Sullivan argues that without God we are left aching for something more as our soul’s remain essentially empty. Fundamentally, we feel alone. As Sullivan writes:
But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs. And this matters. We are a meaning-seeking species. Gray recounts the experiences of two extraordinarily brilliant nonbelievers, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, who grappled with this deep problem. Here’s Mill describing the nature of what he called “A Crisis in My Mental History”:
“I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world. … This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream … In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’”
At that point, this architect of our liberal order, this most penetrating of minds, came to the conclusion: “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” It took a while for him to recover.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl makes similar points. We must have a purpose to slog through life’s indignities with a sense of dignity. Sullivan wants to remind us that absent a deity it can be tough going.
Sullivan then observes that we try to distract ourselves from our loneliness and emptiness through consumer culture and endless entertainments. Nothing new here. The French philosopher Pascal made similar observations.
Sullivan then takes a shot at Vox:
But the banality of the god of progress, the idea that the best life is writing explainers for Vox in order to make the world a better place, never quite slakes the thirst for something deeper. Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality.
“Explainers” for Vox are social justice warriors and empty and banal ones at that. This does strike me as an unfair and over simplistic, perhaps even unprovoked and gratuitous, shot from Sullivan. But I assume Sullivan has some animus against Vox and its brand of liberalism.
Then Sullivan pivots to America, without Christianity, turning politics into a religious substitute and with bad results, creating a catastrophe that we have before us with a sociopath in the White House.
In one somewhat incohesive paragraph, Sullivan disdains Vox liberals and white evangelicals. He conflates the smug absence of faith with Vox acolytes with the empty piety of white evangelicals. In Sullivan’s view, both are frauds, but the latter frauds have erected a monster “demigod” who is destroying America.
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