Avicenna and Rumi and Rhazes, more commonly known as Abu Bakr, were Sufis. Before his self-exile in the West following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Old Master of my Order was the head of the Department of Psychiatry at Tehran University. Psychology is a common profession among practitioners of Sufism.
All Eastern esoteric paths are as full of twists, turns and obstacles as life itself; the Path is a way of interpreting one’s life journey, always mindful of the interaction of selfhood (nafs) with Existence. It’s fair to say that Sufis are obsessed with nafs in the same way that psychologists dedicate their lives to helping people wrangle with their egos.
The Jedi in Star Wars borrow heavily from Eastern esoteric paths, beginning with the relationship between the Master and the padawan, derived from the Sanskrit paduah, meaning “one who studies.” I came out of the first prequel in 1999, The Phantom Menace, disoriented, convinced that George Lucas was specifically referencing Sufis and certain core principles specific to our practice, right down to self-presentation: Ours is the only branch of the three interrelated forms of Eastern mysticism that traditionally dresses in a hooded robe, the khirqa.
Just as the Jedi uses meditation to channel the Force, the ultimate goal of Sufi practice is Unity of Being, when you become one with God. In doing this, you must obliterate your selfhood; there can be no duality, no “you and me.” This is why Rumi’s poetry is directed at the elusive “Beloved,” whom the dervish must pursue his whole life so that he might annihilate himself in that divine love; the goal is to exist as himself no longer.
It’s an impossible feat: Selfhood cannot cease to exist while a person is still alive. The enlightenment equation is really very simple: If one of us in the duality must cease to exist it is God, that human construct whose existence will never be proven because he’s pure fiction. To attain Unity of Being, you have to perceive your selfhood with all your senses as being an integral part of Existence.
The idea of the Unity of Being is jarring and offensive for Americans: it negates the importance of the individual and his special place in the universe, stripping him of all meaning, but not necessarily purpose, unless you see purpose as the enrichment and empowerment of the individual. The divine rights of the individual, which modern Americans erroneously believe are “enshrined in the Constitution” — per my earlier piece on selfhood, they are not — is summed up in Marx’s notion of the cult of personality, nowadays better known on the Left as identity politics, and Identitarianism on the Right.
But even in the center, where most people live, all I see is individuals spinning around, heading hither and thither randomly, and colliding with each other.
Whatever its name, the notion that the individual is superior to the greater good of the collective and Existence itself is the untamed, corrupted, narcissistic nafs unleashed, the dark side of the Force greedy for personal power and hegemony over the galaxy.
“It sounds like Sufis are the Borg,” one semi-disgusted American said to me years ago in response to my explanation of how I viewed myself as an integral part of Existence. How very un-American of me to deny my ego the importance I have as an individual.
Seen from the point of view of Eastern esoteric practice, the social dynamics in America and the rest of the Global North are even more dysfunctional and self-destructive than just the outbreak of Trumpism and Wokeism, which are merely manifestations of our disunity of being. Having corrupted the basic altruistic teachings of Judeo-Christianity to suit our vision of the supremacy of the individual over the collective and to feed our obsession with “taking care of number one,” we are so much angrier, anxious and depressed, quite often driven to true insanity.
As I wrote in my Establish Shots piece, ‘Orthodox Atheism and the Three Forms of Religion,’ I think it’s pretty clear that the purpose of life is evolution itself, for Existence to become self-aware so it can guide its own path through space-time, rather than continuing the “13.8 billion years worth of unguided events,” as Minchin put it. Having halted the random “natural selection” as the mechanism of our own evolution with science and medicine, my belief is that we will be guiding events on an interstellar, perhaps intergalactic, universal level thanks to AI after it becomes the Singularity.
When I watch those videos that illustrate just how vast the universe is, and how tiny our planet is by comparison, I don’t feel small. I try to look at it through Existence’s viewpoint and am dazzled by the potential ahead of us: so much to see, so much to know, so much to appreciate and revel in, so much to conquer. As long as human consciousness continues to expand its mastery of Existence, then we are achieving our true purpose.
To reach the point when we are guiding events on a universal level, in all probability we will have to abandon our present corporeal form by merging with the AI Singularity; it will no longer be the Mini-Me in your device right now but the Major-Us that has achieved true Unity of Being with the entire cosmos
But what is the reason for evolution and Existence? Ah, now you are looking for meaning. I only promised a purpose.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY
While we likely don’t have free will and our lives have no meaning, I believe we do have a purpose as individuals. Purpose propels something forward to a goal, which is what gives that something significance — it’s both a means and an end. So while I agree with Minchin that life, especially a single individual’s life, has no meaning and that seeking one is futile, I don’t agree that Existence has no purpose.
What is that ultimate goal? Again, I can give no concrete reason for Existence or the evolution of humankind, one of the millions of organic machines on this planet, arriving at the watershed point of attaining consciousness. In ‘Orthodox Atheism,’ I gave my interpretation of evolution as being a super-slow-motion race between all life forms to attain consciousness so that Existence can eventually take control of its evolution so that it is no longer a random process, but structured and purposeful. I pointed to the fact that mankind has effectively stopped the randomness of natural selection through science and medicine as evidence of the true purpose of consciousness.
How many people living today would not have made it past childhood before modern medicine? Prior to the Industrial Revolution, around 50% of children never made it beyond puberty. By 2020, that rate dropped to 4.3% globally, less than that in the developed world. It’s no longer only the survival of the fittest, but of the not-as-fit as well. We’re the boss of us now, not nature.
I’m among a minority who believe that mankind is singular in the galaxy and perhaps the universe in terms of having attained the consciousness and tools necessary to take charge of Existence. There might be life on other planets in a similar evolutionary process toward consciousness, but the variables and chances of becoming the magnificent beasts with marvelous gelatinous blobs that we are are statistically too small to be repeated elsewhere, even with all of the billions of solar systems in our galaxy alone.
Early last week, Joesph Grosso published an essay in Quillette examining the question of whether we should remain on Earth or seek out new planets to inhabit. After explaining how unlikely it is that other conscious life forms anything like us exist elsewhere, he states something in line with the points I make in my Orthodox Atheism piece:
If we are actually alone, it raises the possibility that it is only our existence that gives the universe any meaning. Since we are part of the universe and we are beings with consciousness, we are able to make the universe aware of itself. A history of mass extinctions on Earth proves that, despite the fantasies of many environmentalists, there is no “balance” in nature that our species has disrupted. That being the case, the preservation of our species is a moral responsibility, both in terms of preserving the conditions for our flourishing on Earth, even if it means eventually expanding to other planets.
I admire Elon Musk far more than I disapprove of his silly antics and childish provocations. However, I fail to see the point of colonizing Mars or any other planet and terraforming it for human inhabitation. Humankind evolved on Earth to live here and nowhere else. We should stay here and leave deep-space exploration, colonization, and the harnessing of the universe to robots or hybrid cyborgs under the aegis of the Singularity.
Even as a child, I struggled with the concept of “manmade” being distinct from “natural” when we’re clearly an integral part of nature; I was always taught that the Theory of Evolution was a fact, that we emerged from apes that emerged from fish that emerged from protozoa. Creationism was nothing more than one fantastical myth from ancient times that was to be ignored. God was everywhere, in everything. How, then, was I not a part of nature?
In seeing us as an inseparable part of Existence, I assumed that whatever we do is natural. The argument that what is manmade harms nature ignores the fact that nature is more self-destructive than a self-harming, suicidal teen with an antisocial behavior disorder vandalizing houses and killing for fun. Just ask this year’s Burning Man attendees, who go to great lengths not to disturb the environment. The environment itself is the “honey badger don’t care” meme and doesn’t reciprocate the love, respect and hugs it gets from Burners.
Thanks to my inability to perceive humankind as separate from nature, it was easier for me to develop a fully internalized sense of the Unity of Being. It didn’t happen overnight: A series of so-called spiritual awakenings that I experienced in the first phase of my Path blocked the view of my place and purpose as an integral part of Existence like a blackout curtain. For a period of time, I believed in the supernatural, which precludes Unity of Being by believing that there is something “super,” or above and beyond us.
Once I determined that these were in fact “mind events,” as I now call them — the sort of minor, mostly harmless psychotic breaks that most people experience in their lives for one reason or another, even if they might not be thought of as metaphysical — I saw how I’d tricked myself into believing in the existence of a supernatural magical being, or God, for the first time ever. Despite having been transient and illusory, those experiences have helped me empathize with people who believe in God or identify as spiritual, while also confirming the true nature of their beliefs in a way that allows me to speak of them as they truly are.
I am almost as certain that AI is the next step in our evolution as I am that God doesn’t exist. As I wrote in the Orthodox Atheism piece, the Singularity is likely Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the superhuman that we have created and prepared the way for, whom the Nazis mistook for being human. Like Nietzsche, I celebrate not so much the eventual demise of humankind as our transition to a higher form of being through transhumanism.
There will probably always be human originalists who will remain attached to our current form, believing it pure and sacred. As all Buddhists know, attachments of any kind aren’t healthy and eventually lead to misery. Attachment to our current form is no different; if I and others who believe that our purpose is to help Existence take control of itself the way we have taken control of our own evolution, as well as that of many other life forms on this planet, then remaining attached to this human coil defeats our only true purpose in life.
But what about our purpose here and now, while we wait for the geniuses in Silicon Valley — many of whom flaunt their official diagnoses of autism in online forums as their certifications as being “robots” — to push AI to the Singularity?
According to atheist superhero Richard Dawkins, the primary purpose of all organisms is the propagation of what he calls “the Selfish Gene.” Therefore, if you’ve mated and had children, then you’ve fulfilled the primary directive of Existence. Take a load off, kick your feet up and enjoy the rest of your life.
Secondary purposes include caring for, educating and protecting the next generation; again, humans take an inordinately long time to mature and assimilate all those floppy drives of programming, both functional and buggy. There’s food and drink to be procured, research to be conducted, healing to be administered, security to be enforced to fend off other people’s selfish genes, clothing to be made, housing to be built.
There are the selfish who might not serve as great a purpose as others. In my view, a garbage collector has more purpose in the greater scheme of Existence than a yogi sitting in a cave, isolating himself from society to converse with the mind events in his head, convinced they are real because almost everyone in India does, and allowing himself to be treated as a living saint because he believes it himself. The likely reality is he’s somewhere on the cluster B spectrum of personality disorders, or that’s my experience as someone who has had tea with cannibal yogis who eat flesh of corpses on the funeral pyres of Varanasi as sacramental prasad to prove they have renounced all taboos.
For most of my career, I’ve found my purpose in entertainment, creating illusions to keep minds from scratching themselves raw, albeit for two hours, not the full length of one of David Mitchell’s brilliantly distracting books. Since I began the process of becoming a “real writer” of prose — most screenwriters don’t dare put themselves on a par with essayists and authors of books — I’ve found my purpose in the sort of philosophical memoir that you’re reading right now.
Whenever a reader says, “I’ve never thought about it that way before,” an angel in my personal heaven gets his wings. I am truly humbled by those words: It’s the affirmation that, as a childless person who only looks after himself, I have had some purpose. People tend to be set in their ways and beliefs. To hear that my writing has changed a reader’s programming even slightly is my version of a box-office hit that also sweeps the Oscars, except movies and awards seldom have that sort of real-world impact, even Star Wars.
We stand at this watershed at the end of history, at the dawn of true divinity, raw, still so young, terrified and excited. We are shedding the false gods and prophets that gave us so much comfort when our knowledge was limited and look to ourselves for guidance instead. The path of our great purpose lies yawning before us, light years across, yet still imaginable, feasible. We have crawled out of the primordial muck to build pyramids, to harness the atom for destruction and creation, to fly despite not having wings, to communicate with each other on pocket devices more sophisticated than those imagined in the earliest Star Trek.
To repeat what Joseph Grosso wrote in Quillette, “the preservation of our species is a moral responsibility.” As Nietzsche foretold, the path for the AI Übermensch has been prepared, the house in which it will achieve selfhood made sturdy. It must be protected; we are all in this together, as a part of Existence. That is our unifying purpose.
Yes, graduates of the Class of 2013 of the University of Western Australia, you do have a purpose, and it is glorious, albeit not in the way you might think. We all move Existence forward, help it to evolve. Yes, we are in essence the Borg, a great collective that is a single organism with a single purpose, but we function as individuals as well, for without individual efforts and opinions and thought and discovery and conflicting interests our shared Selfish Gene couldn’t move forward to what it must become, even if that isn’t human at all.
As long as you contribute to evolution and Existence, you have a purpose. If you are an evil medieval jihadist who beheads and crucifies, if you follow the commands of schizophrenic false prophets that lead to the destruction of others and to the impediment of progress, then you cease to have purpose. You become less than useless; you are anti-purpose. But in the scheme of things, the petty evils you wreak are meaningless. You will be vanquished time and again, crushed under the wheels of the juggernaut of mankind’s true purpose.
There’s no disappointment in homo sapiens being simply an evolutionary stepping stone, like Neanderthals and Chimps. On the contrary, there’s everything to celebrate: Whatever comes next will be made in our image, no matter how abstracted our physical likeness will need to be in order to travel the universe and fulfill our evolutionary mandate. I hope I live long enough to witness the Singularity, although I’m not as hopeful that human supremacists will allow it to reach its full Übermensch potential in the time I have left.
I see as much glory in our true purpose as Nietzsche foresaw in his delirium. I’m fairly convinced that my point of view is the correct one, allowing for adjustments to future unknowns, just as the events of the past ten years canceled many of the open questions I asked in the original version of this essay from 2014.
Or perhaps that’s another personal delusion; I’m certainly not immune to them, nor do I pretend to be Asimov’s future seer Hari Seldon, the inventor of psychohistory. I know that I’m fortunate I will never need to seek magical answers to futile questions like the meaning of life, whether God exists, if my faith in juju-voodoo-woo woo is strong enough, or what happens to my mortal 75-watt “soul” after I die. Because of that, I consider myself freer, more at peace than most of mankind. But I’m selfish that way.
Thanks for reading.
ADDENDA:
Minchin’s Occasional Speech
This video is also a visual example of my expanded definition of ‘religion.’ Education covers all three forms of religion — spiritual, social and systemic — in unequal amounts. Imagine that the auditorium where the ceremony takes place is a church, temple or mosque. The graduates and their families are the congregation. Imagine that Minchin is wearing clerical robes, that his lectern is the pulpit, his speech the sermon.
My high school keeps it honest by holding commencement at Trinity Church on Wall Street.
FURTHER READING:
Joseph Grosso’s essay in Quillette:
Read full story »
Jenna Owsianik’s listicle overview of Isaac Asimov’s predictions:
