What is the Meaning of Life?

In his review of Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, Spencer A Klavan complains that Murray doesn’t really come up with a solution to the problem of the current gender, race, and identity madness. Murray does not offer an alternative, “a vision of the good life more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers.” 

Exactly. It is not enough to critique the Left. Or to offer political alternatives. “Politics is downstream from culture,” said the late Andrew Breitbart. And culture is downstream from religion, adds John C. Wright. And religion, I would suggest, inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is downstream of the eternal question that every human yearns to answer: the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

Everything -- religion, culture, politics -- is downstream of the question: what is the meaning of life? Indeed, you could say that life is an endless attempt to answer that question.

In the following pages I will attempt to construct "a vision of life more compelling than" the left's vision. It will be a vision suitable for use by anyone in the modern "educated class," and it will be based on what I call the German Turn, that is the revolution in philosophy, in science, and in the sciences of the mind, that begin with the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century.

The modern problem, I believe, is that moderns no longer experience life and the universe as either a complete mystery known only to the gods, or a program handed down by God to humans in a divine creation and a program of divine law. Instead the modern imagines himself the creator of his own life. He is a discoverer, an explorer, and expects to develop an individual, and creative, approach to the age old question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." Far too many moderns also believe that their wondrous creative vision entitles them to force the rest of humanity onto their Procrustean bed -- in their own best interest, of course.

But I believe that we moderns underestimate the enormity of this project. That is, after all, why our ancestors assigned this honor to God: who are we to think that we could ever have the answer to the mystery of life, let alone forcing the answer on our fellow humans? It is not just a question of stepping out and writing a book, or leading a revolution, or doing a bit of activism, or inventing a new theory, or bending the arc of history towards justice. It is a personal existential journey, full of peril, and most likely to end in disaster, or at least in failure. So I believe that the creative explorer, the man who will show his fellow humans a new meaning of life, cannot be a proud egotist but instead a humble investigator that well knows and deeply accepts the odds against him, "that durst defy th'Omnipotent to arms."

There is a name for this kind of man: the Sacrificial Hero.

But now let us examine how it is that I think that the Germans, notorious aggressors and monsters of the 20th century, have a lot to teach us.

Next: The German Turn
The Germans invented everything

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