Everyone needs direction in his or her life, and only a moral framework can provide this. To step outside this damages or destroys personal integrity. Without the moral framework, one cannot make judgments about oneself or one’s environment, as there is nothing to compare them to.

Richard Bradford, director of the Swiss branch of the L’Abri Fellowship, spoke at the annual L’Abri Conference in Rochester Minnesota on February 15 concerning the continuing crisis of meaning in the contemporary West. He began with a quote from Nieztsche: “He whose life has a why, can bear almost any how.”

Bradford referred to a Harvard study of young adults, ages 18-25. It showed that 36% of the respondents suffered from anxiety, while 29% suffered from depression. The most frequently cited cause for distress was “a lack of meaning and purpose.” The madhouse which is public consciousness today was cited as an additional reason, in such factors as “social media, rising tension in the world, political polarization, increased pressure on young people,” etc. But the “lack of meaning” was held by the report’s authors to be the reason that “a large proportion of the population” is “struggling.” Such a cause is more difficult to address than the other causes specific to our time.

Bradford quoted another source from the National Library of Medicine which said that “experiencing meaningfulness is based on a validation of one’s life as coherent, significant, directed, and belonging. A positive appraisal of these components occurs mostly unconsciously, while a perceived lack meaning in life occurs consciously, and is known as a crisis of meaning.” Bradford agreed that meaning in one’s life is noted mainly by its absence. “Depression, suicidal thoughts … heightened anxiety, negative affect, and pessimism … and decreased resilience, motivation, and life satisfaction, hope, self-regulation, and self-efficacy.” This all “results in questioning life’s purpose.”

While a lack of meaning is a problem, there also seems to be an unlimited number of meanings on offer in the contemporary world. This may be contributing to the lack of meaning. However, Bradford looked at some specific reasons for the lack of meaning. God and creation were the framework for meaning in the pre-modern world, but from the Enlightenment on, things began to change.

The Enlightenment and Disenchantment

Bradford referred to a book by the French Catholic author Chantel Delsol, Icarus Fallen: the Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World. The story of Icarus comes from Greco-Roman mythology and refers to a man who wanted to free himself from the labyrinth of Crete, and so he flew on a pair of wax wings toward the sun, which he had been warned not to do. The wings melted, and he crashed to earth. In Delsol’s book, Icarus survives the crash, although very badly injured. He then had the problem of returning to ordinary life after having failed to reach the sun. People today, she said, are “in a similar situation.” The attempt at “radically transforming ourselves and society” has failed, and we must return to ordinary life. The radical transformation was promised by modernity, with “war, disease, need, and perhaps even death” eliminated. But the horrors of the twentieth century (and indeed, continuing into the twenty-first) have disabused people of this prospect. The events humanity has experienced, Delsol maintains, make it analogous to a man with whom someone has “thrown him into the game without giving him the rules. When he asked for instructions, he is invariably told that they have been lost. He is amazed that everyone is content to live in a world without meaning, and without identity, where no one seems to know why he lives or why he dies.” Bradford said that she maintains that “the major discovery of modernity consists in affirming that man invented transcendence, morality, and politics.” This is “the disenchantment of the universe.”

He referred next to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who spoke of “horizons of significance.” These are “objective sources of meaning and morality that exist independent of one’s own will or the satisfaction of personal desires.” Taylor said that “we’re born into a cosmos which requires individuals to search out and understand their position in a broader order.” Taylor believes that “moral frameworks … are inescapable.” Even the claim to authenticity, if it has no external framework, “is left utterly unsupported.” Everyone needs direction in his or her life, and only a moral framework can provide this. To step outside this damages or destroys personal integrity. Without the moral framework, one cannot make judgments about oneself or one’s environment, as there is nothing to compare them to.

The Conflict Between Meaning and Freedom

To be absolute and thus reliable, the standards one uses must have a “transcendent source,” which modernity denies. Nevertheless, people are not willing to be bound by standards outside themselves. In particular, they do not want “to be structured by religious meaning.” The Enlightenment ideals of “reason, freedom, equality, and progress” are held to give value to life.  But today, Bradford said, all values are “up for grabs,” and “open to interpretation.” Institutions (church, state, universities, etc.)  are held to have failed people. Delsol maintains, however, “that to have meaning is to stand for something other than one’s self.” Bradford added that if our values are simply something we prefer, then “they lose any moral or existential weight.” Meaning must refer to “something outside ourselves.”

The search for meaning in the contemporary world is bounded by the need for an external basis for morality, Bradford maintained, but also by the insistence not to be bound by external constraints. Any public agreement on an external truth results in that truth being imposed on people who disagree, and this has “always has ended badly.” Truth, after all, is held to be simply created by people. Yet we must have standards for life. We need morality, but people have no agreement on “what it is based on.” Delsol holds that leaves people with two choices: 1) return to traditional religion, institutions, and beliefs, or 2) rethink anthropology. We then attempt to understand good and evil apart from the old institutions. Bradford does not believe that these are the only two choices. He importantly does not think that the true church is identical with the visible church. He also asked if we can build a new anthropology “without reference to God.” Morality simply cannot be maintained without reference to a transcendent reality.

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