The Meaning of Life 2: Instinct Enacted

 

A search for the Meaning of Life shouldn't limit itself to our species. Humans, however scene-stealing, entered the stage of life only recently and are a fraction of the cast. Any formulation of life-meaning must point beyond language, absent from most life forms, and name something that subsists beyond naming, something shared with all life.

My daily companion, Rumi, is a convenient subject to study--more expressive than bacteria and less elusive than the lizard on the porch. As co-evolved mammals, the dog and I speak similar body languages. Lying on the window seat and lazily surveying the backyard, he sees the neighbor's yellow cat and his life is suddenly infused with meaning. An electric absolute explodes in his little body. He knows what must be done. There is no reflection, no ambiguity. If I open the back door, he runs, hurling himself at the cat. He is clearly going about his father's business (Luke 2:49), the business of myriad furry mothers and fathers before him. Look for him nowhere but in the temple of cat-chasing.

Rumi is a Morkie, a mix of Maltese and Yorkie, and so a terrier. Today he functions as a companion, but his ancestors were bred to hunt and kill vermin or to distract larger game while humans killed them. Though I've never taken him hunting, Rumi (like my Miniature Schnauzer before him) knows the drill. He hurls his body, teeth first, at cats, squirrels, rabbits, and birds, and they flee his tiny ferocity. He sniffs spoors and scratches at burrows. Both of my dogs once cornered opossums and knew to dance out of reach of their claws and bay for humans, an distinctive timbre of bark evidently as instinctive as tail wags. Both dogs returned from such adventures grinning about the ears, their lives brimming with meaning. This suggests a simple hypothesis: the meaning of life is instinct enacted, doing what we were created to do.

There may be some objection to my use of the term instinct, which in the last century had such a narrow sense that I recall being taught that humans had no instincts except maybe the sucking impulse for milk. This clearly is speciesist pride, supposing that any behavior that we can rationalize ("It tastes good," "Mama used to do it," or even "I wanted to") isn't the kind of biological drive we call instinct. But if migrating ducks could talk, they'd quack about vacation planning.

Confabulation is a term used to describe the stories that the verbal sides of split-brain patients invent to explain motivations coming from the nonverbal side. Confabulating an instinct doesn't make it less instinctive. Any pattern of behavior that is widespread, not only throughout a culture but cross-culturally, implies a genetic universal in the species. At the heart of more-or-less universal human patterns are meaning-conferring instincts, autotelic impulses. Instincts are ways that evolution programs us to react, things we are hardwired to be gratified by. If you'd prefer to call them drives, that's fine. For my purposes, the two are synonyms. They're stuff that feels good.

We're programmed, for instance. to like sweets. Babies don't need to be taught about candy. Ancestors who were inclined to eat ripe fruit, not unripe, and to pack in calories against famine were more likely to reproduce, so the genetic trait is all-but-universal in the species. Now, every culture (I suppose without researching it) with a source of sugar has a tradition of pies, cakes, cookies, or candies. Recipes vary from culture to culture, but sweets are universal. Call it the Confectionary Instinct. Of course, it doesn't kick in until a minimal level of culture, but most instincts depend of opportunity. Mallards in a cage don't migrate and solitary ones don't mate. The child's first candy is infused with self-evident meaning. There is no explaining to them at that sugar is not good.

But, just as money can't buy you love, confections can't confer happiness. They cloy. Overuse leads to obesity, disease, and gluttony. However, like the other six deadly sins, gluttony merely overextends a healthy instinct. Flashes of autotelic meaning are also triggered by self-esteem, wealth, love, competition, indignation, and rest: the positive counterparts of pride, greed, lust, envy, anger, and sloth. Instinctual life is like a mosaic floor in which the confectionary instinct is a tile. The meaning of life inheres in the whole mosaic, not in individual tiles even though it consists of them. A single instinct that excludes the others becomes an addiction that satisfies only on a treadmill of frustration. The need for balance is taught in wisdom traditions from the classical via media to the Buddha's abandoning asceticism. The Enneagram teaches that most of us direct our energy too much toward a single direction in the compass of human instincts. Full meaning requires opening to the full compass. If instinct is meaning, no one instinct is.

So how can we begin to describe the peacock's tail that informs a species as complex as ours? I recall Louis Armstrong's reply to a woman who asked after one of his shows what jazz was: "Lady, if you got to ask, you'll never know." Some moments you know meaning as surely as the woman should have known jazz after hearing Satchmo's trumpet. A starving man doesn't doubt the value of a meal. He doesn't reject it because he'll just get hungry again later. A woman carrying her child up a muddy slope just ahead of rising flood waters doesn't reflect up the meaning of life. If you're freezing, you don't doubt the value of heat. You simply know it.

Perhaps, all human effort is meaningless when framed in infinite time and space (sub specie aeternitatis, as Thomas Nagel explains in "The Absurd"). Food, survival, and heat scream over this and, in their imperative moments, confer meaning as absolute as Rumi must feel when he chases the yellow cat over the fence, but then there comes quiet. Absurdity is the luxury and curse of people with no instinctual imperatives to enact, like Thomas Nagel, a tenured professor in his comfortably heated NYU office. All of us, between famines, floods, and blizzards, may fall out of instinctual clarity and, like Alfie, wonder what's it all about (besides the hokey pokey). Life may present no obvious purpose, no raison d'être, no overarching meaning, and the resulting sense of meaninglessness can be painful. We suffer an instinctual need for meaning.

The job of supplying a master meaning often falls to religion. Some people devote themselves to finite causes such as patriotism or saving the planet, causes greater than themselves, but, as long as what is greater is still finite--still an entity with an inevitable end--the devotion is still absurd sub specie aeternitatis. It will crumble to dust as surely as our own flesh. A fully-aware sense of absurdity, a sinking feeling in the bog of eternity itself, can only be answered by something eternal--at least, by something so vast that its edges reach transcend our imagination. That may be Being or its Source, whatever it is called by a particular faith. Religions use myth, doctrine, morality, and ritual to put faces (human or otherwise) on the inconceivable vastness of Being so that we can participate in it--faces more relatable than the bog of eternity itself. Dying and powerless, we rest on the bosom of eternal omnipotence.

Religious institutions serve many purposes, including social control, charity, and congeniality, and religious people still feel anxious about their own absolute vulnerability, their dependence on forces outside of themselves. If there is such a thing as perfect trust in Being and non-Being, it is seldom achieved without heroic efforts of meditation and devotion, the path of the saint or guru. But religion does create an overarching frame, a spiritual jungle gym on which we exercise our instinct for meaning, for something more stable than the hungers and gratifications of ordinary instinct, between episodes of chasing yellow cats from our backyards.