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Old-New Thoughts on the Meaning of Life

Jan. 23 2017

In The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters, Emily Esfahani Smith draws on personal interviews, the work of classical humanists, her own experiences, and the new field of social science she terms “happiology” to answer the age-old question of how to give life meaning. She concludes that there are “four pillars of meaning”—purpose, storytelling, transcendence, and belonging—necessary for personal fulfilment. Alice B. Lloyd writes in her review:

Our souls seek whatever pushes us beyond our selves and holds us there in contemplative service to something greater. Smith grants primacy to love. A story from the life of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, unites the pillars. Frankl, then a prisoner in a concentration camp, was marching on a cold morning with his fellow inmates when he thought of his wife and realized, “love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.” The giving of oneself unto another is always the first best reason to live another day.

Still, in the end, it’s hard to ignore the extent to which Smith’s four pillars—belonging, transcendence, purpose, storytelling—resemble the same psychic needs served by that old-time religion. It’s our secular age that relegates to social science such matters, like a person’s readiness to face death, that used to be settled more or less exclusively on God’s terms.

In fact, reading her accounts of psychological studies and groundbreaking therapies, I couldn’t get this one line from the 1980s movie The Creator out of my head: “When science finally peers over the crest of the mountain, it will find religion has been sitting there all along.”

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Happiness, Psychology, Religion & Holidays, Spirituality

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic