Rediscovering What We Have Lost

What did we lose when we sanitized the world?

For let’s be clear, sanitizing the world has been a dominant, if not the predominant, project of the Western, well-off, educated world for at least seventy years.

First, though, it is worth remembering all that we have gained by sanitizing the world. Our lifespans and our health would astound our ancestors: we live, on average, decades longer than we did a few centuries ago and spend much of that time with stronger bodies and all of our teeth. Unlike our ancestors and our kin still living in low-income countries, most of us will never know the agony of losing a child in our lifetime. I find it hard to fathom that, were I living not long ago, I would have almost certainly buried several children by my age. Most men will never go to war or fight in pointless duels. Most women will survive childbirth and lead lives beyond home and family if they choose.

We gained all this through science and suburbs, safety nets and secure, salaried professions. We have taken as much of the dirt and blood, the messy and frightening, the death and loss, and bathed it in a vat of bleach. It has been a remarkable, dizzying rise in comfort and safety, and all of us who benefit should be grateful every moment of every day.

And…what have we lost in the process?

I ask that question not to romanticize pre-modern life. I have no desire to go to war or be crippled by polio or watch one of my children die. But one way to understand our web of current plagues—the polarization and loneliness, depression and suicide—is that the great sanitization experiment and the culture it has spawned (post-modern, secular, hyper-rationalist) has reached its limits and begun to crumble. We cannot and should not go back to what came before. Instead, we are, as in all things, called to hold paradox, to chart a path between the brutality of the enchanted past and the sterility of the disenchanted present. Or as physicist Wolfgang Pauli so eloquently put it: “between the Scylla of a blue fog of mysticism and the Charybdis of a sterile rationalism.”

We have lost far too much for me to cover here. All that we should rediscover and regrow will be a theme throughout my coming reflections. For now, let’s explore the core, the cold and gray and silent heart of that loss: too many of us have lost our understanding of being human, our connection with life and death.

The more we truly engage with death, the deeper our capacity for fully living becomes. Many people who have endured terrible loss know this, as Nick Cave beautifully articulates in this On Being discussion. We deepen even further when we examine, honestly and unflinchingly, our own inevitable death. Buddhist monks meditate in charnel grounds and visualize their own decomposing bodies for a reason. They know, as most humans other than our recent weird, Western post-modern tribe have known throughout time, that regularly contemplating our own death does not depressingly darken life; it ignites us to burn brighter while we are here.

I now regularly return to my death many times throughout each day—walking the dog, working at my desk, playing with my kids. Each time I do, I want to cry out “my god, what a gift to be here.” What a gift that I ever came into this body and consciousness, that I get to experience all of this, beauty and suffering alike. What a gift that I am still here. As Cave describes in that interview, loss is the foundation of our being. I have lost much in my life already, and, in the end, I, like all of us, will lose everything. What a gift to be able to lose.

Fully embracing the reality of my death has unlocked a greater potential for gratitude and forgiveness and love than I ever thought possible. It has allowed me to better hold the paradoxes that lie at the heart of all life and open to mystery and the possibility of meaning that stretches beyond the scientific theorems and the capacity of our minds. As Abraham Joshua Heschel emphasizes: ““Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.” We can touch that awe and the insight that flows from it in every moment of every day, though it can be fiendishly hard and we require practice and guidance.

That is what so many of us have lost, individually and collectively. And that is what we must discover anew.

Gaining and holding that deeper perspective does not require a particular belief set. Some hyper-rationalists and atheists report deep wells of awe and gratitude and meaning. But it is clear that sterile rationalism is not working for millions of people, and perhaps our society as a whole. Earlier, more dismissive versions of myself thought they understood love and gratitude and meaning; I know now they were just scratching the surface. It is partly this realization that has led prominent new atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to recently announce her conversion to Christianity and eminent economist and rationalist heartthrob Tyler Cowen to declare that “the important thinkers of the future are going to be religious thinkers.”

Religion has become a dirty word for many of us, associated with everything from witch burnings and terrorism to radical, vitriolic politics and denial of science.  But one of its root meanings is “to rebind.” If there is defining dynamic of our era, it is that things have fallen apart. Those of us living in this time are called to find the center again, to rebind and reconnect ourselves to each other, to life, to this world, and to a reality we barely understand.

That reconnection, those new frameworks and mental models and worldviews, those new or evolved (gasp) religions must combine the best of rationalism and modernity—the peace and prosperity and scientific breakthroughs—with the best ways in which wisdom traditions have helped us embrace the wonderful and brutal reality of being flawed and finite creatures in a world that will always slip just beyond our comprehension. We need a new middle way, a reenchanted rationalism that shares more with revered thinkers like Plato and Newton than with post-truth modernists or nihilists.

I don’t know what that way (or ways) will look like. I don’t know how we will get there, other than that it will almost certainly be the slow, invisible work of thousands upon thousands of courageous and wise people and communities (work that has already begun; people and communities who are already among us). What I do know is that those ways must help more people move through the roller coasters of their lives to a place where we can feel the gift that we have been given—that we are—so fully and often that we respond to the cashier who is rude to us in the way that Tim Urban beautifully illustrates below. May we all find and immerse ourselves in that new way as quickly as possible.