The Myth of the Meaning Crisis

How a popular story about a crisis of meaning misleads us

This is a story about meaning. A story about religion. A story about loneliness, despair, and the healing power of community. A story about politics, economics, and philosophy. A story about god – belief, disbelief, and the effects of both. A story about society, and how we can live with each other. A story about destiny – where we’re going, and where we want to go. A story about hopelessness - and about reigniting hope for the future. A story about beauty - what it is, and why it’s important. A story about truth, science, and how we make sense of things. A story about the challenges we face as a species, and how we might overcome them, together.

This is The Myth of the Meaning Crisis.

In this series - I don’t know how long it’s going to be yet, or how long it will take me to complete it - I hope to achieve two main things. First, I want to respond to an increasingly prominent narrative in our public conversation: the idea that we are living through a “meaning crisis”, perhaps linked to a shift away from religious belief, which is at the root of many of our problems. We have a narrative gap at the heart of our culture, some say, and that is leading to a lot of other problems we are facing. I don’t think that story is true, and I want to use this series of articles to explain why.

But I don’t just want to critique other peoples’ stories: I want to tell a different story, offer my own positive account of where I think we are at, as a culture; how I think we got here; and what we can do about it. Broadly speaking, I’ll be defending a version of Humanism, a tradition of thought and practice which focuses on this world and on this life. Humanism tends to reject belief in gods and the supernatural, saying this life is all we get and that we have a responsibility to create a world in which everybody can live their one life fully. Articulating and defending that perspective is the second main purpose of this series.

In the process, we’ll explore the works of religious and philosophical thinkers - people who have grappled with the big questions of life. We’ll meet some of my particular philosophical inspirations, like the Pragmatist John Dewey, 20th century analytical philosopher Nelson Goodman, and contemporary Humanist Socialist Martin Hägglund. 

But mainly I’ll be responding to and riffing off the ideas of the people most engaged with the meaning crisis narrative. That means I’ll be critiquing the work of people like Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke, Jonathan Pageau, Bishop Robert Barron, Justin Brierley, and Paul Vander Klay - so if you like their work but are open to critical perspectives, you are gonna love this journey. Along the way we’ll also encounter historian Tom Holland’s work, as we examine the roots of contemporary western morality.

There is a piece of this project with a harder edge, too. I believe that much of the discussion around the so-called Meaning Crisis has dangerous political implications. Even if some of the thinkers involved in this discourse aren’t political actors directly, their ideas bleed into politics - often, I believe, in ways which baleful effects for the rights of minorities and for our common civic life together. In this series I’ll make a case for why the Meaning Crisis story is politically dangerous, and to do that I have to engage with some less savory figures like James Lindsay, Elon Musk, Fr Calvin Robinson, and other anti-woke crusaders. 

My hope for this series, though, is that it will ultimately be positive, uplifting, hopeful. That I’ll be able to show you that even though the challenges we face right now are profound, they are not insuperable. We can change things, if we work together. We can - without religion - find our place in this world.

We begin with a story which is increasingly prominent in our cultural conversation: the myth of the meaning crisis.

What Is the Meaning Crisis? – Four Views

What is the “meaning crisis”?  Let’s begin back in 2021, when four thinkers - Jordan Peterson, Robert Barron, John Vervaeke, and Jonathan Pageau – gathered on YouTube to talk about meaning. 

At first glance, these thinkers might not seem to have much in common. Vervaeke and Peterson are academics associated with the psychology department at the University of Toronto, but Barron is a Roman Catholic bishop and Pageau is an icon carver. Barron, obviously, is Christian – as is Pageau, whose Orthodox Christiannity informs his work. But Vervaeke and Peterson are vague on their own religious beliefs, each inhabiting a space between the religious and the secular. Three of the four are Canadian, but Barron breaks even that pattern by hailing from Chicago. All four are straight, white men – a fact which might be relevant when we consider some of their shared political views – but this is not why they’re all in this video.

What brought them together is a shared interest in the “meaning crisis”, and over the course of a two-hour discussion they each give their own account of what they think it is, and why they think it’s a problem. Indeed, this video is titled “The Four Horsemen of Meaning” – a callback to the atheist Four Horsemen, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. These four, in the video, all argue that something is wrong with our culture today, such that we find it harder to live meaningful lives.

None of the four describe the crisis in quite the same way, but their presence in the same video suggests there are commonalities between their approaches. The fact that these four people in particular were selected for this discussion reflects that they are prominent voices in this new discourse – so if we want to understand the meaning crisis, it makes sense to start with that video, and with these four thinkers.

So, what do each of them understand the Meaning Crisis to be?

John Vervaeke’s Take

The “horseman” most closely associated with the term “meaning crisis” is John Vervaeke, whose epic 50-part video series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” helped popularize the term. Despite this, it can be hard to understand precisely what he thinks the meaning crisis is: his work weaves together countless philosophical and psychological ideas in a way which can be difficult to follow. A page on the website of his Vervaeke Foundation promisingly titled “What is the Meaning Crisis?” oddly fails to provide a succinct answer. The page talks about crises of mental health, the environment, and politics, and says these are “enmeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis that John Vervaeke calls ‘The Meaning Crisis’” – but it does not then say what this “meaning crisis” actually consists of. The closest the page comes to describing the “meaning crisis” as a distinct phenomenon is to say “today, there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future” – but it’s not clear whether this is another set of symptoms of the meaning crisis, or a way of describing the crisis itself.

In another attempt to explain the concept – the introductory video to his 50-part series – Vervaeke tells us that “the meaning crisis expresses itself…[in an] increasing sense of bullshit”. OK, I certainly feel an increasing prevalence of bullshit, particularly in our politics – but is this the “meaning crisis”? No, according to Vervaeke this is merely an expression of it, a symptom of an underlying cause. The meaning crisis itself is “deeper than social media problems, political problems, even economic problems: they are deeply historical, cultural, cognitive problems”. So apparently we have some deep historical, cultural, and cognitive problems which are giving rise to majorly problematic social ills, and this is called “the meaning crisis”. But what is it? What actually is the problem which is causing all these symptoms?

Hard to say. I’ve listened to all 50 hours of Vaerveke’s series on the topic, and I’ve consumed countless interviews he’s given on the radio, on YouTube, and in print, and I am still not entirely certain what he believes this “deeper problem” is. The closest I’ve seen to a succinct explanation of it is in the “Four Horsemen” conversation though – and particularly in one segment, excerpted by Jonathan Pageau on his channel. Here Vervaeke says that “We have a scientific worldview in which science and scientists and their meaning-making have no proper ontological place…Science and we are the black hole within this worldview that dominates us.” He goes on to say “This lack of ontological placement…is causing massive suffering.”

I take this to mean that the scientific worldview has no way of explaining science itself, let alone people and our experiences of meaning and truth. Meaning and truth, he says, “have no place within” the scientific worldview. And since this worldview is the dominant worldview under which we live, most of us feel ontologically out of place. Our “cultural cognitive grammar” (Vervaeke’s phrase) can explain everything except us – “We have no home in which we are properly situated”, Vervaeke says, “That’s what I mean by the meaning crisis.” This, Vervaeke argues, causes “enormous suffering” – including the high rate of suicide in Australia, the loneliness epidemic, the addiction epidemic, people choosing to live in the virtual world.

Vervaeke further explains the “meaning crisis” in a 2015 discussion with Peterson at the University of Toronto. There, he talks about how the Axial Revolution established a “two world model”. Under this model there is understood to be the normal, mundane world in which we live everyday, and also a world beyond it in which we find “fulfilment and protection from horror” (think heaven). Thus on this view our lives in this world come to be understood as preparations for life in the next world. Later, the scientific worldview “calls the heavenly world into question”, asking us to “imagine there’s no heaven”, and the advance of science means we’re left now with only the mundane world - which we have been “tutored for millennia” to believe is meaningless in itself. Hence, we suffer a crisis of meaning: the very thing our finite lives were preparing us for is now no longer believed to exist, so we have nothing left to live for.

So, Vervaeke presents complex picture, but the basic idea is that our relationship with the world and with our own lives has broken down because a metaphysical meta-narrative which used to shape and orient our lives has been called into question. The scientific worldview - distinct from the worldviews which preceded it - has no way of encompassing ourselves and our own meaning-making, and has dispelled the “higher world” of the two world model, so we are at a loss - hence, meaning crisis.

Bishop Barron’s Take

Vevaeke’s take on the “meaning crisis” is essentially secular - he doesn’t attribute the problem to increasing disaffiliation from religion specifically. Bishop Robert Barron, by contrast (and perhaps predictably, given he’s a Catholic priest) relates it to a loss of religious - and particularly Christian - belief and practice. Barron is relatively taciturn in the “Four Horsemen of Meaning” discussion, but in a follow-up video he expands on his understanding. There Barron links the meaning crisis to two problems: what he calls “scientism” and “the culture of self-invention”.

“Scientism”, for Barron, is “the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge.” Today, he argues, we associate authentic knowledge with science and, on the other side of the coin, consider the realm of values as subjective, merely a projection of our needs. He claims that “Today because of scientism there is a great occluding of [the realm of objective values]”. In other words, the presumed superiority of science crowds out non-scientific knowledge – including knowledge of the Good and the True. That’s what he means by “scientism”.

The second cause of the meaning crisis, in Barron’s eyes, is “the culture of self-invention”. This is Barron’s critique of postmodernism, essentially: he says that today “claims to objective value – whether that’s truth or goodness or aesthetic value” are considered to be merely “disguised plays of power” (a notion he attributes to Foucault).

Put together, these features of our contemporary way of seeing the world create a meaning crisis. He says this explicitly:

“The result [of scientism and the culture of self-invention]? A loss of meaning. Knowledge given by the physical sciences? Sure, we have a lot of that. Affirmation of our subjectivity? We have tons of that. But we’re losing a sense of objective value and a purposive orientation to that value.” 

His solution? A return to Christianity, and specifically Catholicism: “we need great Catholic scholars”, he says. “We need great Catholic artists…We need great Catholic saints!” 

So there’s Bishop Barron’s slightly different view of the meaning crisis: scientism and a culture of self-invention have led to a loss of a sense of objective value, and hence a loss of purpose in our lives. In response, we need to return to the secure and objective verities of Christianity.

Jonathan Pageau’s Take

Jonathan Pageau also links the meaning crisis to a loss of religious faith, but in a slight different way. In the four-way discussion he says:

“[In] The idea that we project meaning on an objective world, already you can see the alienation that is bound up in that very proposition. Which is: so where are we then? We’re not in the world? We’re these kind of ghosts that are floating above reality?”

This separation of ourselves from the world, Pageau argues, [Leads to] “increasing alienation…increasing fragmentation…[as] a direct consequence of that thinking.” 

In another video Pageau expands on his thinking. He is asked by a viewer “Why do Millennials hate their lives?” Pageau puts the blame in part at the feet of schools where, he says:

“All they’re being told is how the world is falling apart because of ecological reasons, because of racism…The very school system is giving them a sense that they’re…the last generation…They are being presented with an apocalyptic narrative on all sides.” 

So here the problem is that young people are being presented with the wrong ideas: the reason for the young people’s sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness is not the ecological crisis or institutional racism, but being told about those things. The narrative about those things is causing our loss of meaning - this point will come back later, so hold onto it.

The way out, Pageau suggests, is to rediscover Christianity. He talks of all the cultural myths which portray the rediscovery of lost knowledge or a lost civilisation - the secrets of Atlantis, the secrets of the Egyptians - and says these myths hold the key to unlocking the cage in which we are now trapped. Christianity, he says, is the ancient wisdom from the past we need to rediscover so, like the ancient line of kings in Lord of the Rings, we can renew our lost glory. 

Jordan Peterson’s Take

Finally, to Jordan Peterson’s take on the “Meaning Crisis”. Peterson is by far the most famous and influential of the “Four Horseman of Meaning”, so it’s important to understand his congtribution to the discourse. However, in the four-way discussion he plays primarily a moderator role, asking the other participants their views - so we have to go elsewhere for his understanding of the meaning crisis.

We find the answer in his 2013 TEDx talk. There, Peterson argues (like the other speakers) that science bears the responsibility. He says:

“Since the scientific age began we’ve lived in a universe where the bottom strata of reality is considered to be something that’s dead - like dirt…It’s matter, it’s objective, it’s external. There isn’t any element of it that lends any reality to phenomena like meaning or purpose. That’s all been relegated to the subjective and, in some ways, to the illusory.”

Peterson goes on to argue that because of our scientific assumptions, modern people are prone to pathologies like “nihilistic hopelessness which is a consequence of the recognition that in the final analysis nothing really has any meaning.” So similarities here with Barron’s view - science has presented us with an empty and mechanistic view of the world which has stripped out meaning and purpose. Further, Peterson suggests that not believing in transcendent meaning leaves you weak when suffering hits you, and makes us susceptible to pathological belief systems (he implies that Nazism and Soviet Communism are such belief systems).

The Five Common Features of the Myth of the Meaning Crisis

So there are four accounts of the so-called Meaning Crisis provided by four of the people most closely associated with the emerging discussion around that term. Their accounts are clearly different, but they share some key features.

What are these common features? I think there are five, but you can probably break them down in lots of different ways.

Point 1: The necessity of a metanarrative.

People need stories, most importantly a narrative to frame and shape our lives and give them meaning. These thinkers claim we cannot live without such overarching narratives - metanarratives - so if we discard one we will inevitably live by another. Everyone worships something, they say – we just choose what we worship. Because of this, these thinkers tend to believe that atheists, who do not believe in god, simply replace their belief in god with a similarly fervent belief in something else.

Point 2: Metanarrative collapse.

Most versions of the myth argue that for ages, in the west, we have had a metanarrative which has shaped our lives, given them purpose and meaning - but that metanarrative is now collapsing.

Some versions of the myth suggest our shared story has been the Judeo-Christian story - Bishop Barron and Jonathan Pageau basically take this view, as does Justin Brierley, a Christian writer and broadcaster. As Brierley puts it in his podcast The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God:  “The narrative of Christianity gave people a story to be part of.” This narrative shaped our values and our outlook – especially our moral values. Christianity is, according to Brierley and other (mainly Christian) purveyors of the Meaning Crisis story, the psychological and theological foundation on which our society is built. Now, because less and less people are religious, that narrative is falling away.

Other versions of the Meaning Crisis myth do not specifically identify Christianity or Judeo-Christian Values as a foundational element of western culture. Rather, they posit some other framework of ideas which served a similar orienting role – before it started to break down, that is. We’ve seen how in John Vervaeke’s version the “two-world model” of the Axial Age is the metanarrative which has broken down. Tomas Bjorkman (someone else who has talked about the meaning crisis) talks about “outgrowing our collective imaginary”, saying: “the collective imaginary that we are living under today, which we got essentially from the Enlightenment transition…[has now] reached the end of [its] capacity”.

Often commentators here posit a reason for this metanarrative collapse. Just as the metanarrative which has collapsed differs between tellings of the myth, so too the reasons for its collapse differ. Religious thinkers tend to point to widespread disaffiliation from traditional religion, and blame the New Atheism for challenging the Judeo-Christian framework. Justin Brierley, for instance, writes in The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: “The narrative of Christianity gave people a story to be part of. But as that story has faded in our communal consciousness, a shared existential question has come to replace it: what story are we now supposed to live by?”

Secular thinkers tend to point to broader causes, like a shift in our worldview away from a broadly Enlightenment way of thinking toward something different. Postmodernism often comes in for criticism here, as it is blamed for breaking down traditional categories and understandings, contributing to our supposed narrative instability. But whether religious or secular, often some reason is offered why our metanarrative has broken down.

The important thing about this stage of the argument is that some sort of metanarrative or set of metanarratives has broken down, leaving us unable to make sense of our lives, sapping them of meaning and purpose, making us unhappy and unfulfilled. This leads to loneliness, a sense of disconnection, a feeling of meaninglessness, a lack of hope. That’s the second core component of the Meaning Crisis myth.

Point 3: Emptiness of contemporary metanarratives

The myth then claims that contemporary metanarratives are weak, lacking in some way. It is often said that materialistic atheism, for example, provides no narrative to help us grapple with the perennial problems of being human. It clears away religious narratives but leaves a vacuum. Atheism, it is claimed, cannot sustain values, meaning, purpose. For some religious purveyors of this myth there is a sense that robbing the human species of belief in god specifically causes problems. Here’s Justin Brierley again: “Atheist materialism, with its promise of science and technology as a savior for the world, has failed to give us a story that we can make sense of life by.”

Sometimes it’s not atheism in particular that is criticized here, but other metanarratives like multiculturalism or political progressivism. Douglas Murray, a British political commentator and author, expressing his conviction about the emptiness of contemporary metanarratives, says: “We might be among the first people in human history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to tell about what we should do.”

So, contemporary metanarratives - such as they are - are unable to fill the vacuum left by the meta-narrative collapse.

 Point 4: The Rise of Pseudo-Narratives

Into the vacuum created by the metanarrative collapse and the weakness of contemporary metanarratives rush other ideologies, replacement metanarratives – because remember point 1, we cannot live without a metanarrative! But these metanarratives are themselves inadequate in some way, and won’t solve the meaning crisis.

Often, wokeism is described as such an ideology. Indeed, wokeism is sometimes described as a religion, a “new orthodoxy” which reduces individuals to their group characteristics, opposes free speech, is vengeful and dogmatic etc. Some describe Humanism this way too, arguing that Humanism is a “pseudo-religion”, based on Christianity, which seeks to take the moral fruits born of the Christian tradition while jettisoning the metaphysical roots which enabled them to grow (Tom Holland has made this argument).

Whatever pseudo-narratives a particular purveyor of the myth of the meaning crisis targets, they are agreed that, while they might have the form of religious stories which used to satisfy us, they aren’t up to the task of filling the void of meaning in our lives.

Point 5: A prescription to resolve the crisis

The final part of the myth is the prescription, the cure, the way we are going to claw ourselves out of our narrative quagmire and get back to solid ground again.

Sometimes this prescription is unambiguous: we need to get religious again, and specifically, become Christians. Clearly Christian thinkers like Jonathan Pageau, Bishop Barron and Justin Brierley think that Christianity is part of the solution here - remember Barron’s injunction that we need “great Catholic scholars…great Catholic artists…great Catholic saints!” That’s how he thinks we solve the meaning crisis.

A very clear example of someone offering a religious response to the meaning crisis comes from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, formerly a new atheist thinker, who recently wrote in an article for UnHerd: “…we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” 

Here can be seen many elements of this myth in a super clear form: we have formidable challenges we cannot face without a uniting metanarrative. Contemporary metanarratives like atheism and liberalism are too weak. So we need a return to legacy, tradition, Judeo-Christianity.

Others offer a different prescription. John Vervaeke, rather than prescribing a return to traditional religion, suggests we should create new ecologies of spiritual practices which learn from our religious past, but don’t simply replicate it. Others provide a purely political prescription, usually involving the return to some supposedly lost conservative cultural values. The prescriptions differ, but there is always a prescription for how to solve the meaning crisis.

So those are the five main claims of those who put forward the idea of a meaning crisis:

1. We need metanarratives to help shape our experience.

2. We are experiencing a metanarrative collapse at present, because old stories which used to serve us have been abandoned or superseded. Sometimes a reason for this metanarrative collapse is presented here.

3. Contemporary metanarratives are said to be lacking in some way, unable to help us truly make sense of the world we are living in now.

4. Pseudo narratives rush into the void, but fail to give us the meaning we crave.

5. So we need either a new metanarrative or a return to an old metanarrative in order to fix the problem.

These five points together are what I call the Myth of the Meaning Crisis. Clearly, different thinkers understand the myth in different ways, diagnosing different problems and offering different solutions. But the narratives they offer have these common features, which is why it makes sense to group them and see them as part of a connected project. That’s why they all go on each others’ YouTube channels and promote each others’ work - they see themselves, at least in part, as engaged in a shared enterprise - and I think that enterprise is based on a misdiagnosis of the challenges we face, and therefore provides “solutions” which will not solve our problems, and in some cases are actually harmful. That’s why I’m writing this series in response.

What the Myth Gets Right

I want to pause here and say there are things the myth gets right. I don’t think that everything these thinkers are saying is wrong - they do identify some real problems and offer some insight. So, in the interest of intellectual charity, here is what I think these thinkers are right about:

• They are right to worry about the profound challenges the human species face at present. I agree that we are facing a collection of interconnected crises - economic, political, ecological - which combine to make our problems seemingly insuperable.

• They are right that we face crises of loneliness, disconnection, and lack of trust which are resulting in major mental health problems - particularly for young people. I see this in my work at my university, and I think they’re absolutely right to be worried about that.

• I agree we are seeing a resurgence of interest in some forms of spirituality and religion, and that the New Atheist wave has broken without having swept in a new age of reason and plenty (though I’m not sure that was ever really on offer). 

• I agree, too, that atheism alone is insufficient to make sense of our lives (although, again, I’m not sure anyone thought it was).

• I agree with them, too, that we should take religion seriously. We shouldn’t simplistically deride all religious ideas and practices, tossing them into the dustbin of history. Religious stories, practices, and institutions have a lot to teach us about living well.

In all these areas, I think the Meaning Crisis Myth-makers are onto something, and are sparking an essential conversation. Yet I still think there are some major problems with this whole line of thinking.

Why the “Meaning Crisis” is a Myth

So why, then, do I think the Meaning Crisis narrative is a myth? Because it makes three big mistakes. The first mistake is a misdiagnosis: the Meaning Crisis narrative misdiagnoses the problems that we face, attributing them to a breakdown in our metanarrative instead of to material conditions, which are the real cause of our problems. 

The second mistake is a misprescription: because the cause of our social ills is misdiagnosed, the wrong prescription about how to cure those ills is offered. Instead of pointing us to collective efforts to make political, social, and economic change, the Meaning Crisis story turns us inward in the pursuit of faith (or some other internal transformation).

The third mistake is broader, and runs through the whole enterprise: it is misevaltuation. Because its thesis is focused on how contemporary metanarratives are inadequate to meet our current needs, tseeing them as either derivative or deformed versions of what came before. Thus the meaning crisis myth systematically undervalues contemporary secular approaches to living, preventing us from seeing the value they truly offer.

Let’s look at each of these three mistakes in turn.

The mistake of misdiagnosis

First, misdiagnosis. As we’ve seen, the meaning crisis myth is based on the idea that there is something wrong with how we look at the world. These thinkers argue that some framework we use to relate to the world has broken down - this is its obsession with metanarratives. 

In this way of thinking, concrete, material problems - problems like economic inequality, political unresponsiveness, ecological anxiety etc. - are seen as downstream from metaphysical problems: our inadequate metaphysics somehow provokes material problems. And that’s why they focus their attention at metanarratives and how (in their view) to fix them - because problems at the metanarrative level are causing other social problems.

This might seem wrong to you - how can how we think about the world cause problems with our economy, for instance? But this is really what these thinkers believe. This is what John Vervaeke, for instance, means when he says the meaning crisis is “deeper than social media problems, political problems, even economic problems: they are deeply historical, cultural, cognitive problems” . See how Vervaeke’s mind, the cultural and cognitive problems are deeper, they are beneath or undergird political and economic problems. They are fundamental - so they need fixing first.

We see the same basic idea in Jordan Peterson. Remember what he said about nihilism when he was talking about how our scientific worldview has relegated human experience to the “subjective”? He said “nihilistic hopelessness…is a consequence of the recognition that in the final analysis nothing really has any meaning.” In other words, the hopelessness so many of us are experiencing now is due to - it is a consequence of - our contemporary scientific worldview. The worldview - the metanarrative - is causing the hopelessness. That’s what Peterson thinks.

We see the same in Pageau and Barron: both argue that something about how we situate ourselves in the world is causing other social problems. Pageau is really interesting here: remember when he was asked why some many young people feel hopeless and said “The very school system is giving [children] a sense that they’re…the last generation…They are being presented with an apocalyptic narrative on all sides”? See how he locates the cause of young people’s challenges not in any problems with the world itself, but in what they are being told about the world at school - the implication being, of course, that if they were told something different, they wouldn’t feel that way? Again, the metanarrative is the problem, not the world. And Barron thinks our supposed contemporary loss of meaning is the result of scientism and the culture of self-invention - once again the problem is with how we see the world and situation ourselves within it.

This is the central diagnostic maneuver of the meaning crisis narrative, and I think is wrong - it is a misdiagnosis - and hence the story is a myth. Instead of problems with our metanarratives causing concrete problems, I think it’s precisely the other way round: concrete problems are causing a sense of meaninglessness and despair for many. I’ll say more about what I think is happening in future entries in this series, but first we must review the other two mistakes this story makes. 

The mistake of misprescription

So, I’ve argued that the Meaning Crisis story misdiagnoses our problems. Because of this, it prescribes the wrong solutions - this is the problem of misprescription. When we go to the doctor to be treated for an illness, the effectiveness of the treatment depends on the accuracy of the diagnosis: if the doctor gets the diagnosis wrong they will likely give you the wrong prescription for treatment, and you won’t get better (and could even get worse). That’s what I think is happening here. Because the myth locates the problems with contemporary society in the metanarratives we use to make send of society, it promotes “solutions” based on repairing those meta-narratives.

Barron says we need more Catholicism; Pageau says we need to return to our ancient stories (especially Christianity); Justin Brierley says we need to rediscover the Christian story, and hopes for a turning of the tide of faith. What links these prescriptions is that they target our metanarratives - which makes sense, because that’s where thinkers believe we’ve gone wrong.

I think this is a misprescription, because I think the problems we face are much more mundane and material, and therefore the solution to these problems is equally mundane. Instead of changing the stories we use to make sense of the world, I think we need to change the world through community organizing, collective political action, technological innovation etc. Our sense of meaningless, purposelessness, homelessness etc. can be resolved through concrete changes in our material conditions and social organisation, and a focus on metanarratives is a distraction from that essential project.

I’ll expand in future articles, but this misprescription is why I think the Meaning Crisis myth is not just mistaken, but dangerous. Because it misunderstands the root of our problems, and therefore prescribes the wrong solutions to those problems, it points us away from the real solutions. It focuses our attention in the wrong place, and promotes ideas which will fail alleviate them or even make our problems worse. This is why I believe the Meaning Crisis myth is fundamentally “conservative”, in the sense that it promotes looking back and reclaiming the past, an impotent nostalgia that doesn’t challenge the real causes of our discontent.

The mistake of misevaluation

And, finally, misevaluation: the Meaning Crisis myth consistently and repeatedly under-appreciates the values of contemporary, and especially secular and progressive, approaches to making sense of the world. By saying the scientific worldview is inadequate to meet our needs; by saying that modern science has pushed humanity and subjectivity out of the frame; by constantly attacking postmodernism and other schools of thought which emerged relatively recently; by saying that nonreligious ways of navigating the world can’t explain fundamental features of our experience (making us feel rootless and homeless); even by lauding the architecture, art, and music of the past over that of the present (a consistent theme among many of these thinkers and some of their fellow travelers) - in all these ways the contemporary is diminished in favour of the antique.

I think this both fails to appreciate the value in contemporary secular metanarratives, and fetishises perspectives which actually themselves have a lot of problems. So a running theme of in this series will be an attempt to revalue the contemporary and the secular, to show that the ways we live and think right now aren’t hopelessly debased or missing anything essential, but rather can furnish us with a sense of belonging, the strength to make change, and hope for the future. A secular, humanistic worldview can five us a secure and meaningful place in this world.

Flipping the Narrative

So what is my response to all this, and what am I gong to present in this series of articles? I think the Meaning Crisis myth has things exactly backwards. I think our problems are fundamentally economic, political, technological - they are concrete problems, problems with our material conditions - and that those are causing the struggles with meaning and purpose many people are feeling. Things like the crisis of loneliness (and the mental health challenges that crisis provokes) are downstream of material concerns such as the state of the economy, education, housing, technological change etc.

My thesis, in short, is this:

If we feel we’re not at home in the world, it’s not because our metanarrative decenters human beings and our subjectivity, but because we cannot afford homes to live in. If we feel powerless, it is not because our metanarrative presents us as material beings at the mercy of material forces, but because the structure of our politics is systematically disempowering. If we feel unsafe, it is not because our metanarrative robs us of a sense of psychological safety, but because multiple wars are raging. If we despair about the future, it is not because our metanarrative doesn’t provide a vision of a better future, but because we are destroying the planet, putting our future at genuine risk. 

To the extent there is a “meaning crisis” at all it is the result of mundane political, economic, and ecological problems. Our difficulty making meaning is due to the contradictions in how we are living. To fix this we cannot simply change our ideas - we must change the world. Focusing on a so-called “meaning crisis” - or any other religious, psychological, or metaphysical explanation for our problems - makes it harder for us to focus on the real issues. The Meaning Crisis myth is a misleading distraction from the work we need to do to create a better world.

We do face crises: economic inequality, unresponsive political systems, rising political extremism, impending ecological disaster, the collapse of civic life. These provoke our feelings of emptiness, hopelessness, and despair. Repairing our metanarratives won’t fix any of them. Returning to religion will not avail us, because the problem is not religious. These crises are concrete, this-worldly, mundane - we face secular problems which require secular solutions.

But that means we can fix them.