MEANING AND MADNESS

by Stanley
Over the course of the years I have become quite mean about meaning; almost miserly you might say – a bad case, perhaps, of excessive scepticism. I would call it philosophical caution. The ‘meaning of life’ is something people crave if they haven’t got it and are driven mad if they’ve got too much. Not enough meaning is what we call ‘depression’; and too much is what we call ‘manic’.

Depression is easily spotted. People will say there’s no point to life, nothing in it – life has no meaning. But the other end of the scale, the manic end, can be a bit more deceptive. Easy to spot if a person is over the top where even the smallest detail in life is pregnant with significance and burgeoning with meaning, where life is monstrously larger than life, where a bird sitting on the garden fence means something, or spiritualising about the significance of the clock stopping at exactly twelve, or what did the postman mean when he said ‘good morning’ like that.

But the world fraught with meaning comes in all shades from simple faith to the most bizarre superstitious concoctions. The more outlandish beliefs and meanings, separated by the distance of history, are easily recognizable for what they are. The Incas, for example, knew quite well the meaning of life. It was simply that the sun was hungry for blood and human hearts. So, twenty times a year there would be these wonderful festivals. A thousand celebrants, one by one, would ascend the sun-temple steps where a priest would raise the sacrificial knife and surgically gouge out their living hearts and hold it aloft still pulsing with blood – a gift to appease the sun-god.

Nearer to home is the meaning that Catholics endow the little biscuit the priest gives them to eat, a biscuit which is not a biscuit but somehow the actual body of Christ; a nice little bit of sublimated cannibalism that nobody seems to think extraordinary. Not at all over the top, apparently! Neither is the person who has to plant his garlic on exactly the first night of the new moon – not exactly common-garden sense, but not mad! The meaning of the moon in this case is less harmful than the meaning the Aztecs gave to the sun.

Is it the terror of meaningless depression that incites the profusions of significances with which we embellish life? It’s almost as if any meaning is better than none. When the Roman Empire was crumbling astro-religion swept through the population in a wild scramble for security – the stars as a comfort blanket. Every upper-class family had their personal astrologer who would daily announce the complicated conjunctions of the stars and what they meant – and god help the Emperor’s astrologer if he failed come up with something favourable or, if what he did come up with, didn’t happen.

Then there are the deep meanings that the great thinkers have given us. Saint Thomas Aquinas probably wrote the most influential philosophical theology of all time, about nothing less than the meaning of Christ, the Bible and the whole of God’s creation. He wrote the most profound, scholarly, comprehensive, intellectual work of utter drivel you could imagine. The work of Doctor Angelicus, as he was known, has been the bedrock of church thinking for seven hundred years and is so even today. But we never get to the small things: we never get to hear whether St. Thomas was worried about his piles when he went to the toilet.

Recently I was raving on like this about some bizarre idea like ‘channeling the wisdom of a long-dead guru in the Himalayas’ when someone said: ‘why not’. As if to say, why shouldn’t it be true? Exactly. Why not? That’s precisely the point. It could be true. No reason to not to believe it. No reason one way or the other. Why not believe if it makes you feel better.

Believing in the Tooth Fairy can make you feel better, but it doesn’t help in the real world; belief in a spiritual system makes you feel bigger and better, but the price is being slightly out of touch!

I am impatient and sceptical with large-scale meaningful scenarios because they hide the really important issues in psychological life. Perhaps that’s their purpose. They encourage a sort of addictive drunkenness, an unreal, manic largess that covers up the small worries we think we should have grown out of. They inhibit reflection on the close, personal concerns in life that really mean something. Over and over in therapy we find it’s the small, childish things we overlook that really count. Simply acknowledging them can make a world of difference – helping us to be more relaxed about our frail humanity.

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