when it comes to efficiency, utility, speed, convenience, and getting ahead in the world; but we are at a loss concerning what it’s all for. This lack of cultural and moral confidence about what makes a life worth living is perhaps the deepest curse of living in our interesting time.
I do not mean to imply that my fellow Americans are living empty or meaningless lives. Far from it. Many people today are fulfilled in their work, their families, their communities, and their religious devotions. But they live their worthy lives in the absence of strong and confident cultural support. Indeed, they do so in the face of relentless attacks – from intellectuals, popular culture, and media celebrities – on their core beliefs, practices, and institutions. We are awash in cynicism about work, love, marriage, government, and seeking the truth – and, truth to tell, not without cause.
Other peoples, in earlier times and places, have also been cursed to live in interesting times. Great nations have experienced crises of confidence, whether from war weariness, declining religious beliefs, or cultural disarray. Consider ancient Athens, for example, a city-state that came to prominence in the Persian Wars, after which it found itself in possession of an empire, more by default than by design. Athens predominated for several decades, only to enter upon interesting times as a consequence of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta and her allies, the plague of Athens, and a decline in manners and morals at home. Cynical public intellectuals and wise guys (my translation of sophistes) ran around undermining belief in the gods and in traditional mores, also teaching the young how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger. The conservative elders – their equivalent of our American Legion – looked back nostalgically to the glory days of Marathon, even as demagogues swayed the multitude and as public speech and morals headed for the sewer.
Yet precisely because the old orthodoxies were crumbling, these troubled times in Athens offered great opportunities for renewal and growth, at least for individuals. It was then that Socrates, calling philosophy down to earth from its preoccupation with the heavens, made famous the question “How to live?” He gathered around him the finest youths, who warmed to his insistence that the unexamined life was not worth living. Instead of receiving authoritative answers, his students were encouraged to discover genuine and weighty questions, and to undertake real quests in search of a worthy and flourishing life. Never mind that the city fathers, mistaking Socrates for one of the subversive Sophists, convicted and executed him for impiety and for corrupting the young; his influence lives to the present day as the supreme model of a thoughtful life, thanks to the divine Plato, who commemorated the life of his teacher in his famous dialogues. Though Socrates professed no substantive teaching, he exemplified – and still exemplifies – what it means to live thoughtfully and worthily, fully open to the world, fully present to his friends and his city. His example underscores the opportunity that we still enjoy today, in part because we too live in interesting and open-ended times, to seek and find a worthy life for ourselves. We can begin by rejecting the despair and cynicism that often surround us and cloud our vision.
This book is written in a Socratic spirit. Recognizing both the fatigue of our inherited ways and the opportunities it opens up, I aim to encourage our flagging moral confidence by illuminating key aspects of a worthy life that are still available to us and by defending them against some of their enemies. I hope to be helpful to both secular and religious readers, to people who are looking for meaning on their own and to people who are looking to deepen what they may have been taught or to square it with the spirit of our times.
The book grows out of the two major activities of my professional life, spanning nearly fifty years: examining closely the human meaning of the new biology and its life-altering biotechnologies, and teaching searchingly great books that offer profound but competing accounts of the good life. It also no doubt reflects what I have learned, over a long and blessed life, from lived experience – as a child of unschooled but humanly splendid Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who grew up in an ethnically diverse, lower-middle-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago after the Second World War; as a young lover, husband, father, and grandfather, blessed as few have been in his marriage of fifty-four years; as a student of the liberal arts, medicine, and biochemistry, a practitioner of biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health, and (for most of my life) a teacher of the humanities at St. John’s College and the University of Chicago; as a member of the National Council on the Humanities and as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics; as a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; and as an engaged citizen of the United States under fourteen of its forty-five presidents. During this time I have witnessed and thought about many large cultural changes in American society, most of them initiated or accelerated by technological innovations introduced or popularized in my lifetime: washing machines and dryers, television, antibiotics, interstate highways and colossal automobilty, commercial aviation, the Pill, the Internet, the Human Genome Project and genetic screening, psychoactive drugs, in vitro fertilization, organ transplantation, personal computers, smartphones and instant messaging. More than most of my contemporaries, I have regarded these innovations as mixed blessings, recognizing the ways in which they contribute to bettering human life, but noticing too the challenges they present to our very humanity.
Although I have learned much from experience and from knowledge of times and authors past, I write not with nostalgia for those less interesting days, but rather with both concern and hope for the present and the future: concern lest we diminish our chances for a worthy human life amidst a glut of distracting, addicting, and isolating amusements; hope that we can recover and strengthen our appreciation of the permanent possibilities for a rich and meaningful life. I believe that such a life is, in fact, more accessible to many more people than ever before, thanks to freedom, prosperity, and life-easing technologies, even if the fundamental features and deeper significance of such a life are harder to recognize and sustain in the confusions of our times. My main purpose in writing this book is to shine fresh light on several fundamental and irreplaceable aspects of the good life, as well as on the specific threats they face today and tomorrow: love, family, and friendship; human achievement, human excellence, and human dignity; learning and teaching in search of understanding and wisdom; and fulfilling the enduring human aspirations for the true, the good, and the beautiful, for the righteous and the holy, and for freedom, equality, and self-government. I seek to provide an articulate defense of what many Americans tacitly believe or seek in their heart of hearts but have forgotten how to articulate or defend. And I wish to suggest how these aspects of a worthy life, once recognized and defended, can still be pursued under present circumstances, as goals toward which we may continue to steer our voyages over turbulent waters, in newfangled and ever-changing conveyances.
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The chapters in this book were originally separate essays, written for different occasions over a period of twenty years. They have all been revised and updated, and organized into a coherent structure, informed by the purposes just reviewed. The first chapter, “Finding Meaning in Modern Times: An Overview,” introduces the theme of the book and presents a synoptic view of four domains in which people can and do find meaning in their lives: in fulfilling work, in love and family, in love of country and public service, and in seeking the truth about ourselves and the world. Activities in these domains (especially the second and the fourth) are explored in greater detail in the subsequent chapters.
The first section, “Love, Family, and Friendship,” deals with the domain of deep interpersonal intimacy and familial flourishing, the aspect of a worthy life that is in principle most accessible to, and most sought by, the largest number of people. In my experience, most young people – despite the cheap cynicism they hear about the dim prospects for enjoying happy and enduring marriage – still harbor a desire to find a soulmate with whom they might make a life. They want to be taken seriously; they want to love and be loved. Although chastened by the sad experience of their parents’ generation, and therefore fearful of failure, they would gladly, if they could, pledge “In sickness and in health, until death do us part” to a worthy partner.
There are many obstacles in the way of their meeting the right – or a right enough – one, but perhaps none greater than the
