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MORTALITY AND MEANING

In 1868, two years after he had finished the six movements originally planned for his German Requiem, Brahms inserted a seventh, a soprano solo punctuated by muted interjections from the chorus. The text he chose promises consolation: those who now grieve will be comforted, the bereaved will again see those they have lost. Brahms's setting acknowledges the depths of their sorrow, and responds with gestures of exquisite tenderness. Music-loving secularists, however resolute in their nonbelief, should concede its emotional power.

Culturally successful religions are often credited with enabling their followers to understand and to accept the major transitions in human life. They have, after all, had plenty of practice—typically centuries or millennia in which they have worked at shaping their rites. Those, like Christianity and Islam, that promise an eternal continuation to which mundane human life is a prelude, seem especially adept at coping with the last transition: death is supposedly easier for the devout to bear. Part of the relief comes from prospects of personal continuation and hopes for reunion with others who have been loved and lost. Consoling too is the faith that each finite human existence connects to something transcendent, and thereby gains an eternal significance. For the non-believer, however, there is no hope of future survival or of reclaiming the dead. Individual human lives are thoroughly finite, their effects evanescent. All human life will eventually cease. Our finitude leaves nothing to celebrate in the wake of a life. What use is Darwin at a funeral?

Mortality and meaning raise connected challenges for secular humanism. On matters of life and death, however, religion offers less, and secularism provides more, than is usually assumed.

How should a secular humanist think about the prospect of his own death? A classic recommendation sees fear as inappropriate: with death comes the end of pain, of suffering, of frustrated striving. Hamlet, meditating suicide, calls death “a consummation devoutly to be wished,” until, turning suddenly devout, he imagines an afterlife in which the torments of mundane existence continue. Secularists who dismiss that possibility can return to Hamlet's original stance: being dead is nothing to be frightened of.

There is, however, the getting there. Fear can be directed not toward the state itself, but at the process of dying. People are often afraid not only of the pains that come at the end, but also of the unraveling of body and mind, the losses of capacities relied on in their active days. So they are terrified at the thought of what they are likely to become, foreseeing the surviving being as a grotesque parody of themselves. Concerns of this sort are serious, deserving confrontation by the person who contemplates her own life's ending and support from those who might help her avoid, or at least mitigate, the conditions she fears. Support need not—probably should not—come from religion but from humane deployment of medical resources. Careful thoughts about the end should be fostered, expressed, developed in exchanges with those who know about the options, in “end of life” conversations designed to allow the inevitable decaying and dying to approximate a termination suited to her reflective image of her life and her death. Secular humanists regret that religious affiliations, and indeed religious interventions, all too often override people's considered hopes and concerns about the inevitable ending.

Fear of being dead is misplaced, fear of decaying and dying belongs to the anxieties of life, to be addressed with sympathy by whatever techniques of amelioration medical practice can provide. Yet perhaps the concern has been misstated by focusing on the wrong emotion. As you look forward to the future, to a world without you, you might feel regret, rather than fear, being sad that you will no longer be a part of the show. There might be psychological pain, even quite acute, at the prospect of your nonexistence. Again, there is a classic reassurance, stemming from the ancient world. As you look back into the past, you contemplate with equanimity the long expanses of time before you were born. No pangs disturb you as you think about your absence from particular historical episodes. Why then should you feel any differently about the future?

So far I've offered a swift review of familiar attempts at secular consolation. If they constitute a beginning, they do not go far in addressing the root anxieties—many people regard them as facile, shallow, even as laughable sophistry. The sorrow or repugnance felt in contemplating a future from which you will be absent is not to be assimilated to everyday reactions to pain and suffering. It is deeper, an emotion of distress, or even terror, at the prospect that you will no longer be. To help bring this reaction into sharper focus, I shall replace the classical query about past and future with a different question: Do you feel differently about your absence from different parts of the future?

I do. As I imagine the world in the years immediately following my death, I feel a more intense regret about not being part of it than when I project forward a century, or even half a century. Increasing the time interval diminishes my sadness—it fades relatively swiftly to indifference. Not because I'm envious of those who live happily and actively into extreme old age. I don't even yearn for the longevity advances in medicine may someday achieve for future generations. Absence from the period just after my death is poignant because so much of the stuff of my life will be continued in it. Whenever I die, people about whom I care most deeply will live on, and I should like to be there, sustaining them and being sustained by them. Endeavors to which I have committed my energies will remain unfinished. Loose ends will be left, and I should like to tie them up—while knowing that ends are always beginnings and strands will inevitably dangle. By contrast, the connections with the more distant future are dim, and I cannot even be confident of the large contours of the remote world from which I shall be excluded. Were I to survive into that world, there would be a continuously evolving set of relationships and activities that would give me a stake in it, but, lacking any experience of that development of my life, the concerns I would come to have are not vivid for me. So, as I look forward sufficiently far, regret declines into indifference.

Those who shudder at the thought of their nonexistence in any part of the future will see this reaction as only a slight improvement on the ancient idea that past and future can be contemplated with equal serenity. In this area of my thought and feeling, I shall appear to them as akin to the color-blind and the tone-deaf. But what are the analogues of the hues and pitches that normal people can differentiate? What contrasts with absence from the future? What envisaged state would not provoke the shudder?

World literature tells of many people who react to the prospect of death by longing for immortality, and of some among them whose wish is granted. The incautious ones—Tithonus, for example—forget to ask that vigor, youth, and beauty should be part of the bargain. Tennyson captures their lament:

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, ...

But this, you may think, is a technicality. What is really desirable is the possibility of living forever at the height of your powers—or, perhaps, the possibility of living forever with the option of assuming, at any moment in time, whatever life-stage you choose—and it is the realization that these possibilities are denied us that causes distress or terror.

Tennyson's Tithonus makes a deeper point, however, when he regrets his deviation from the happiness of the finite human lot. Ensuring eternal vigor (or permanent options for choosing your age) abstracts from some conditions of human life, but it does not modify a fundamental aspect of human finitude. For each of us, there is a number of ways in which we might choose to lead our lives. Perhaps it is a very large number—but it is not infinite. If you imagine your immortality in concrete detail, it would decompose into a sequence of episodes. Rather than having a single coherent narrative arc, it would be a loose picaresque novel or a disjointed collection of short stories—however fulfilling the individual episodes might be, it would be hard to understand the whole as a life. Furthermore, it would reach a point when immortality became tedious and burdensome, not because your powers had withered but because there was nothing new under the sun. Tired of attempts to develop infinite variations on finite material, weary of repetition, like Tithonus you would long to rejoin the mortal human condition.

We cannot, I think, fully imagine what it would be like to be the kind of being for which immortality was a condition of eternal joy. If my diagnosis is correct, distress at the prospect of not being is founded in a confusion. For absence from any part of the future is only terrible because something is felt as having been lost. If extended sufficiently far, however, human lives would not be vulnerable to any real loss through the threat of termination—indeed, cessation would ultimately appear as a blessing. What lies behind the sense of horror at not being is regret at being human. To my humanist sensibility that species of regret appears one we should try to overcome—just as we should seek to accept, even enjoy, the arc of our aging. Our real problem is posed by the prospect of a removal from a web of connections that matter deeply to us.

The loss of the immediate future is hard for those whose lives attain, or approach, the biblically allotted span, but for the young who face the threat of imminent death the sorrow is even more intense. No member of their unfortunate ranks has expressed the predicament more eloquently than Keats:

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high pilèd books, in charact'ry

Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain; ...

Regret and sadness become fear, but the fear is not of death in general—that is nothing to be frightened of. Premature death, however, is fearsome, even terrifying, because it truncates and nullifies the pattern of a life. Although the later lines of the sonnet worry that he will never experience the love for which he yearns, Keats's first anxiety is for the expression of his genius. Central to his existence is his poetic vocation. If that vocation were realized only in a mutilated, abbreviated form, the meaning of his life would be lost.

Following Keats, I take the genuine problem of death to be the problem of premature death. Deaths count as premature when they prevent lives from attaining meaning: the challenges of mortality and meaning connect. But aren't all deaths premature? Can any finite life be meaningful?

III

A proposal: human lives sometimes attain meaning through individuals' developing conceptions of who they are and what matters to their existences, through their pursuit of the goals endorsed by those conceptions, and by some degree of success in attaining them. A Keats who lived for eighty years, piling up books full of poetry as extraordinary as the lyrics he wrote at the height of his powers, would have led a meaningful life, whether or not he found love along the way. Indeed, the actual Keats, leaving only a fraction of what he might have written, lived a life whose meaning is untouched by his early death. Nor is exceptional achievement needed. Secularists should endorse not only the grand accomplishments of the poets and the statesmen and the scientists, but also the humbler self-conceptions of those whose pursuits and achievements focus more locally, on family, on friendship, on community, on the maintenance of things that matter to a small group of other people.

Mattering to others is what counts in conferring meaning. Keats matters to others because of the body of verse that continues to delight. The effects of more ordinary lives are felt on a smaller scale, but they still secure genuine worth. The nature of the dispute between religious and secular perspectives should now be visible. For the religious challenger, no set of characteristics of finite lives, or of relations among finite lives, can substitute for the connection to the transcendent that alone confers meaning and value.

Problems about our own deaths lead to deeper issues about the significance of finite lives. Yet the thought that we shall cease to be is not the only way death figures as a problem for us. The loss of loved ones lacks secular compensation. In the beginning the fabric of a human life is tightly woven. All the threads tying us together are fully intact. As people grow, however, holes appear, leaving frayed ends that cannot be reconnected. For those who live the longest, the final tapestry is a thing of shreds and tatters, its yawning vacancies recalling people whose laughter and whose touch is still longed for. Growing old beside someone you love brings the overwhelmingly likely prospect of an ending in which one will mourn the loss of the other, and the inevitable shrinking of the survivor's life is—for both parties—more fearsome than the anticipation of one's own bodily and mental decay.

Back, then, to Brahms and the promise of reunion. Here apparently is a consolation secular humanism cannot match, a hope religious widows and widowers sometimes confess they could not forfeit. Well-meaning people occasionally tender a similar hope to those who grieve for children who have died young—as Charles Kingsley did in a letter to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley had lost his beloved first son, Noel, at the age of four, and Kingsley (the reverend Charles Kingsley) regretted that the celebrated agnostic (Huxley had even invented the term) could not look forward to a reunion with the boy in the hereafter. Despite his grief, Huxley responded with an unflinching declaration of his resolve to “serve Truth.”

Imagine for a moment that Kingsley's vision of the hereafter was correct. Would his promise of a future meeting have answered to what his friend so desperately wanted? I think not. No such reunion would have extended the threads death had broken. Huxley's life had been interwoven with that of the child—he had anticipated guiding the boy through his formative years, watching him mature into an adult, gradually fashioning a new, more equal, relationship with Noel, looking on as the young man created his own pattern for his life. Parents who have lost their children, lovers who mourn the beloved, people who miss a close friend want a continuation in the here and now, not a meeting under very different, dimly imaginable conditions in which two strangers, whose lives are no longer connected, confront one another. The hole in life's fabric demands immediate repair.

The religious challenger is likely to protest that the dismissal of the promised comfort rests on misunderstanding the character of the afterlife, on substituting a crude vision that undermines the real consolation. Yet mistaken as they may be about the glories of the hereafter, the bereaved are surely clear about the aching gap they feel in their lives. Whatever happens in the future, there is a loss in the mundane present. Moreover, refined religion, with its abstract, indescribable transcendent, cannot deliver reassurance. For Kingsley's hope, or anything similar, to respond in any fashion to the sorrows of the bereaved it must rest on substantive religious doctrines: the words Brahms set must be heard as importing the everyday implications of “Wiedersehen.” Although Christians often express disdain for the material comforts of the paradise the Qur'an holds out to Muslims, the Islamic vision has the merit of connecting with the desires of the faithful. When religion retreats to confessing that the transcendent is a mystery, only apprehensible through figurative suggestions, its advertised power to bring comfort in the wake of death dissolves. Huxley was right to suppose that what crumbs of comfort Kingsley offered depended on swallowing a fiction—on accepting dubious articles of specific doctrine, and thus forsaking his devotion to factual truth.

Is this too harsh? The modest version of refined religion takes faith in the transcendent to provide a basis for hope that important values can be realized. Were Kingsley to speak in this idiom, he might claim that the development of loving relationships (between, for example, parents and children) has a place among the important values, so that, without violating Huxley's admirable principles, refined faith could provide him with hope. But to respond in this way would be to slide across one of the boundaries the previous chapter aimed to draw. Realization of the value of parental love need by no means take the highly specific form of reunion in the hereafter—a secular realization would be an enduring tenderness for Noel, preserved in Huxley's memories of the boy. Without compromising itself, refined religion cannot provide any basis for hope that those we have lost will ultimately be found again.

Although the impotence of refined religion is clearer in the case of those who mourn, analogous issues arise in contemplating one's own death. First, whatever the qualities of the envisaged continuation, present losses remain: projects, some of them important, are left unfinished. If the compensation offered is a life in which suffering is behind us, in which there is an end to challenges and an end to struggle, the promise has a superficial appeal—but only until we reflect that our individual identities are founded in commitments, in goals we struggle to realize, that glorifying a form of existence in which all our strivings cease nullifies what we do and who we are. We may envisage a being psychologically continuous with ourselves, no longer invested in anything we have taken to be significant or central, but it is hard to regard that being as anyone we would want to become or to celebrate its existence as a splendid continuation of our own. Further, even this relatively abstract conception of the afterlife, characterized by the psychological continuation of persons in circumstances from which suffering and challenge have been removed, depends on a modestly literal reading of a phrase from Whittier, set in a famous hymn: in God's presence, “all our strivings cease.” Refined religion cannot assume so much, and its restrained conception of the transcendent offers no basis for supposing an afterlife in which any being remotely like any of us has a presence.

In the end, any additional comforts religion offers depend on ignoring the arguments of Chapter 1, and settling for substantive doctrines that are almost certainly false. Refined religion provides nothing superior to what secular humanism can offer. Yet a fall into unrefined religion fails to touch many aspects of what we feel in the face of death. Gibes about Darwin's uselessness at funerals misunderstand the human situation. Death should usually be an occasion for sorrow, often one for anguish, on any religious or any secular account—for whatever dubious comfort is promised for a conjectural future, the torn fabric of mundane life remains unrepaired. If Brahms's soprano uplifts her hearers for a moment, if she brings them consolation, that is because the music she sings is beautiful and its sensitivity to the words reminds us vividly of things that are rightly loved and valued within human life. The real challenges focus on meaning and finitude. The problem is not whether secularists can match the religious response to death, but whether they can make adequate sense of life.

The question of the good life is the oldest issue of Western philosophy, one that drew the privileged young men of the ancient world to the various philosophical schools. Their mentors instructed them in alternative techniques for living well: learn and practice virtue, be active in political life, cultivate friendships, pursue knowledge for its own sake, limit pleasures to those maintaining psychological equilibrium, and so forth. Contemporary judgment might expand the ancient catalogue, and undo the distortions imposed by conceiving the good life as possible only for a privileged elite. After the fall of Rome, however, the old philosophical question lapsed in the intellectual culture of the West, for it seemed to have received a definitive solution. The Christian churches declared that the valuable life is one directed toward God, centered on obedience to God's commandments, and rewarded by an eternal continuation. The finite span allotted to us on earth is only a prelude, its worth determined by whether it fits us for eternity.

The Enlightenment brought a detached appraisal of the religious solution, and revived interest in the ancient problem. Secular thinkers returned to considering how people might best spend the years between birth and death, endorsing the importance of many of the qualities highlighted in the classical tradition. Reacting against a prominent feature of the religious conception of the meaningful life, the outside imposition of meaning on the individual, some thinkers—Kant, Humboldt, and Mill notable among them—emphasized the importance of autonomy. Because any human life is the life of a particular person, it should express an individually chosen pattern. For a life to be meaningful, the person must have some conception of who she is and what aspirations are most important, and this conception must not be imposed from without. In Mill's classic formulation, the highest form of freedom is to “pursue one's own good in one's own way.”

So the ancient problem is reconfigured. Each meaningful life is distinguished by a theme, a conception of the self and a concomitant identification of the goals it is most important to pursue. That theme should be autonomously chosen by the person whose life it is. But we ought not overinterpret talk of “themes” and “autonomous choice.” Meaningful lives are not restricted to the privileged few, to an elite of the high-minded. Autonomous choice of life theme does not require a transformative event, an epiphany around sixteen, say, when a condition of detached freedom permits the review of a large range of options and identification with exactly one of them, in a commitment never to be amended or revoked. Someone's life theme may not be formulated explicitly, unless or until a questioner inquires what matters most to her. Her autonomy may consist in the presence of different possibilities, intermittently recognized as available, and in the absence of the everyday ways in which people are often coerced into assuming the tasks and roles that dominate their lives. Moreover the theme itself may evolve under the contingent conditions generated from previous pursuits: originally centered on nurturing her children, a mother bears an infant who needs a particular kind of help to grow to independence, and, through learning how to provide the necessary support, she comes to play a far broader role in assisting similar children.

Are there further constraints on life themes beyond the requirement that the choice of them be autonomous? The Enlightenment thinkers who returned to the ancient question believed there were, casting the classical emphasis on virtue as the demand that themes be ethically permissible. Mill limits his fundamental form of freedom: one person's choices and pursuits of his own good must not interfere with the counterpart choices and pursuits of others. The constraint should be accepted, but it is too weak. Many projects posing no threat to the life patterns and the lives of others would be insignificant and worthless. Imagine, for example, an asocial solitary, retreating to some remote place and passing his days in counting the blades of grass growing in the vicinity. Lives like that are wasted. So too, as I'll contend later, are others, all too common in the affluent world, in which people center their lives on the pursuit of wealth and material possessions, their self-conception summed up in a bumper sticker: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

Lives matter when they touch others. The problem of limited responsiveness was and remains the center of ethical practice, and individual lives gain meaning through their own contributions to solving that problem, through actions prompted by recognizing what other people want or need and attempting to provide the things required. Ethical values are social creations, worked out collectively to address a basic problem of the human situation (as well as to tackle further problems that arise in the history of partial solutions). The meanings of lives are individual creations, products of people's autonomous choices, but framed always by the core ethical ideal of other-directedness.

Is there then no place for the meaningful life founded on the development of special talent, of genius that recognizes itself and dedicates itself to self-expression? Indeed there is. For the demand of other-directedness is met if talent and expressed genius are to be worthy of the names. Keats's fears of death as truncating the expression of his genius already presupposed a connection between what he hoped to write and the lives of others, made concrete in the vision of “high pilèd books” as granaries to nourish his readers. If his writings had failed to move or illuminate others, or if he had been resolved that his verse should be confined to his “teeming brain,” his choice of theme could not have conferred meaning on his brief life.

Some lives are meaningful because their effects endure across many generations, perhaps in the form of words that continue to be read with profit or joy, perhaps in the guise of material objects or institutional structures, enriching the lives of many people who, when they occasionally think about them, are grateful for what they have inherited. The great touch the lives of millions or billions, of people remote and unknown to them—as Diotima once told Socrates, they have the best kinds of children. Yet, it is important to reject exceptionalism, the modern counterpart of ancient elitism. Ordinary lives attain meaning in the more local, but no less important, differences they make. Ambitious young Stephen Dedalus avows his resolve to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Joyce reintroduces him once his attempt to soar high has led him to share the fate of Icarus, his classical counterpart, setting him beside a different protagonist, Mr Leopold Bloom, advertising canvasser, whose ordinary life, for all its blotches and flaws, may yet attain worth and meaning.

Religious people might concede that the features I have focused on mark differences among human lives, while denying that they can confer meaning. Detached from any connection to the transcendent, these features, however richly present, are always insufficient. Secular lives may be better or worse—health is better than sickness, generous attempts to help others superior to inward-turning misanthropy—but the everyday qualities and virtues always fall short of genuine significance. Autonomy matters when, and only when, it expresses the free commitment to the transcendent; contributing to the lives of others is transformed when human beings are understood (metaphorically) as children of a common parent. Without filiations to something transcending human life, no amount of the qualities secularists prize could achieve real significance. No link to the transcendent, no meaning.

Fear of finitude runs through the writings of religious thinkers as sophisticated as William James and Paul Tillich. They regard the “problem of finitude” as dooming any nonreligious perspective. Similar anxieties sometimes infect secular pessimists too, leading them to infer from the bounded impact of any human existence to the absurdity of life. Pessimism is vividly encapsulated in James's haunting image of our predicament: we are like “people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape,” fully aware that the ice is slowly melting and that the day on which they will vanish without trace is drawing ever closer. Religion is the answer to their—to our—cry for help.

Nobody should deny that the human span, individual and collective, is finite. Nor is it controversial that reflection on this fact can prove disconcerting. The issue is whether that undermines the meaning and value of any human life, even lives that, by secular lights, go well.

Why should impermanence cancel meaning? We can counter James's image with a different story. In Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, experiences two deaths in close proximity. In Buchel, Leverkühn's childhood home, his father dies. The composer has taken up residence in a different region of Germany, on another farm with an eerie resemblance to the surroundings of his early years. Max Schweigestill, the owner of that farm and the counterpart of his biological father, dies at about the same time as the elder Leverkühn. Adrian's health is not robust enough for him to make the long journey back to Buchel, but he does attend the ceremony for Schweigestill. Returning from the funeral, he is greeted by the distinctive smell of the old man's pipe.

“That endures,” said Adrian. “Quite a while, perhaps as long as the house stands. It lingers on in Buchel too. The period of our lingering afterwards, perhaps a little shorter or a little longer, that is what is called immortality.”

The ordinary unpretentious endurance of Max Schweigestill is partly captured in the aroma, impregnated in the woodwork and the walls of the house in which he has passed his entire life.

Eventually, of course, the odor will dissipate, the farm will be tended and maintained by people who know Max Schweigestill only as a figure in faded photographs, the walls and fences he built will decay and be replaced, the fields he plowed and planted will be newly configured and put to different uses. For a while, though, he will be vivid in the memories of those who knew him, who were sustained by his labors and comforted by his presence. The fabric of their lives, initially left ragged by his death, will be rewoven in ways that preserve and cherish the recollections. His commitment to maintain and improve the farm his father left him, and to pass it on to his own son, will be felt in the early years after his death. So much, Mann invites us to think, perhaps stretching the concept too far, suffices for a kind of immortality. Whether or not we acquiesce in his choice of words, this “lingering” is enough to confer meaning on an ordinary life.

Would there be some qualitative difference if the impact of Schweigestill's life were considerably extended, if his achievements were as long-lived as those of Keats, or even, implausibly, if his agricultural accomplishments were recalled across the millennia as we celebrate the Homeric epics? Would the significance of his life be transformed if we imagined the earth and the human species and the farm and the memories of Max Schweigestill to last forever? I think not. What matters is the fact that this life has a continuing connection to a world that endures beyond it. Like a stone cast into a pool, it leaves a series of ripples behind, sometimes more, sometimes less, and it doesn't matter that the ripples eventually fade away.

Conceiving meaning in this way allows a more complete answer to the problems posed by death. Corresponding to the anguish of premature death is the consolation of the fulfilled life. The truly lucky are those who can come to see that the projects singled out in their life themes have been largely finished—not completely, of course, for there are always further endeavors, always loose ends. While they may take their current strivings seriously, and hope for the joys brought when those strivings are successful, reflection may convince them that they have done enough, that if life ended now it would not disrupt or subvert their most fundamental aspirations. A New Testament story captures the attitude beautifully. When the baby Jesus is brought to the Temple to be circumcised, he is seen and held by the aged Simeon, prompting the declaration Anglican choirs sing as the Nunc Dimittis: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, For mine eyes have seen thy salvation....” Simeon's reaction can be liberated from the specifically divine project he takes to have been realized; it can be felt by anyone who recognizes that enough has been done to elaborate his life theme. Purely mundane life might bring a point where “all our strivings cease,” where the gains in bringing further projects to successful conclusion add less and less to what has already been accomplished. Drawing inspiration from a different text, we can recognize the fortunate possibility of accepting serenely the ending of one's revels—there can be calm and comfort in supposing that a human life, a “little life,” is “rounded with a sleep.” Especially if Prospero's lines are read with the emphasis on “rounded,” they point to fulfillment, to a conclusion in which what was sought has been found, what was striven for achieved. So, like Simeon, Prospero (and perhaps his creator as well) can show us how finitude can be embraced.

Thoughts of an indefinitely extending future promise only repetitions whose significance fades to nothingness—even a long finite continuation would wither into triviality. As I suggested earlier, human finitude is expressed in the fact that we lack the capacity for playing infinite variations on the narrative of our lives. If it were protracted, the fulfilled human life would eventually have to strike out in some new direction, pursuing a novel theme. Extended, the life would tack on to its original coherence some different venture, one that might, with luck, be equally “rounded.” Occasionally, actual human lives do seem to consist of two or three stylistically different acts, each of which resolves itself in successful concord. Life themes can develop and the attainment of new goals can follow achievement of the older ones. Yet lives of this varied sort are neither more nor less meaningful than those that pursue a single course, that complete one satisfying narrative arc. Why then should it be supposed that a finite sequence of different fulfilled lives would be superior to a single one, that if Simeon could go on to a second career as Prospero and a third as Shakespeare, that would constitute an improvement? Beyond the finite sequence lies only the exhaustion of potential choices, and eventually the weary staleness of repetition, the plaints of Tithonus and of Elina Makropulos. The fortunate can be prepared for an exit, a well-timed departure. They are aware of the tedium of any form of immortality beyond that Mann's Leverkühn assigned to Schweigestill.

Those left behind cannot feel the same equanimity. How could they? They have lost a person whom they still long to see and touch and hear. Yet, provided they have time to renew and refashion their own life patterns, their awareness of the fulfilled life enables them to integrate the memories of the dead into their continuing relationships and endeavors. Eventually other people will occupy the spaces originally left achingly blank. Nor will the new loves constitute a betrayal, for they will be recognized as shaped by memories of those once mourned, the dead, no longer recalled with such keen anguish but remembered with something akin to reverence.

Demanding that genuinely meaningful lives should “transcend finitude” is a common trope—but, for all that, a prejudice. What stands behind the thought that nothing we do makes a significant impact unless its effects are permanent? Not the force of some yearning that naturally and inevitably wells up when the prospect of eternal propagation of effects comes into view—for, insofar as that future can be envisaged, it has no real connection with what people aspire to be and to achieve, and consequently no particular attraction. Perhaps, then, the source of insistence on overcoming finitude is an argument. My life could obtain meaning from its effect on other lives only if those other lives themselves were meaningful. Supposing meaning to accrue from mattering to others begins a regress: the other lives would obtain their meaning from their impact on yet further lives, whose meaningfulness would depend on their effects on yet more remote people, and so on and on. Because the sequence cannot proceed indefinitely—human life will eventually cease and all James's ice-dwellers will be drowned—there must be some last member of the chain. Since this person can have no impact on some subsequent meaningful life, her life is deprived of meaning. Lack of meaning now seeps backward through the entire sequence: because those in the (n + 1)st place do not enjoy meaningful lives, the people at the nth stage do not have effects on meaningful lives, and hence their lives are devoid of meaning.

Stating the argument explicitly makes it evident how to resist it. The picture of something acquiring meaning through relationship to something else that already has meaning is doomed from the start, especially if the somethings are qualitatively akin. But we can reject that picture in favor of taking meaning to lie in the relationship itself. One life may be meaningful through its attempts to affect the lives of others, efforts that contribute to the possibility of the lives affected developing meaningfully, even though contingent factors subvert that development. Schweigestill's life would remain meaningful even if the fortunes of family and farm gradually declined across the subsequent generations, even if the property were eventually sold and the descendants scattered in a very different society. Nothing human endures forever, but lives centered on trying to extend the existence of something people treasure are not automatically deprived of meaning by the fact of impermanence.

Refined religion sets against this image of meaningful lives with local, short-lived effects an ostensibly grander perspective. Independent of human aspirations there is some eternal goal, and the meaning of individual lives stems from their acquiescence in the goal and the—necessarily infinitesimal—contributions people make to it. Transcending finitude is purchased at the cost of autonomy. Mill's “fundamental freedom,” the choice of one's own good, is subordinated to a cosmic enterprise beyond human understanding; our autonomy is reduced to acceptance of a remote venture in which we are to play bit parts, without any clear consciousness of how our doings contribute. We are minute cogs in a vast machine whose point exceeds our comprehension. How our condition of alienated labor confers meaning on what we do must remain a mystery. Worse still, the ordinary things that matter to people, the stuff of meaningful lives, do not receive their value from any human concerns: relations to the lives of others are not significant because extending and expanding responsiveness is at the heart of ethical life. Rather acts of caring, nurturing, sustaining, and protecting achieve their special status from the terms of the cosmic enterprise. The yearning to transcend human finitude ends by restricting autonomy and estranging what is most centrally human.

Meaningful lives do require a connection to something larger, but not to anything eternal or cosmic. Humanism affirms both the potential meaningfulness of our deeds and the finite character of their impact, endorsing the “enduring,” the “local immortality,” recalled by Mann's protagonist. In this sense, humanism can only be secular.

Once clearly in view, the intellectual problems posed for secular humanism by mortality and meaning can be resolved. Practical difficulties, however, remain.

Many, probably most, human lives do not go well. Among the contemporary global population, millions, if not billions, struggle to gather the necessities that enable them, and their children, to continue from day to day. For many more, secularist praise of autonomous choice of “one's own good” could only be heard as a tasteless joke. Statistics indicate that religious adherence and religious fervor flourish among the people most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. That should be no surprise, for religious doctrine and religious community can provide hope that the reversals of the present fragile existence will somehow be compensated. They can also create opportunities for mutual support and consolation. Even if, under scrutiny, the promises of future rewards turn out to be hollow, the benefits brought by religious community may be real.

Because substantive religious doctrines often retain the prejudices inscribed by the supposed ethical authorities of the tradition—for example in their views of the roles appropriate for women—they can intensify the confinement of autonomy and erect further barriers to the realization of a meaningful life. Nevertheless, religious communities have often played an important role in bringing the powerless together, identifying shared sources of oppression, and combining voices so a chorus of complaint can at last be heard. Famously, the civil rights movement of the 1960s was grounded in the churches, and led by eloquent preachers who could galvanize their congregations. Less evident to many, although not to those who have first-hand experience of contemporary urban poverty, is the social role religious communities continue to provide, the resources they offer to families struggling to create better opportunities for their children in environments where secular institutions are woefully inadequate and where the temptation to acquiesce in hopelessness is omnipresent.

It does not have to be that way. Secular society might respond to the problems of economic and social justice, honoring the egalitarian ideal of the provision for all of the preconditions for a meaningful life. Even the most striking attempts to nurture all nascent lives, undertaken in Scandinavian societies, have fallen short of the ideal. The lapses of other affluent countries, in northern Europe, or in Japan, in Canada, Australia, Britain, and the United States are successively more glaring, signifying at the latter end of the continuum a willingness to treat many lives as effectively disposable. On a global scale, however, the predicament is even worse. Central to the normative stance of Chapter 2 is a commitment to socioeconomic justice across the human species. Beyond declaring abstract rights we should demand that the world's resources be shared so as to allow to all people (or, more exactly, to all people except those whose biological limitations cannot be overcome) the opportunity for a meaningful life.

However thorough the dedication to egalitarian ideals, there will always be lives that do not go well—lives disrupted by contingencies beyond prediction or control. There will be no utopia in which all people enjoy the good life to which the aristocrats of the ancient world aspired. But we can try to decrease the frequency at which human lives fall short—indeed to decrease it dramatically. When lives go awry, there should be efforts at rescue, support for the person's search for a new direction. If the efforts fail, that is a genuine loss, not to be glossed over with false promises of some future compensation. This is the only life the person has. We should be committed to salvage, not to salvation.

Literalist religions often do better than secular institutions in responding to the conditions dooming many people to lives marked by insecurity and confined to narrow horizons. But their efforts are compromised by supposing present failures to be redeemed in the hereafter, by affirming doctrines tainted by traditional prejudices, and by commitments to exclusivity. The eternal reward awaiting those who have suffered is wonderful enough to justify extreme measures for ensuring that all meet the conditions required to receive it. Doctrines that seduce people from the true path must be resisted; those who uphold the deviant doctrines must be fought with every available weapon. The soil that nourishes consolation for the downtrodden also supports the growth of a noxious weed—violent religious strife—that intensifies the material and social miseries.

Religions that refine the pertinent elements, abandoning any literal commitment to immortality and the traditional divisive prejudices, do not offer the concrete promise, but they often do far better in reshaping the lives of the unfortunate. Secular humanists can reasonably see refined believers as allies in an ethically fundamental enterprise, co-campaigners whose currently greater successes make them worthy targets of emulation.

Thinking of religions and religious communities as only directed toward the plight of the needy and oppressed misses an important dimension of the work they do. Connection to others is central to the meaningful life, but so far I have emphasized the simplest form of connection, pairwise relations between individuals. Most meaningful lives exhibit a more complex structure of affiliations. Engaging with many others in joint projects and sharing purposes is central to their life themes—it is important to participate in common endeavors, that the endeavors proceed through mutual responsiveness, and that the people themselves contribute to the eventual outcome. Today most of us belong to societies in which the web of associations is not simply given, as it once was for our Paleolithic ancestors or for the closely knit villages of the pre-industrial world. Contemporary people must seek community. Religious institutions are often the only places in which they can find it. At their best, their rituals foster responsiveness to others, the public avowal of prayer becoming a stimulus to joint ethical deliberation, rather than one side of a dialogue with some transcendent figure.

Communities of believers connect their members, providing a sense of belonging and of being together with others, of sharing problems and of working cooperatively to find solutions. Religious involvement does not merely provide occasions for talk about important issues—although that itself is valuable—but also for joint action. Sharing a religion, whether literalist or refined, can foster agreement on goals, not necessarily focused on the liberation or socioeconomic progress of the faithful. Engaging in common pursuit of a good endorsed by fellow strivers, and doing one's part in the shared effort, can be the source of the deepest satisfactions.

Religion does not have to be the main vehicle of community life. Thoroughly secular societies can contain structures enabling people to enter into sympathetic relations with one another, to achieve solidarity with their fellows, to exchange views about topics that concern them most, to work together to identify goals that matter to all members of the group and to pursue those ends through cooperative efforts. Authors of contemporary manifestos calling for freedom from religious delusions typically belong to professional communities with the important dimensions—taking that for granted, the lack of similar secular structures for others disappears from their view. Focused on adding to the stock of factual truths, and finding an entirely reasonable satisfaction in sharing that goal with their closest colleagues, they want the delight of apprehending factual truth to be shared by all—just as some devout people hope that all will enjoy the bliss of eternal life—and so they see purifying progress, the replacement of factually false religious doctrines with clear-headed denial, as a major advance for humanity. In many parts of the affluent world, however, particularly in the United States, there are no serious opportunities, outside the synagogues and churches and mosques, for fellowship with all the dimensions religious communities can provide. Perhaps among small groups of friends there are occasional moments at which serious discussion becomes possible, when aspirations can be revealed or doubts confessed, when what might be worth doing can be patiently explored. In most secular settings, however, such explorations would be an embarrassment. So the necessary words go unspoken, the spread of sympathy into others' lives is checked, goals are decided and pursued largely alone. The actual secular world thus forfeits the most significant aspects of community life. Purifying progress leaves many erstwhile believers exposed to the chill of a lonely and inhospitable world.

By contrast, some people who have little time for any substantive religious doctrine view the persistence of religion in the modern world as a welcome corrective to the dominance of crass materialism. Their diagnosis rests on an important insight, despite the fact that it is usually presented in terms of preserving the “spiritual” aspects of our nature. The core perception recognizes the conditions of modern life as distorting the autonomous choice and pursuit of “one's own good,” diverting people from more meaningful forms of existence they might have pursued and enjoyed. Satisfaction of the material needs of all, the preconditions of affording opportunities for meaningful lives, generates the quest for efficient production and the unsparing competition of the workplace. The secondary goal trickles down to individual lives, now seen as competing for material goods and for the marks of status. Atomistic individuals attempt to play Homo economicus, not a role for which human beings are particularly well suited. Family life provides some refuge for meaningful projects—although these too may be misshapen by the assumption that the young must above all be equipped for the competition to come (the rat race begins in the cradle, or even earlier). Beyond the family projects lie only the goals of accumulating goods and prestige and of enjoying evanescent pleasures—goals the ancients already knew to be inadequate aspirations for a flourishing life. Religion is rightly seen as a corrective to the materialism of the age, not because it draws attention to any real “spiritual realm,” nor because of the correctness of any specific religious doctrine (no matter how minimal), nor because religion is the source of values, but because of the importance to us of a multidimensional form of community life. For large swaths of contemporary affluent societies, that form of shared ethical life is in short supply, and religious communities are the principal places in which it can be found.

Secular humanism faces no intellectual problems in accounting for the potential meaningfulness of human existence. The real difficulties are practical, grounded in the need to overcome aspects of the contemporary world that unnecessarily limit the lives of many people. Resolving them is, in part, a matter of rethinking economic life and institutions, returning to a conception of political economy that frames its standards in the fundamental currency of values, not in the secondary goals of monetary profit. A central task is to devise secular substitutes for the multidimensional community life religions have been able to bestow on their followers. Attempts to solve that problem may seek inspiration in the successful strategies of the world's religions—as the most prominent ventures in fashioning secular community, Unitarian churches, Societies for Ethical Culture, and Jewish Community Centers have all done. If the initial results seem pallid imitations of the religious prototypes, lacking the powerful rites with their resonant words and uplifting music, it is worth recalling that the religions have had centuries of practice. Humanists, as well as critics who think a secular perspective cannot suffice, should remember that experiments require time to make them work, and should pursue the important practical goal with perseverance and patience.