The search for meaning

Careful!

Students of human nature have observed a hierarchy of needs in people. We need air, specifically oxygen. Deprive us of oxygen and we die after a few minutes. We need water. Without it we die in a few days. Without food we die within weeks.

Moreover, when one of those basic needs is pressing, it preempts everything else. If I’m stuck under water, the only thing I can think of is getting a breath of air.

Once basic physical needs are met, other needs emerge. Like other animals, at certain times of our lives we feel a need for sex. Or at least a strong desire for it. The difference between a need and a desire becomes fuzzy at this point. We won’t die without sex. But our species will, if enough members don’t procreate.

Like other social animals, we have a need for companionship. Again, we won’t die from a lack of companionship, infants and the infirm excepted. But neither will we thrive. Loneliness is a severe hardship for many people. For elephants too.

At this point in the discussion we’ve gone beyond what is truly necessary to what is merely advisable. Abraham Maslow famously described a pyramid of needs, from food and water at the bottom, through safety and security, then love and belonging, to self-esteem, and finally topping out at self-actualization: finding a higher purpose in one’s activities. Self-esteem and self-actualization can be described as needs only in the sense of being necessary to optimal human flourishing. Many people can live long and not unhappy lives without getting past love and belonging.

Self-esteem and self-actualization are more subjective than the more basic needs, and hence open to greater variation. One person takes pride in keeping a neat house. Another prefers a casualness the first person calls a mess.

Most people in most of history spent most of their lives on levels one and two of Maslow's pyramid. Finding food to eat and a place to live was a constant challenge. Level three’s family and community support was a welcome bonus but not a sine qua non of existence.

Such was history as lived. History as written, by contrast, lay mostly in levels four and five. Self-esteem is often misnamed. Most people esteem themselves because they receive esteem cues from others. A common soldier does certain things and is praised for them. He internalizes the praise and knows what it is to be brave. A woman raises her children a certain way and is praised for doing so. She internalizes the standard and thinks of herself as a good mother.

But the common soldier and still less the mother don't often appear in written histories. The level-five self-actualizers are the ones whose stories are remembered and told. And they are remembered as often for bad as for good.

The top-level need of humans is to find meaning in life, meaning that persists after the more basic needs are met. But meaning takes all manner of forms. One person builds a birdhouse, another an empire. A birdhouse is innocuous, an empire is not. Mao Zedong was a poet and a tyrant. He found transcendence in both. Hitler thought he was doing humanity a favor by slaughtering millions. Henry Ford brought mobility to the masses, but the masses proceeded to immobilize one another in traffic jams.

Sometimes we've managed to render transcendence harmless. Stadiums used to fill with crowds howling for gladiators’ blood. Now the howlers are satisfied with a goal or a touchdown. The function is the same: to take the watchers out of themselves for a moment. True fans are never more ecstatic than when their side triumphs.

Religion aspires to transcendence more self-consciously. A prophet leads followers out of the humdrum of the here-and-now to the higher plane of the eternal. Yet false prophets are more common than true ones, and their transcendence can be license for great mischief.

Why are humans driven to seek greater meaning than simple existence requires? Cows don’t do it. Neither do other primates. Probably humans do it because this strategy has paid off evolutionarily. In Mormonism’s early, polygamous days, critics and even some believers observed that the elders of the church had the most wives and the most children. Heroes, whether military heroes, sports heroes or guitar heroes, have typically had better luck in the mating game than lesser mortals.

Moreover, societies that cultivate transcendence produce the outliers that give those societies a competitive edge over others. By contrast, societies that do the opposite—that indulge in what Australians call the tall-poppy syndrome, of cutting down the ones who stand out—fall behind. America historically has let people go where their gifts and ambitions will take them. The cost is greater inequality than many societies are willing to tolerate. The benefit is greater creativity and dynamism than other societies have enjoyed.

It’s worth a reminder that transcendence is largely the preserve of the privileged, people for whom quotidian cares hardly register. Religious mystics rarely supported themselves. Many were mendicants, living on the charity of others. Great artists traditionally had patrons.

Is the sublimity of Chartres worth the pinch to the lives that might have improved had they shared the resources the great cathedral absorbed? Maybe so. They’d all be dead by now anyway, and the work lives on.

But this is a slippery slope. Hitler might have reasoned similarly. They’re all going to die anyway, so what does it matter whether sooner or later?

How, then, ought we to judge the search for meaning and transcendence?

With care and humility.