People today supposedly suffer from a chronic lack of meaning. Presumably the latter was originally supplied by religious belief. Yet is it really the case that in the past, religion was about meaning? Hardly. Before the twentieth century, most people had more pressing issues to contend with: starvation, disease, infant mortality, etc..

It wasn’t the demise, in the modern world, of religion which produced the feeling that ‘something’s missing’. Rather, precisely this sense of lack created both the yearning for meaning and the false notion that religion originally supplied it. Not that we should underestimate the power of this yearning. It drives the wheels of the media, really an enormous ‘meaning factory’ churning out vast quantities of images in which people see semblances of their own wishes and dreams, but distorted and manipulated in all kinds of grotesque ways.

Does it matter that what is produced by the ‘meaning machine’ of the media is mostly rubbish? Not at all. Since any meaning is better than none at all, people will quite happily devour it in any shape or form, even when it verges on being meaningless. To track it down, some are prepared to go, quite literally, to the ends of the earth. A good example here is the fad of ‘doing the El Camino’ – that is, walking the old pilgrimage route to Santiago De Compostela. Have all these people who now flock from all parts of the world to trudge hundreds of kilometres in the burning sun on dusty roads suddenly become good Christians? Of course not. What they are looking for is meaning with a capital M, meaning de-historicized and de-contexturalized. In this respect, the search for meaning is essentially akin to that other fetish of modern people: experience. But as the search becomes an end-in-itself, that which grounds both meaning and experience – i.e., reality – starts to evaporate. After all, being continually on the lookout for the novel and the surprising hardly demonstrates any genuine interest in the world. It’s more like indifference, perhaps even a negation of reality.

Like the Delmore Schwartz character who is always “moving forward to fresh arenas of frenzied activity”, the restless hunt for meaning is indicative of a mentality: perpetually on the move, dissatisfied at every turn, continually looking for something to give life direction, worth and value. Yet in case one’s tempted to feel sorry for a person whose hunger for ‘meaningful experiences’ leaves them perennially homeless, it’s worth recognizing that their own, restless mental economy is to blame for all their privations (as Kafka put it, “He who seeks will not find; he who seeks not – will be found”). What sustains the yearning for meaning is precisely a compulsion to negate every fixed relation and every life circumstance which might potentially turn into a situation of responsibility or commitment. So what exactly is meaning in this guise as negativity? Ideology. This is why it’s very important we do not start thinking that religion is about meaning, or, indeed, that our contemporary ‘social crisis’ somehow derives from a drying-up of the sources of faith.

The false problem of meaning is also why, in the modern world, religion has been so thoroughly psychologized, and also why contemporary people are always liable to become enthralled by all the many bogus spiritualisms and occultisms that nowadays thrive like weeds (I’m thinking in particular of the so-called ‘New Age’ spirituality). Monotheist religion is not about meaning but about salvation, and justice (or responsibility). Indeed, for the greater part of its history, Christianity was concerned with weaning people off too great an attachment to worldly meaning. And in this respect, it’s probably fair to say that those who nevertheless persisted with hunting for meaning in a worldly, materialistic sense had missed the most important message of Christianity. For the Christian strives precisely to be ‘dead to (worldly) meaning’, and also ‘dead to self’.

I’ve said the problem of meaning is a false problem. Actually, what contemporary people really hanker for is not meaning but certitude. In a late essay, Karl Popper remarked on the human craving for certainty and its consequences. He observed that most people want certain knowledge and think they cannot do without it. Such people have a dangerous need for suggestion, they lack the courage to live without assurance, without certainty. This need for certainty explains the proliferation in our time of mythologies, in the form of those pernicious new moralities and tribalisms Douglas Murray identifies with the all-consuming ‘madness’ of the contemporary public.

Mythologies – or to use a more familiar term, ideologies – are what people reach for when they find it difficult to cope with reality, to manage in a world of change and contingency. Myths are reassuring in this respect because they offer a phantasy: a timeless world in which everything is stable and values are eternal. Mythologies thus confirm what people want to believe. That’s why they’re lethal in the societal and political arena. Insofar as mythologies encourage mental habits which are prior to the choice of knowledge, people then find it impossible to see what’s unfolding right in front of their eyes. And by convincing individuals that making an independent, intelligent judgment of the existential situations in which they find themselves is not at all necessary, they are then led to make choices which fail to address their real circumstances.

If I no longer feel compelled to reconcile the evidence of my senses with what I’m told by ideologies and mythologies, I will have no way of knowing what is real. The death of factuality is part of this dangerous trend, as are the epistemological ramifications of mythological thinking, which tends to be fatalistic. In a world where everything is already determined, the individual is absolved of responsibility. It’s for this reason that the modern myths of determinism, whether economic, genetic, psychological or historical, have been the source of all that is irresponsible, violent and cruel in human history.

If I recognize that absence is the basis of knowing, in the sense that none of our knowledge is certain or infallible, I will also recognize that choices are necessary and inescapable. If I were able to have perfect knowledge, then there would be no need for decisions or choices, since the correct course of action in a given circumstance would always be self-evident. But the fact is that I will never be in a position to know everything. In which case, I’ll always have to make choices.

Karl Popper experienced personally how what he thought of as the natural human craving for certitude and regularity could become particularly acute in times of social upheaval. Likewise, Hannah Arendt witnessed firsthand the magnetic attraction exercised by totalitarian political regimes on personalities tossed about by the storms of historical contingency. Both saw that when all customary points of reference are torn away, people are prone to clutch at anything that might provide a modicum of stability and coherence. Moreover, it’s when people lack confidence in their own powers of reasoning, and are inclined not to trust the evidence of their senses, that they become docile and pliable. Political mythologies, be they Fascist, Totalitarian or Humanitarian, always gain traction precisely at this point. At every turn, they try to dissuade individuals from thinking for themselves. We see this today, insofar as people are happy to leave everything up to ‘experts’.

So what is the alternative? To understand that religion and spirituality are not about meaning, and certainly not about ‘feeling good’. The spiritual life is ethics. It is the individual’s assumption of personal responsibility which makes human existence meaningful (As Jordan Peterson remarks in a 2018 interview: “I’ve come to understand that the meaning that sustains you in life is mostly to be found through responsibility . . . through the voluntary adoption of responsibility, you are very likely to find your fundamental strength, and I think that is a clinically unassailable observation”). This is where Christianity turns out to be at a disadvantage. A key example here is the Christian notion of Charity, or to refer to it by the more common name, Love. No doubt it’s a fine sentiment. However, on its own, it is not the source of life-meaing. Moreover, history demonstrates quite clearly that a society cannot be built purely on motives of the heart. This might also explain why more than two millennia of Christianity have not succeeded in reducing the amount of bloodshed and violence in human history.

The Christian sentimentalism which is grounded in the pathos of the God-Man is not necessarily offset by the call to “love one’s enemies”. The latter might seem like a very radical idea, as Douglas Murray opines. Certainly, it’s more radical than anything one could find in pagan philosophies. But in reality, it’s far less uncompromising than it sounds. Carl Schmitt remarks that the passage in question from both Matthew and Luke reads diligite vestros, not diligite hostes vestros. His point is Ancient Greek has actually two words for the one English word, ‘enemy’ – inimicos and hostes. The first refers to the private or personal enemy, whilst the second refers to the political or public enemy. So what does it mean that the Gospel uses the former term? Simply that it’s not asking a person to befriend political communities which have mobilized to destroy them. Indeed, it recognizes such a course of action would be tantamount to political and social suicide.

Never in the thousand year struggle between Christians and Moslems would it have occurred to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love towards Saracens or Turks. One’s enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally. Only in the private sphere does it make sense to love one’s enemy. We must be careful, then, not to read this most famous dictum of the Gospels in a sentimentalizing or psychological manner. But then if, under Christianity, one is under no obligation to love the public, political enemy, the pagan world order, which maintains the necessity of war, is left essentially undisturbed.

The political theology of Christianity is clear: “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”. And this pleases Caesar. In short, Christianity is universalistic in theory but in practice subordinates ethics to politics. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. All of this applies quite generally to the history of the Christian Churches. They dulled the radicalism of the Gospel by giving in to the tenacious folk-mythologies and residual paganism of the broad sweep of humanity they otherwise very successfully converted. The catholicity of Christianity integrates the small and touching household gods of the pagans into the worship of saints and local cults. Through sublimation, Christianity continues to give piety roots, nurturing itself on landscapes and memories culled from family, tribe and nation. This is why it conquered humanity. But in so doing, it left the way open for political mythologies.

This is where Judaism is quite distinct. For more than forty centuries, it waged unrelenting war on mythologies of any kind. Unlike Christianity, Judaism has not sublimated idols; on the contrary, it has demanded they be destroyed. Like technology, it has demystified the universe. By freeing the human from intoxicating myths and tribalisms, from the instinctual identification with everything trans-individual, it was Judaism rather than Christianity which sought to wean humanity off the addiction to cruelty and violence which is the outcome of every mythology of meaning, be it political, theological or psychological.