Vervaeke’s Glib Solution to the Meaning Crisis

Why we should start by recognizing life’s absurdity

To adopt a line from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), Jordan Peterson is the guru we deserve (because of our flaws), whereas John Vervaeke is closer to the guru we need.

But even Vervaeke’s take on life is problematic.

If you’re unfamiliar with those two figures from Toronto’s cognitive science scene, here’s a quick summary. Peterson combined Jungian and evolutionary psychology with alt-right politics, becoming a hero for virile males who are disgusted with the emasculation of urban men by feminists and tribal progressive culture. (For the record, I think Peterson’s targets deserve criticism, but his solution leaves much to be desired.)

Meanwhile, Vervaeke addresses larger problems, with a deeper knowledge of cognitive science, philosophy, and religion than Peterson can muster. Specifically, Vervaeke means to buttress some religious traditions, such as Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and Taoism, with an inclusive scientific theory of cognition to solve what he calls the modern “meaning crisis.”

What Vervaeke’s after is a paradoxical “non-religious religion,” as in a mode of religious experience that isn’t trapped in small-minded orthodoxy. And Vervaeke uses the harmonies implicit in a theory of knowledge — of the coming together of symbols and facts, given that the former can mean or be true of the latter — to renew the way in which ancient wisdom traditions “homed” people, reassuring them and sustaining their happiness and sense of belonging to a greater good.

The Meaning Crisis

The new meaning crisis, then, is what Vervaeke calls “domicide,” the killing of our home in a broad sense. We used to feel at home in our communities and in our culture and worldview. Our minds harmonized with our environment because we conceived of ourselves and of the wider world as being meant for each other. We belonged in nature, for example, because the gods made things that way or because there’s an underlying consciousness that unites everything, and our purpose in life is to see through the apparent strife and to recognize the oneness that hides in plain sight.

There have been several historic domicides, according to Vervaeke. The rise of big cities and civilizations spoiled the nomadic hunter-gatherer’s enchanted sense of feeling at home in the wild. Alexander the Great’s forced globalization overshadowed local cultures with a sense of their comparative smallness, which threatened them with the dreaded realization that all cultures have only relative and subjective validity.

And of course, there’s “modernity,” which includes:

• the Scientific Revolution’s undermining of animistic vitalism and of religious dogmas and institutions
• the replacement of public philosophy with shallow self-help and demagoguery
• capitalism’s commercialization of all collective values
• and the heightening of postmodern anxiety and alienation by social media and the infantilizing entertainment industries.

Modern individuals feel that they don’t belong anywhere, that they’re competing for social status and for material advantage in an absurd game, with no divine judge or guarantor of fair play.

Vervaeke’s Theory of Cognition

Vervaeke’s solution to this crisis is to remind his fellow cognitive scientists that there are different kinds of knowledge, other than just the propositional kind of information processing.

• There’s also participatory knowing, the ability to act well as an agent in an arena, to flow in an environment as opposed to bumbling about in confusion.
• Then there’s perspectival knowing, the comfort you might have of being “in your skin,” of being an embodied mind with a limited, subjective standpoint.
• And there’s procedural knowing, the instrumental know-how or excellence at optimizing and at getting a job done.

At the root of all cognition is what Vervaeke calls “recursive relevance realization.” You need to know what’s relevant to make sense of the world in any capacity, and although science can’t explain the semantic and global concept of relevance, according to Vervaeke, science can explain how we realize what’s relevant. Science can explain how the mind continually adjusts its understanding of what’s relevant and combines the grasping of semantic connections with practical applications.

We realize what’s relevant in some context, by identifying the connections with our concepts and words and by acting on that awareness.

Vervaeke’s Solution to the Meaning Crisis

Notice, then, that Vervaeke’s picture of cognition secularizes the premodern religious harmonies, by replacing gods, spirits, and metaphysical designs or purposes with propositional, participatory, perspectival, and procedural agreements. Indeed, the correspondence theory of truth might have sufficed as an antidote to the meaning crisis. Perhaps we needn’t feel alienated from the world if we can take comfort in the meaning of our thoughts, in how they agree semantically with the facts.

For example, if you merely think what’s empirically or mathematically true, such as that the sun warms the earth or that two plus two equals four, you’ve already gotten out of your head and made some peace with external and universal regularities. Need anyone ask for anything more?

Thus, in an interview, Vervaeke says (with my emphasis), “Wisdom doesn’t just mean having discernment. It means dealing with the things that cut us off from connectedness, which is ultimately the meaning in life.”

And in his book, Zombies in Western Culture, he and his cowriter say that the concept of a worldview likewise presupposes such harmony: “The worldview is the cultural analogue of an ecology. The attunement between the agent and the arena mirrors the Darwinian fittedness between an organism and its ecological niche. A fluid worldview is akin to a healthy and balanced ecology. Just as there is the possibility for an ecological crisis, there is also a possibility for a worldview crisis.”

Vervaeke’s hope, then, as he says in the interview, is that we can “find bottom-up emergence — new forms of practices, new ecologies of practices, new communities of practitioners — that are trying to train people in the transformation of perspectival and participatory knowing so as to reduce their self-deception and enhance their sense of connectedness to themselves, to each other in the world” (my emphasis).

In a similar vein, he says, “With mindfulness,” the feeling of being present and deeply aware of everything’s relevance, “I can break out of egocentric bias and that will actually afford me overcoming a lot of self-deception and it also enhances my connectedness to the world” (my emphasis).

In short, modern Western secularists look back fondly on how we managed to leapfrog the medieval period of ignorance to regain the skeptical philosophical standpoint of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Yet Vervaeke thinks we need to leapfrog modernity in turn, to re-establish the religious confidence in our place in the world which prevailed in both the ancient and medieval periods.

Far from saving us, modernity condemned us to the meaning crisis, and cognitive science can alleviate the self-deception that generates our alienation and anxiety.

Natural Disharmonies

But Vervaeke’s solution is all wrong, as far as I can tell.

To begin to see what’s wrong here, return to his assurance that, “Just as there is the possibility for an ecological crisis, there is also a possibility for a worldview crisis.” Of course, Vervaeke has in mind the human-made ecological crisis but notice that there are natural ecological crises too.

There have been five mass extinction events on this planet, including the meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. As David Attenborough explains, human “progress” has only accelerated the natural carbon cycle. While organisms indeed adapt to their natural environment, this balance has been illusory all along. It’s just that you need to take the long view to see through the “fittedness” between life and the planet.

Life evolved in fits and starts, negotiating a peace, as it were, via the carbon cycle in which the carbon atoms needed for life travel between the atmosphere and the planet’s lands and seas. Carbon is likely alien to the planet, though, so although there’s a life-friendly cycle of carbon’s flows, including the exchange between carbon-breathing plant-life and carbon-exhaling animals, there have also been several catastrophic buildups of carbon which had to be expelled by massive volcanic eruptions and which periodically threatened the existence of terrestrial life.

The end-Permian extinction event 252 million years ago was one such unharmonious natural conflict between life and the Earth. Again, the planet mostly absorbs the carbon that life needs and harmlessly recycles it, but eventually the carbon buildups overwhelm the planet’s filtration systems, and the carbon cycle terminates in a mass extinction event.

Although our species is accelerating this long-term process by spewing disproportionate amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and by cutting down forests that trap carbon, threatening a sixth mass extinction, we didn’t invent this kind of catastrophe or disharmony. Nature did, by slamming a Mercury-like planet into the proto-Earth some 4.4 billion years ago, introducing alien carbon to the native building blocks. The two cosmic bodies established an equilibrium that allowed life to evolve, but the truce, as it were, is uneasy, as is apparent from the long view which includes the pattern of mass extinction events.

My point, then, is that this long view of scientific detachment and of grim acceptance of the accidental, tragic aspect of life’s emergence is the meaning crisis. Moreover, this is the opposite of what Vervaeke calls “self-deception.”

Modernity’s Dehumanizing Enlightenment

So Vervaeke has it backward. The happiness of those who feel at home in the world is sustained not by wisdom or by intellectual integrity, but by an abundance of ignorance, naivety, and gullibility. Even most of the intellectual elites of the ancient and modern worlds indulged in anthropocentric projections that masked the greatest known truth, which is that of the cosmicist upshot of philosophical naturalism.

There is no meaning of life in the sense of a cosmic role we’re supposed to play that will vindicate life’s advent. If there are heroic roles we can play, they’re likely tragic ones, meaning that they’re doomed to fail in the long run. Mindless nature will have the last laugh, as it were, at the expense of all life forms.

That atheistic, humanistic, naturalistic truth is indeed alienating, and as Vervaeke says, that perspective contributes to what we can helpfully think of as a modern meaning crisis. But the crisis isn’t that we’ve lost our grip on ancient wisdom. On the contrary, the true crisis is that ultimate knowledge is alienating because there’s no absolute agreement between life and world, agent and arena, symbol and fact. There are only temporary, accidental, or illusory such agreements.

The ultimate facts themselves are disheartening. Hence, the meaning crisis is that we have too much knowledge and we don’t know what to do with it.

Have a look at the correspondence theory of truth. If I say that the sun warms the earth, does that mean there’s a two-way agreement between that solar fact and the statement? Not really, because our languages are meaningful and consequential to us, not to anything else. The only agreement at play here is that we agree to model natural facts in our bid to exploit them with the applications of our instrumental cognition. Nature, for her part, agrees to nothing.

Indeed, all four of Vervaeke’s types of cognition are bound to be one-sided in that respect. True, the natural facts seem to submit to our efforts, allowing themselves to be conceptualized and spoken about, as it were. But that submission is an illusion. In their inhuman essence, the natural facts are ineffable to us, and to model them is to falsify them to some extent, regardless of the utility of science and philosophy. Our knowledge seems to empower us, but only to make fools of us in the long run. Our technological and economic progress may just be speeding our demise.

Take, for instance, what Vervaeke calls “participatory knowing.” Suppose a pickup artist walks into a bar, enters his flow state, and “owns” the place. That is, this handsome, rich, successful, confident young man dazzles single women everywhere, hopping from one group to the next, regaling them with banter and seductive anecdotes. The women are at his disposal because he’s the big man on campus. He’s one with his environment.

But does that fittedness entail that that flow state is respectable? Can’t we take a step back and contextualize the process of sexual seduction, viewing the matter with increasing levels of sobering objectivity and humility until that young man’s expertise begins to look like a form of clowning? And can’t we do the same for every all-too-human flow state, including the less controversial ones?

The Quest for an Honourable Meaning of Life

Again, the problem is that the harmonies in question are all hallucinatory, as is made clear precisely by what we call the modern skepticism that trades our small-minded happiness and self-assurance for dehumanizing knowledge of the world’s monstrous inhumanity. Even scientific progress looks like absurd strutting and hubristic clowning when viewed from the relatively enlightened standpoint. That’s the ironic standpoint that sees through all delusions, including the anthropocentric projections that make us feel at home in what is, rather, a perfectly alien and inhospitable cosmic wasteland.

When we think philosophically, we suspend our faith in the noble lies that keep the peace in society. The more we internalize philosophy, the more we’re inclined to renounce the artificial environments that humanize the wilderness to flatter and to serve us. We retreat to the noosphere, to our pet projects and pastimes because the antics of mass society look grotesque and myopic. And mass society still engages in such antics because nonphilosophers don’t consciously suffer from much of a meaning crisis, not even in the twenty-first century.

Vervaeke condemns modern egoism or individualism as a form of self-deception. He thinks it’s myopic, rather, to presume that we’re isolated individuals since we’re part of natural and social environments.

But modern naturalism isn’t so solipsistic. Sure, there’s an abundance of narcissism in pop culture, but modern secular enlightenment doesn’t deny the existence of an external world. On the contrary, knowledge of that world expanded beyond all reckoning only with the rise of modern philosophy and science. No, we think of ourselves as individuals because we posit a gulf between the self and lifeless, pointless nature. That gulf is no illusion. Instead, it’s the grand truth that makes for the meaning crisis.

There’s currently a meaning crisis because we know now that life is absurd. We care about ourselves, but the natural wilderness doesn’t. That asymmetry follows from the philosophical naturalism that Vervaeke’s cognitive science takes for granted, so he can’t escape the metaphysical disunity. Life evolves largely by accident only to acquire the intelligence to discover that its feeling of belonging to a habitat or to a social role is sustained by ignorance, self-indulgence, and hubris. Enlightened life falls back on the humiliating long view or on Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere,” according to which there are no satisfying final answers to our most urgent, existential questions.

Again, the real crisis is that we don’t know what to do about life’s absurdity. Vervaeke’s solution is to pretend that certain religious traditions were on the right track, and he uses the cognitive scientific concept of mental representational unities to dignify them. Yet all such unities are illusory.

Science is asymmetrically related to that which is scientifically explained because science is part of the Faustian, Promethean enterprise of our short-sighted empowerment at the expense of all other life and of the wilderness as such. We humanize the inhuman domains by building progressively more extravagant, decadent, and artificial refuges. Most religions are part of that gambit, so they enable us to ignore the fact that these meaningful lives we’re enjoying are only subjectively, arbitrarily valid. From the long view, which is that of the mindless and therefore monstrous cosmos, as it were, we’re all clowns.

That’s not to say there’s no dignifying solution to the meaning crisis. I’m chipping away at the problem, using the thought experiment of transhumanity to test the adequacy of enlightened lifestyles. In 2013, for example, I wrote “Homelessness and the Transhuman,” which likewise follows the existential philosophers who emphasized life’s absurdity within the scientifically-understood universe. And I suspect that pantheism, aesthetic values, and artistic creativity will be crucial to some such solution.

But these are shots in the dark. No one knows what should be done about the discovery that life is absurd, that our creator is a monstrous, pointlessly self-unfolding fullness of configurations of space and time, and of matter and energy. What will likely happen is that we’ll stumble from one option to another, as we’re inspired now by this charlatan or charismatic figure, and now by that one. We’ll proceed by trial and error until our time runs out or perhaps we discover an honourable, truly wise life project to pursue.