For the love of meaning: The meaning crisis is among us, and it’s not a problem
by JD Alibrando
PCC is an open campus, and people often exploit this to get a chance to imprint on students’ minds. Born again Christians attempt to prepare students for the second coming of Christ. Jehovah’s Witnesses set up tables to teach students about the Bible. A Hindu organization gives out spiritual texts on self realization.
Saul Marquez is part of ISKON, a Hindu organization that wants to share the practices and teachings from the Bhagavad Gita.
“Stress is everywhere; Anxiety is everywhere,” Marquez said, when asked why the organization was on campus. “I am very excited that we meet a lot of open minded people here and that gives us the opportunity to have some exchange with people and hopefully they can learn something and use it in their lives to become better students, to become better family members and friends.”
Whether or not there is a real need, there is the perception by these organizations that students need meaning. There are multiple paths for a student to consider when cultivating meaning, but, even for those that do not find religion attractive, the options can become overwhelming.
This competition of meaning creation is part of a phenomenon that John Verveake calls “the meaning crisis.” Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist and philosopher. He argues that as traditional structures of religion and ideology are becoming transformed we are losing the meaning we inherit from them. But is there a meaning crisis?
Vervaeke argues in his lectures that, although knowledge has become easier to access, we are now lacking institutions which cultivate wisdom. The postmodern condition has decayed the sense of a universal project for humanity and has replaced it with a cacophony of projects with no direction or consensus. How do we know how to act without myths of progress or salvation? How do we handle suffering and pain if there is no purpose?
PCC students are finding ways to cultivate meaning. Freshman Ricardo Muñoz led a meeting on stoicism at PCC’s Philosophy Club. Before coming to PCC, Muñoz served in the United States Marine Corps for four years, where he was often confronted with the task of staying collected in an environment of stress and suffering. Muñoz found it was important to have a radical acceptance of suffering, since suffering is inevitable and out of our control. Catholicism and stoicism are two aspects of his mental life that help him with radical acceptance.
“Stoicism is not a choice in the military, since either you are a stoic or you will go crazy or you will die,” Muñoz said. “A lot of the stuff you are going to confront is not up to you, so you need to learn how to react to it and use what you can control.”
The military fosters strong relationships among its ranks and a sense of purpose, so Muñoz was quick to notice that many students lacked guiding principles.
“Now we are beginning to question things, which I do see as a benefit, because it is important to know why you are doing the things you’re doing,” Muñoz said. “However, now I feel we have jumped to the exact opposite end of the spectrum where everyone is lost in a giant void where there is no rhyme or reason.”
Dr. Monica Coto is a professor of psychology and biopsychology at PCC. Positive psychology, according to Coto, has a lot to say about meaning.
Positive psychology is the study of human flourishing as opposed to clinical psychology which mainly deals with psychological disorders.
“If you look at positive psychology — which is the study of what we should be doing — when you look at people who are not just mentally stable and clinically normal but people who are thriving and are happy, they have meaning,” Coto said. “So, they generally point to the idea that you should develop meaning some way, somehow.”
Whether or not there is a meaning crisis, each and every one of us will probably have our own mini meaning crisis while we try to cultivate an intuition for how to act. Of course, the value of cultivating meaning extends to college students.
“The times that I have seen students lack meaning, often times I see it manifest in two ways,” Coto said. “The first is depression, and that is a more pervasive lack of meaning.”
Depression and anxiety are increasing in the modern world, according to Coto. This is one of the reasons Verveake believes there is a meaning crisis. Depression in particular can involve a lack of meaning, which can manifest as a loss of interest in the things that normally give someone pleasure or joy. Depression is complicated, and it is difficult to say whether depression leads to a lack of meaning or a lack of meaning leads to depression. However, it’s evident the two do feed into each other.
“I also see that if students don’t have a very clear goal for their education, and this happens when students just come as default to community college,” Coto said. “They tend not to have such great outcomes until they find that purpose.”
Even just small bits of purpose, imagining what your near future could be like, can significantly help motivate students.
How do we cultivate meaning? Positive psychology points to three things. First, we can find meaning in communities such as family, friends, work, religious institutions or other social networks. Second, we can also find meaning in purpose. Positive psychology points to art, sports, games, work or other hobbies and goals as sources of meaning. Lastly, positive psychology points to transcendent experiences as something which creates meaning.
“That can happen in a church, so you can be praying and feel one with God,” Coto said. “But, it could also happen in a meditation hall, or when you’re playing basketball and you’re experiencing flow, the idea that you for a moment, and this seems to be critical, you have a moment of ego disillusionment, however you get that!”
Ego disillusionment is the process of losing your reflexive thoughts about your future and past or how you are being perceived by others. Instead, there is clear attention. Coto points out that ego disillusionment is an important part of all of the techniques that positive psychology uses to cultivate meaning.
“If you think about all the things that positive psychology points to — seeking out these transcendent experiences, being in support systems like a family or friends or social network, and then finding purpose — all of those things are going to trigger these very useful psychological approaches, like thinking about others instead of yourself, like getting out of your own head so you can do that work of art or play that game well,” Coto said. “So, these are things that, in practice, do tend to decrease ego. If you are doing them well.”
Coto has her own history of exploring meaning and has come to her own conclusions. She is skeptical of meaning, whether it exists and whether we need it.
“There is good in cultivating meaning if you need meaning, but I think in some ways you could live a happy and healthy life without it,” Coto said.
Whether or not meaning exists or is useful depends on what meaning is. It is clear that meaning has something to do with cultivating value, but what has value and how you cultivate it is unclear. Is meaning being a part of something larger than yourself? Is meaning fulfilling your purpose or function?
Some may believe that meaning is synonymous with purpose, however, it is possible to have meaning without purpose. Meaning without purpose entails that value is intrinsic to the person, so no other extrinsic objectives need to be fulfilled to cultivate value.
“Sometimes meaning has this tinge of purposeness, like there is a purpose, and when you think of that it is usually grounded in some future thing, like I have to do this or I need to go in this direction, but there are some traditions where you don’t need to do that,” Coto said. “You just need to be here and acquiesce to what the moment requires. So, you do not necessarily have to develop that meaning or purpose, because the flow of the universe will just give you that.”
Dr. Jonathan Miller is a philosophy professor here at PCC. Although he is not convinced that there is a meaning crisis, he finds the idea plausible.
“Many people have remarked on this, the fact that in the last 50 years, the rise of postmodernism, it is hard for people to be unironically or sincerely attached and committed to all encompassing ideologies,” Miller said. “So, there is just a lot more complexity in the ways that people use these traditional value systems and world views.”
Miller points to existentialism as an example of how students at PCC could begin to think about meaning cultivation.
“Existentialists regard humanity as not being given a meaning, because they believe that humanity doesn’t have a fixed essence or nature,” Miller said. “Rather, humans have this radical freedom which they see as the ability to, through their own action and ideas, create their own nature and thus create meaning in their lives.”
We are no longer simply handed our beliefs. Instead, we can pick between a multitude of beliefs. This can be a lonely or overwhelming process, especially if you cannot find others on a journey simikar to your own, but it can potentially be just as rewarding as traditional methods of meaning creation, if not more so.
Miller does not believe that we are completely free to create our own essence since we are bound by our biology, communities and histories, but he believes existentialism is on to something important.
“You can’t expect meaning to be handed to you, even by a clever guru like Vervaeke,” Miller said. “It is something where you have to put in the work.”
Existentialists are not the first to think about meaning. Human kind has been thinking about meaning for a long time, but the idea comes in different flavors.
“If you go back to antiquity, it is interesting because they don’t talk about the meaning of life question so much,” Miller said. “For them, the more important question is what is the good and what is the right way of living?”
Although the language is not the same, there is an analogy between what is good and what is meaningful, since they both inform how we should act. In a sense the meaning crisis is a crisis of not knowing how to act.
In antiquity, philosophers across Eurasia were preoccupied with how to become virtuous, or how to cultivate an intuition about acting in accordance with what is good, according to Miller. Ancient Greek schools of thought, such as the Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics, had their own theories of virtue. Ancient Chinese schools of thought, such as Confucianism and Taoism, were preoccupied with becoming virtuous as well, though “virtue” is not being strictly used in the Aristotelian sense here.
“You get this virtue theory, that tells you things you need to be developing, and you just train these through practice,” Miller said. “ You kind of gradually discover or construct meaning along the way.”
Both Miller and Coto point to the importance of practice. Although we may not be able to articulate what is meaningful, we can practice in ways which cultivate an intuition about meaning. This is one of the reasons religion is such a powerful force of meaning cultivation, since religions come with a shared set of beliefs about what is good and how to practice.
“We are now in a different position whereby maybe we can become more alienated just from those very basic ideas that there is a good for humans,” Miller said. “The idea that we can discover what is good for us and pursue it, if that doesn’t come so naturally and we are either lost without a clear conception of the good or we don’t have clear knowledge of the techniques and methods for developing it, maybe that is when you fall into a meaning crisis.”
This is something that Marquez mentioned when explaining why ISKON was at PCC. Although students are very knowledgeable they may lack a committed practice which can lead to wisdom.
“The best thing is to actually practice,” Marquez said. “Now the practice requires some discipline, but at least we come to some alternative knowledge.”
Saul Marquez, of ISKON, a Hindu organization, shows Bhagavad Gita to a visitor at his booth at Pasadena City Collge on Wednesday, December 14, 2022. His intention is to help PCC students develop wisdom and self realization
These practices don’t need to come from religion, however. It can come from meditation — the practice of directing one’s attention with intention — or other practices which require concentration like art, sports or work.
Science or natural philosophy was seen in the ancient world as a means to discover the good, according to Miller. However, the project of science since then has changed hue and is more ambiguous.
It is not easy to go from facts to understanding what is good. Scientific facts inform the debate around abortion, yet they do not determine whether or not abortion is wrong.
Miller points out that even though science doesn’t directly provide meaning, science can inform our intuitions about meaning.
“The fact the universe is so vast and we are but a small portion of it. That we live in this apparently decentered cosmos,” Miller said. “Even though that doesn’t logically entail some point about meaning or purpose, it is still relevant for trying to figure out things related to meaning and purpose and even the human good. Just meditating on that realization, the vastness of the cosmos, can alter our perspective.”
Coto makes the connection between science and mysticism. To be a scientist you are constantly on the edge of understanding, and you must be willing to change your beliefs if observations contradict them. As a mystic you must cultivate a relationship with the ineffable and constantly remind yourself of the illusions that veil reality.
“It is weird because the mystic is like ‘ah we don’t know anything’ and the scientist is like ‘ah we want to know stuff,’ but both of those groups live right where the unknown is and they enjoy it,” Coto said. “You have to be OK with that.”
The meaning crisis may be among us, but, as long as we put in the work and are OK with the unknown, it is not a problem as much as an opportunity.
