The search for meaning
Martha Nussbaum talks to Bill Moyers.
[I]f you look into the religions, they have this deep idea of human dignity and the source of dignity being conscience. This capacity for searching for the meaning of life. And that leads us directly to the idea of respect. Because if conscience is this deep and valuable source of searching for meaning, then we all have it whether we’re agreeing or disagreeing. And we all ought to respect it and respect it equally in one another.
Hmm. I would say, as usual, it depends what kind of ‘respect’ is meant. There are, as usual, different possible levels of respect – recognition respect, substantive respect, and so on. In one way I agree with that (and so, it might surprise many people to know, does that notorious ‘fundamentalist’ atheist Richard Dawkins): I do respect the search for meaning and related projects, I do respect the desire for something more than the purely greedy or trivial or selfish. In another way I’m not sure I do agree with it – though I’m not sure enough that this really is another way to say flatly that I don’t agree with it. I respect the search for meaning, but then my respect goes wobbly if the search is carried on with the wrong equipment, or with self-imposed handicaps, or if it’s declared successful too early. My respect thins out to the vanishing point when the idea boils down to saying ‘people crave meaning therefore God exists’ or ‘people crave meaning therefore it is a crime to say there is no reason to think God exists and any old lies are okay to tell about people who commit that crime.’ Nussbaum doesn’t mean that, obviously; I suppose I’m just registering some caution about the idea because a lot of very vehement and inaccurate critics of ‘new’ atheism do resort to the ‘search for meaning’ defense in just that vituperative way.
Moyers later points out that many conservative Christians believe that ‘without a belief in a supreme being, a person, an atheist, can’t be a moral agent.’
I know they think that. But I think they really should look more closely at the ethical reasoning of people who are agnostics and atheists. And I think it’s obvious that lots and lots of people in this country are– are deeply ethical, do have a sense of the ethically obligatory and of the depth and real requirement of ethical norms, while not connecting that to a divine source.
Yes, I think they should too, but I’m not very optimistic that they will. But I would certainly be pleased if they did, and if Nussbaum’s book gets some of them to do that, very good.
Yes, I think they should too, but I’m not very optimistic that they will.
I think they often do, though, and are unsatisfied with what they find, which is precisely why many of them turn to religious explanations.
I think this is actually true of many atheists too: atheists are just as likely to behave ethically as religious people, but in my experience atheists are much more likely to think they have no objective reason to be ethical, though they are ethical anyway.
IMO this is why secular moral philosophers need to get louder and clearer. The responsibility here isn’t just on the religious.
That’s a very good point. Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience is one book for the louder and clearer project.
The religous may have an idea of human dignity that is many things but “deep” isn’t one of them. You don’t derive deep ideas from shallow answers and “God” is as shallow answer as they come.
Let’s just add “deep” to the list of meaningless honorifics.
Well, Nussbaum said ‘if you look into the religions, they have this deep idea’…That hits a wall of skepticism in me too but on the other hand Nussbaum has done more looking into than I have, so she could know something I don’t.
On the other hand, she has a bad (I think) habit of using modifiers of that kind, and then, if religions have this deep idea, why does it take so much looking into to find it? Why isn’t it right there on the surface for everyone to get at? Why keep it a secret? If they have this deep idea, why doesn’t the deep idea appear in all these tragically vacuous apologetics we keep reading? So maybe it’s just the usual word salad, the usual smoke and mirrors – religions have sophisticated arguments for God and deep ideas of human dignity, but somehow those sophisticated arguments and deep ideas are always kept behind a locked door. Somehow they never turn up in public. What turns up in public is always just the same old crap that convinces no one except the already convinceed. So…one has to wonder.
What does the word ‘deep’ mean in relation to ideas? Is it just a code word for unintelligible? It worries me when people talk about ‘deep ideas of human dignity.’ That usually means: we know what’s best for you, even if you can’t see it for yourself.
What does this mean: ‘the source of dignity being conscience’? Isn’t that just another code word for: ‘we know better than you’? If your conscience doesn’t tell you the right things, then we’ll have to do your thinking for you.
And then, ‘this capacity for searching for the meaning of life.’ Funny about that. Most religions think they’ve already found it. If they are only searching, why are they so sure?
All this is code language. It tells us that religion has something important going on. We may not know what it is, but it’s there. You’ve just to put your trust in … Jesus? Mohammed? Moses? Who? I mean listen to the last part of the first quote:
‘Because if conscience is this deep and valuable source of searching for meaning, then we all have it whether we’re agreeing or disagreeing. And we all ought to respect it and respect it equally in one another.’
What is it we’re being asked to respect here? The source of dignity is conscience. Conscience is a deep and valuable source of searching for meaning. Hey, wait? Hold up. Searching for meaning…. is that what it sounds like? So searching for meaning, even if you’ve got it all wrong, is something we’re supposed to respect, whatever that leads you to do or say?
There is something dangerously loose about this language. Is that the kind of language you use when you don’t really know, but want to sound deep?
It often is, but I think it’s not in Nussbaum’s case – even though I’ve been disagreeing with her (here) about religion and some of the terminology she uses, for two or three years. I think she does have something clear in mind – but I think there is also a whiff of hurrah language in the way she puts it.
Can a person without belief in liberalism be ethical, or a moral agent?
Alright, I agree, Nussbaum does have some interesting and important things to say, and of course Bill Moyers has every reason to trap her in the contemporary American fixation on religious themes.
But does she have to play up to Moyers’ needs so obligingly? It’s charming that religion can be passed off as ‘the capacity for searching for the meaning of life’. But there’s a lot more to religion than just searching, and Nussbaum knows that, but that form of words allows her to say nothing while at the same time sounding “deep”.
She also, incidentally, puts atheists and agnostics in the same basket along with the religious. So, just as religious people are deep, because they have this deep sense of the meaning of life, or at least the search for it, so atheists can be deep, too, in the very same way. They are ‘deeply ethical, do have a sense of the ethically obligatory and of the depth and real requirement of ethical norms.’ And here she modulates into another key, when she says, ‘while not connecting that to a divine source,’ but all the while implying that it’s the same search for meaning, the same depth of conscience, the same mysterious nothing that underwrites all that is best in the structure of being human.
And so Bill Moyers runs all the way to the bank. I think Ophelia is right to be ‘not very optimistic’. Because Bill Moyers and Matha Nussbaum, together, have given people a reason not to read her book. It is, after all, when you come down to it, too deep for mere mortals to understand. Somehow it looks as though atheists are part of God’s party without knowing it.
You know, a Texan woman I met at the CFI seminar last summer swore to me that Moyers is in fact an atheist. I expressed strong incredulity, of course, but she said it’s true – he hides it in public, but he is. She seemed to be drawing on inside knowledge (though I couldn’t tell you what inside knowledge – the grapevine among Texas atheists, I guess) so it installed a big question mark next to Moyers for me.
“But does she have to play up to Moyers’ needs so obligingly?”
Well, they’re her needs too. She’s got a thing about religion – which I think does cause her to ‘frame’ it in maddeningly rosy terms, and also to be maddeningly selective about which aspects of it she talks about. To be continued.
As OB has fairly pungently pointed out in the sin post, christians hold that belief in God and doing what he says is their true guideline. They explicitly hold that being a moral person, however good, is not anywhere near good enough.
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.
Can I therefore suggest that a better response to the ‘no ethics without God’ line of argument is that ‘no salvation for any level of ethics without believing in Jesus’ means that their implied denial of a basis for ethics without belief, implies denial of the importance of belief in grace alone for salvation.
Oh, and you could maybe add a gratuitous head-tilt of sincerity and an understanding half-smile of false humility, it makes them less aggressive.
‘… gratuitous head-tilt of sincerity and an understanding half-smile of false humility,’
It makes them less aggressive? Possibly. But you have just described one of the few things that forces this advocate of non-violent rationality to dig deep to avoid the urge to mayhem. Or at least a prolonged face-slapping.