The Sense of Stories

The Meaning of Meaning

I have said that complexity without meaning is worthless. But what sort of meaning, exactly, are we looking for in the universe? How do we define true importance or true significance or true success? Is there, as some have suggested, a formula for making your life the most successful one, by somehow calculating the maximum pleasure possible and achieving it?

You are welcome to try this method, but such a calculation is unattainable. And even if it were possible, pleasurable and meaningful are two such different words that it is almost impossible to confuse them when they are placed side by side, without the wordplay that usually accompanies such equations. We all know that someone like Mother Teresa can live a very painful, but a very meaningful life, while someone like Goering could have all the pleasure he desired, but if he didn’t feel the pain of his depravity, that made him less human, not more.

In fact, when we look at the nature of meaning and purpose and all the rest in human life, we find that it can never be pulled straight out of the air. We cannot simply invent a system or calculation of meaning with no precedent and stick it onto our lives. We are not, in the end, perfectly rational beings; we are passionate and rooted beings who exist in time and in space, in history and in context. The logic that we go by is not, in fact, a logic of system; it is a logic of story.*

The Sense of Stories

I have five dollars in my pocket.

What does that sentence mean? You cannot know the significance of the fact of the five dollars without knowing the story that goes with it. Do I owe you five dollars, and I’m expressing my ability to pay you back? Or was I a millionaire yesterday, and I’m telling you that now, due to some catastrophe, this is all the money I have in the world? Are you in need of money, and I am offering help? In all of these instances, the five dollars means something different. Money, after all, is worthless unless it is part of an exchange – that is, a story. Value depends on context.

I will go one step further: objective value depends on objective context. If anything in the world is to have an absolute significance, if anything is to really matter or really last, it must be part of an objective story that comprehends all the world and all of history. One obvious question becomes: how on earth are we supposed to know what this master story is? Who determines it?

This question may seem insoluble, but it is actually very simply answered. If you assume that the world came into being by accident and has proceeded randomly ever since, then there is no story, and the question is moot. If you believe the world, as I said a couple weeks ago, was intended, the answer is equally obvious: if we want to know the main thrust of the story, we must ask the author.

One of these days I will get around to writing more about the story of the world, but it is a massive task (hint – in my last blog, I discussed the pivot-point, the great plot twist of history). Right now, I want to conclude with a few thoughts on why, if the world’s significance is determined by its story, it is so important to know that story.

What Matters?

You see, if we are part of a story, there is absolutely no way to know what anything is worth apart from that story. I remember in sixth grade having auditions for parts in a play. I auditioned for, and received, the part of the queen, and I was very excited until I realized that the queen actually only had two lines in the entire production. Position, money, power, happiness, even personality and character, all turn topsy-turvy in story logic. They may or may not be relevant to the plot.

You may work all your life and achieve what looks like a lot, but it you don’t know the story, it may all be insignificant, not even worth a mention on the bottom of a page. And a passing event that you took no notice of may actually be part of the main plot, going on without you. You may do a great deal of bad or a great deal of good, by most people’s reckoning, but without knowing the author’s reckoning, you cannot know where it matters.

Everything depends on knowing the plot and themes of the book – and ultimately, on knowing the purposes of the author. But how can the characters know the author? When Khrushchev, remarking on Yuri Gagarin’s return from space, remarked that “he didn’t see God up there,” C. S. Lewis drily replied that this was like Hamlet climbing into his attic to find Shakespeare. The characters can only know the author, and so only know the story, if the author writes himself into the story (hint: another post).

This post is long enough. I will end with this caution: you are not going to be able to make any sense out of the Christian God or the Christian faith if you try to use the nice, neat logic of modern man. The logos of the Christian God is not a principle – it is a person.

*Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal work After Virtue offers an extensive proof of this, the most widely known part of which you can read here. I will write a blog about it at some point. If you would like a very intricate discussion of the progression of moral philosophy in modern times, I recommend it, but I warn you that even for a Harvard philosophy major, the book proved to be dense and a bit dry.

“Open book” by Thomas Quine is licensed under CC BY 2.0