Finding Meaning Saves Lives

This morning i learned of an attack that was made — in a national newspaper — against a former classmate of mine. Robert Fulford of the National Post (unofficial soapbox for Canadian cynicism) wrote a piece called “Lex Luthor hearts Superman: Your tax dollars at work” in which he basically accuses Jes Battis of stealing money — by being awarded a research grant for his work on homoeroticism in popular culture. Jes responded to the attack with more humour and patience than i could have mustered.

Many issues were brought up in the exchange, but for me i was reminded of the article i read some time ago in the Georgia Straight called “Finding meaning in life key to curing addiction”.

Lately i’ve been reading Victor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning and when i read Jes Battis’ response to the attack against him i remembered one of Frankl’s lines about life in Auschwitz. Speaking of the psychological torments of the camps and his fellow prisoners’ inevitable contemplation of suicide, he says: “...once lost, the will to live seldom returned.”

New pathways to meaning:

Counter-hegemonic readings of (supremely accessible) iconic cultural texts — such as Battis’ queer reading of young Superman and Lex Luthor — can help to provide an ontological foundation for discursive spaces in which to safely begin the collaborative work of psychological healing (from homophobia, for example).

This is not intellectual wanking. This is completely practical, vital, real-world stuff.

I see this in action every day in my work as a youth counsellor. In fact, one of the strengths i feel i bring to my work is the willingness and ability to help young people see and appreciate the philosophical profundity of the self-healing work they’re doing — and to assure them that there are intellectual and cultural communities in which they would be welcome. Often i have to do a lot of explaining (decoding jargon, paraphrasing, etc.) but the experience has been mutually rewarding and has even occasionally led to therapeutic breakthroughs for the young people i work with.

Incidentally, reading about Jes this morning reminded me of my pivotal experience in early adolescence (about which i have written, in an article published in Adbusters a few years ago), of discovering the historical tradition of anarchism — knowing that generations of people had built a movement based on ideas similar to my own profoundly changed my perception of reality, at a crucial time when despair and alienation were a serious threat to my well-being. As the protagonist of the film Year of the Dog put it (upon discovering veganism) “It’s nice to have a word that describes you. I’ve never had that before.”

The sense of belonging, the meaning of community, obviously saves lives — it is a salient level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And Jes Battis’ significant contributions to the creation of community should be applauded. The fact that so many of the National Post’s readers so eagerly attack him makes me very sad because it strikes me as an example of what people who have no sense of connection to the whole of humanity act like, in the agony of alienation. Again, i think of Victor Frankl.

So many of the comments seem to reverberate with a despairing, fanatical economic adversarialism — as if giving someone money always means stealing it from someone else. I see this reductio ad absurdum as the tragic kernel of prevailing statist (socialist and capitalist) economic theories... A sketch of an anarcho-synergistic economic model is something i might dare to attempt some day. (I’ve heard Michael Albert has interesting ideas along these lines).

Ultimately, i was driven to write this post because both the NP article and many of the comments posted below Battis’ response to it ignorantly and arrogantly dismiss his work and attack him personally — and i felt attacked alongside him. So i wanted to raise my blog’s voice in protest, to assert that i am part of the intellectual community against which these attacks are being made, and to emphasize that we are a community which, beyond being legitimate, actually makes important contributions to society. Even saves lives, and helps to make them worth living.