WHAT MAKES A LIFE MEANINGFUL

A paean to non-market values

Cornel West was my graduate school mentor. It was my good fortune. He left a deep impression not merely as a brilliant lecturer, but as a supportive teacher who imparted wisdom beyond the classroom.

I first met Cornel West when I took a course he taught at Union Theological Seminary as he was starting his career at 24. It was clear to me then that he would one day make his mark as an important public figure. At the time I was working toward my doctorate in religion at Columbia which required two master's degrees along the way. The second necessitated completing a thesis and an oral exam with two professors of my choosing. I selected Cornel to read and review my essay on aspects of Sigmund Freud's philosophy of religion. I was pleased that he assessed it favorably. He also extended a complement noting that he had learned from my thesis aspects of Freud's thought that were new to him.

In 1990, Teaneck, New Jersey, where I served as leader of the Ethical Culture Society, underwent a crisis. A white police officer had shot in the back and killed an African-American teenager as he was fleeing. It set off a riot in a suburb that prided itself on its progressivism, inclusiveness and its history of voluntarily integrating its schools.

I was active then on the local clergy council and we worked hard to try to stitch the town together. Among my efforts was to invite Cornel West to address a public meeting on the larger issues of race that were made so painfully manifest by the crisis we were in. It was my assumption that no one could speak across racial lines more effectively than Cornel West, and he certainly did not disappoint. The auditorium that held 400 was filled, racially mixed, and Cornel West was electric.

Prior to the meeting we met to chat in my office. In that conversation he happened to refer to me as “an organic intellectual,” probably implying that my intellectual orientation grew out of work with the Ethical Culture community and my activism in the community at large. It was an elegant descriptor of how I tried to live my life, and I have long valued that Cornel thought of me that way.

But there were other insights he left me with as well. I recall him informing his students that “one should never give an undialectical ‘yes’ or an undialectical ‘no’ to any thinker.” In other words, rather than reject outright the thoughts one disagrees with, it is far better to engage in dialogue with the possibility that one will come away broadening one's own thought in the process. We can gain useful knowledge from those whom we are initially impelled to ideologically dismiss. I have taken that insight to heart and have striven to mold my own intellectual style around it.

Cornel West intellectually ranges very broadly, reflecting both his extraordinary erudition as well as the flexibility and creativity of his thought. In his social critique he draws from Marxism, pragmatism, and postmodernism, as well as his commitments as a non-dogmatic Christian. He is as comfortable sermonizing in a Black church as he is in dialogue with Italian communists. It all ultimately informs his progressive commitments as an anti-racist theoretician and activist.

But I resonate most personally with the moral content that animates West's life work. An additional line of thought that has inspired me is his commitment to what he frames as “non-market values.” It is a commitment that becomes urgent within the pervasive power of a society that molds and impoverishes lives with the blandishments of materialism and consumerism.

In a compilation of essays published in 1993 under the title Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times, West wrote the following:

“As I travel across this nation I sense a deep hunger and thirst for a more compassionate country- one in which public service supersedes private opulence, institutional fairness triumphs over individual greed and the common good prevails over group xenophobia.

(There is) an undeniable cultural decay, which is in fact unprecedented in American history. This is what frightens me more than anything else. By unprecedented social decay I mean the social breakdown of the nurturing system for children. The inability to transmit meaning, value, purpose, dignity, decency to children.”

In nurturing children with non-market values, he becomes specific:

“I will be talking about that love, care, service to others, sacrifice, risk, community, struggles for justice, solidarity, all of these are non-market values against a market culture.”

I would add to this list, kindness, compassion, empathy and forgiveness.

All this is music to my ears. I do believe, along with Cornel West, that our society has long been locked in a battle for its moral soul and in a conflict between those values that issue from the market and those that stand opposed.

Perhaps it is an index of the limited circles I keep that I remain struck by those for whom monetizing human experience is a prevailing preoccupation.

In 1995, I fulfilled a childhood dream and rode my bicycle across the United States. After my return an acquaintance, who worked in a large corporation, suggested that I use my experience to give motivational talks before corporate audiences. She saw it as a source of potential revenue. To be frank, the thought never dawned on me. The rewards of my summer adventure rested in the experience itself. Seeing it as an opportunity to make money involved a values system and mindset totally foreign to my own. I used to jokingly say to my wife that I specialize in doing things I don't get paid for. I am not claiming any personal virtue. Rather I choose to make a larger point.

It brings me to the heart of my insight. It relates to how materialism, consumption, and the acquisition of wealth so dominate American aspirations. Our capitalist system and its commercialism continuously dangle before us desiderata that emanate from the frenzied creation of new needs.

What's lost in this is an underlying and often unspoken truth. And that truth is that what most often gives meaning to peoples' lives is expressive of wants, aspirations, and dreams that partake of the moral universe which Cornel West defines as “non-market values.”

In this way, the human condition is wonderfully diverse. Some people cannot be happy unless they are spending their time as artists or gardeners. Some cannot find satisfaction unless they are risking their lives scaling mountains or becoming prima ballerinas. Others will spend six hours a day in the gym pumping iron to turn their bodies into living sculptures. Many will devote themselves foremost to being loving and nurturing parents as their primary aspiration. And, as Cornel West suggests, many will find life's meaning in service to others and in the struggle for social justice.

I have often thought that if one wishes to find what gives meaning to life, do not look primarily at what people get paid for. Rather, look to their hobbies: what they do when they are free of the demands of earning a living within structured environments.

Life is ultimately lived as a series of experiences. The experiences that yield satisfaction can come in two forms. One is the gratification of the moment of triumph, so to speak. It comes from having trained hard to win the race, and to feel the joy of victory and the accolades that follow. Or, the satisfying experience emerges from the process itself. As one runs the race, gratification comes from the more subtle experience of expending one's energies, of unfolding one's potentials or expanding one's abilities in the very process of exertion. But in either case, the meaning emanates not from accumulation or ownership. It comes ultimately from life lived. It comes from one's activity and achievements in either fulfillment of one's values and aspirations or in the actual process of moving toward them, or both.

Given this interpretation of the human condition, money becomes merely a means to leverage experiences around which life's meaning is centered; it is not the end in itself. When we mistake the means for the end, we have gone astray.

There is a passage in Karl Marx's Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, quite lovely in fact, written when he was arguably in a humanistic stage long before his economic theorizing in Capital, wherein he critiques the corrupting power of money as an object of possession. Marx wrote:

“Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.

He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward.

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.”

The humanism of this insight is apparent. Its valorization of non-market values is telling and profound.

None of this is to neglect the critical economic disparities of our times. I am not drawing a crass conclusion that one's economic wherewithal is a matter of indifference. We have a moral duty to end poverty, which so degrades the capability of so many to enjoy life's experiences. And we need to find ways to undo the obscene wealth gap in American society that so threatens our democracy. I believe it much lies behind the resentment stoking our social and political divisions and a rancorous tribalism that is tearing us apart. The answer is greater egalitarianism and economic justice.

Yet in a world in which climate destruction looms as our overarching and most comprehensive menace, we have urgent cause to rethink our priorities as a society – and in our individual choices - as to where we search for life's meaning. Unless we can radically alter our cultural value system dedicated to incessant consumerism, we will render our planet unsustainable.

Systemically, the forces that drive the global economy will imperiously work against human interests. But on the individual level in making choices that unburden us from the shackles of relentless consumerism and material possession we may find to be liberating. It may bring into greater clarity where life's enduring meaning can be found.