To be human is to ask big existential questions.
They start when you learn early that things like your goldfish and budgerigar – even your dog – die. Then comes that chilling moment when your parents respond that, yes, people do too.
It takes a few years for that to fully sink in and gives rise to another thorny question that adds to emergent teen angst: what happens next?
Those turning 13 around 1990 were either fortunate or unfortunate, depending on disposition, to benefit from Kerry Packer’s personal experience that he’d “been to the other side, and let me tell you, son, there’s fucking nothing there’’.
As teenagers of an earlier generation we had no such wise, brutal wisdom upon which to draw. We seemed to sail through early, mid-and late teendom blissfully unpreoccupied with what next, focused instead on the now: What is the meaning of life?
Some found – or reverted to – God.
Others went surfing. To Thailand. Or mushrooming.
Others simply went to the Valhalla cinema, blood coursing with THC, hoping the answer might be in the Friday evening double late screening of Koyaanisqatsi and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those who stayed awake emerged little wiser.
We moved on. Grew. Let it go, mostly, for a few decades albeit while flirting with the possibilities that clues might also be discovered in The Big Lebowski (Abide) or in the pages of Moby Dick (where the answer is simply the journey to the edge).
But age, the travails of the world, and most of all the chill of mortality and greater preoccupations with legacy, have a way of resharpening focus on that question in middle- and late middle-age.
Which is why it’s so heartening to learn that an organisation named the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is having a conference in London later this year to consider, among other things – according to its front man, the charismatic controversialist and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson – “issues metaphysical, cultural and practical’’ and “pertaining to the meaning of life’’.
That’s some deep contemplative action right there. But who gets to play?
Besides Peterson (courter of controversy on everything from trans-rights and gender roles to his advocacy of the all-beef Lion Diet and climate change science scepticism) a few eminent Australians are apparently going along to spitball the meaning of it all with other deep-thinking and -talking types including Bjørn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger.
Two former Australian prime ministers in John Howard and Tony Abbott, and former deputy prime minister John Anderson, are invited. So, too, former Liberal National party senator Amanda Stoker, South Australian Liberal senator Alex Antic, and shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie.
None of these people have, let’s say, reputations for thinking too far outside of the deeply conservative box on a range of social issues (name pretty much any one). Fine. But it’s their scepticism – or in Howard’s case “agnosticism’’ – on climate change that seems most starkly at odds with a genuine quest to parse the meaning of life.
As Guardian Australia’s Graham Readfearn and Paul Karp pointed out here, the alliance’s vision document asks how it might “effectively conceptualise, value and reward the sacrificial, long-term, peaceful, child-centred intimate relationships upon which psychological integrity and social stability most fundamentally depend’’.
Peterson has said a model for this was “something approximating the nuclear family” with “long-term, committed, stable heterosexual marriages sanctified by the community”.
All of which sounds like a pretty closed door kind of place where the invited Australian thinkers might well, in the infamous words of Howard as PM, feel comfortable and relaxed. But the IRL world with all its human complexity doesn’t quite roll so neatly.
It’s doubly interesting how ARC’s (Arc – get it, as in saving the human species? ... or perhaps not) vision doesn’t believe humanity is “necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster’’ despite evidence that we are already well and truly down that road.
It’s a handy trait – the ability to choose belief, religion’s bedrock, ahead of fact, which is that of science, when considering the small question of humanity’s future.
What if the meaning of life happens to be: securing the future of subsequent generations by saving the planet? Just asking.
No need to go all the way to London to ponder – or to determinedly not contemplate – that.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
