Life, the universe and everything

I have a manifesto-making streak, maybe a pedantic streak. What do you think that title is about? I always wanted to figure everything out—life, the universe and everything—and explain it. My poor sister, forced to read more than one of my childhood treatises.

Well, here I go again—I just have to work this out on page every now and then—my current theory of the meaning of life. Feel free to skip it, sexier posts a’comin.

In high school and college—Catholic high school and college—I was influenced by the Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist (or something like that) Teilhard de Chardin. He saw evolution as an evolving toward something, that something being god. It seemed a neat and easy way to reconcile science and religion.

But current consensus among biologists seems to be that evolution has no goal at all except maybe the continuance of life of some sort. It doesn’t matter if the life is viruses, roaches, rats, monkeys, whales or people.

I’m willing to work with that theory. It just makes humanity that much more a remarkable, spectacularly random accident. We’re self-conscious knowledge seekers, taking on the world with our clever brains and opposable thumbs. We are, functionally, nature’s consciousness. We seem to be the only way the universe has of looking at itself.

We can and have subverted what seemed to be the purpose and m.o. of evolution. Many of us fully or partially opt out of the reproductive endeavor—those of us lucky enough to have sexual independence and birth control, anyway. We use sex for different things than what nature apparently intended. Then we sit back and take a look around and wonder if there’s a point to this beyond procreation. We want it to mean something more, and we make it mean something more.

Maybe it will all turn to be a gorgeous failed experiment, but how amazing to take part in it. These are the things worth doing—everything we do to seek knowledge. Everything we do to develop and sustain just and intelligent systems of living with each other and within our environment. The things we do for the sake of beauty and joy and unselfish love. Everything we do to make ourselves and our lives a creative work.

Well, we all have mixed motives. None of us are free from the need for food and shelter. Some of us have more freedom than others. There’s nothing wrong with mixing high and low motives. But what must be resisted is the drive of our darker, reptilian potential—our ignorance, hatred, fear, greed.