Of Hope and Dispair

I'm going to offer my take on couple more points raised in the Salon article I've mentioned in the last few posts.  I want first to tackle the issue of hope and the purpose of life. 

The author of the article begins by relating two incidents from Richard Dawkins.  It seems after the publication of The Selfish Gene. We are told that "an unnamed foreign publisher...told him that, after reading...The Selfish Gene..., he could not sleep for three nights, so troubled was he by its 'cold, bleak message.'"  We are also told that "a teacher 'from a distant country'...had written to him reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book 'because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends, for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism.'”

According to the author of the article, Dawkins was shocked!, shocked!, that his view of human life as a chance assembly of chemicals without purpose could  lead anyone who took his philosophy seriously into a pit of nihilistic despair.

Dawkins attempts to offer us a way out of the dilemma.  While he observes that all purpose in life is "'gone... all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe,” apparently quoting his colleague Peter Atkins’s book The Second Law (1984), he admonishes us that this dispassionate view of the purposelessness of the Universe, of which we are a part, "must not be confused with the loss of personal hope."

Well, that sounds good.  What then is it that we are supposed to hope for personally in this life that is completely without purpose?   Well, he says "there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane."  That sounds like progress.  So we don't look to the ultimate fate of the Universe for purpose in our individual lives.  We must look closer to home, to something that is on a more human scale.  Okay, then what are we to look to?

Well, he observes that "[o]ur lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions."  Okay that's nice.  Then what about those human ambitions and perceptions will provide us with a bulwark against the despair of a life without meaning?  It is Dawkins avows a "sense of awed wonder that science can give us and which makes it 'one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.'”

So, although our lives are completely devoid of meaning and purpose we must not despair because the "closer, warmer human ambition[]" of science will keep the darkness at bay and provide us with our "life's hope."   But we never really see what it is we are to hope for.  Are we to hope for a privileged view of the inner workings of the Universe through the medium of science?  Are we to hope to be able to achieve a "sense of awed wonder" at the world around us? 

Of course the author of the article never ascribes to Dawkins any reason for hope or any explanation of what we should hope for.  I suppose that because the article is merely a summary of some of Dawkins' work he could provide those answers in one of his books, but somehow I doubt it.  No, it is clear to me that for all of Dawkins protestations to the contrary, he doesn't really believe the philosophy he espouses.  His demonstrates his insincerity by his very continued existence.

If there is no purpose to anything in the Universe, no purpose in our individual or collective lives; if after all we dissolve into nothingness then whatever joy or pain we experience, whatever success achieve or failure we suffer is completely pointless.  Living or not living is exactly the same.  The fact that the purveyors of the reductionist deterministic view of the Universe continue to live, that they breath and eat and do all those things necessary to sustain life, means that they believe that life has some meaning or purpose.  Otherwise why continue?  All of their protestations about living so that they can experience the wonder and awe of the physical world only means that they believe there is some point to doing so.  If there is a reason for doing so then there must be a purpose.