Finding Meaning in Modernity: Two Books about Quest
by Cheryl Sadowski
Reviews of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment by Benjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey and God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn
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264pp., hardcover, $27.95 256pp., paperback, $32.99
April 06, 2021 May 18, 2021
ISBN 9780691211121 ISBN 9780691226460
How unexpectedly invigorating it was to read about restlessness nearly two years into the Covid pandemic. Rather than distract myself (paradox noted) through more popular methods like Netflix binging or online shopping, I preferred to lean in to my unease and discontent. Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment acted upon me like a tonic—a zesty cognitive booster during another wary December spent largely at home.
Published in April 2021, Why We Are Restless does not deal in antidotes for boredom or quarantine fatigue. Rather, it is an exceedingly elegant survey of four classical French moralistes (“observers of men”) whose philosophies and ideas about infinite restlessness still resonate today. “Each one of these authors possesses the uncanny capacity for spelling out … modern alternatives for thinking about happiness,” write Professors Benjamin and Jenna Storey. As the linchpin for their explorations, the Storeys look to “immanent contentment”—an Enlightenment-era ideal centered on human flourishing within the parameters of ordinary living.
Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville led anything but ordinary lives. The Storeys acknowledge the counter-intuitiveness of examining postmodern restlessness through the lens of these aristocratic men from France’s ancien regime—or in Tocqueville’s case, its tempestuous aftermath. But how can we expect new prescriptions for the soul without understanding the roots of our very Western quest for meaning?
There is a disturbing trend to suspect and discount classical, liberal thinking without recognizing the undeniably solid firmament it provides for expression, debate, and synthesis. The Storeys oppose this tendency by invoking philosophical anthropology—a reminder that ideals and ideas are products of their times—and that each philosopher articulated “thoughts that occur in every modern mind…but with a power few of us can hope to match.” From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the French moralists challenged more heroic ideals of happiness through affirmations of self-knowledge and ordinary living.
Immanent contentment behaves like a prism reflecting the light and shadow of its interpreter. Michel de Montaigne, who “never claims to be wise, heroic, or holy,” looks to self-knowledge for contentment, not theoretically but in an autobiographical sense, reframing high-minded Aristotelian virtues and setting aside airs for authenticity. His cultivated nonchalance aspires only to be grateful for good when it comes along, and to do without when need be. Believing providence and nature take no interest in personal fate, Montaigne delights in our cosmic banality. There is an almost Buddhist quality to the way he neutralizes feelings of want and lack through a life built around curiosity and conversation. He is the proverbial cat lying in the sun.
Of course one man’s idea of contentment is another’s idea of the void. Enter Blaise Pascal and his dissatisfaction with Montaigne’s interpretation. Pascal considers cultivated nonchalance a fleeting substitute for a more meaningful quest characterized by our unrealized but ever-present longing for divine connection. The sooner we realize our alienation from God, the sooner we can begin working to close the gap. The Storeys orient us to Pascal’s religious upbringing, the conflicts that defined his era, and the through-lines of his philosophical treatise, Pensées (“Thoughts”). Much delight in Why We Are Restless is found in the authors’ ability to contrast their subjects through metaphor: “Where Montaigne seeks to circumscribe the soul, Pascal seeks to crack it open.”
The sooner we realize our alienation from God, the sooner we can begin working to close the gap.
Arriving at Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I was ready for something between carefree libertine and religious woe. In combining naturalness with depth, Rousseau appeals to our Western inclination of customizing life philosophies to meet our particular tastes. With their gift for compact historical backgrounding, the authors take us on a Rousseauian journey, including his seminal work Émile, as the eighteenth-century philosopher leaves behind the transparent diversions of Paris for the transcendence of the French countryside, trading his identity as social citizen for radical solitaire. Rousseau is nothing if not honest about the vacillations and vicissitudes of his life. Whether he is living in aristocratic manors or in abject poverty, he’s “all in.” He is the friend you keep who is always changing but ever so much the same.
It’s upon this varied landscape that we finally encounter Alexis de Tocqueville, who simultaneously accepts the verity of Pascal’s soulful quest and Montaigne’s embrace of the common human condition. Tocqueville’s life looks back on aristocracy and forward toward democracy, so he presciently perceives the receding, ancient European order on one side of the divide and the rise of a new humanism on the other. The Storeys treatment of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is an exceptional overview for anyone who missed this foundational chapter of history or wishes to better understand America’s egalitarian aspirations against its uneven, cruel realities. Tocqueville himself is aware of the breadth of disparity. Yet it’s hard not to share his enthusiasm for the indefatigable striving, straightforward speech, and “cheerful busyness” of the early American democrat. What haunts his prescription for contentment is paradox: centering our lives around civic progress requires patience beyond a typical lifetime, and a staunch tolerance for political maelstrom and subversiveness.
Whether we situate our American brand of psychic craving in intellectual life, God, family, social diversion, public good, or industry (or some amalgam thereof), Why We Are Restless is a reminder that it’s the relationship we have with ourselves that ultimately determines how we spend our hours and days.
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Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine inhabits an entirely different mindset, though major subtexts between the two books made them a good choice to read in sequence. I’ve followed O’Gieblyn’s writing for some time: her discursive reflections on subtlety, the Midwest, artificial intelligence, and her journey away from religious Christian fundamentalism are modern examples of classic essayism, where the eye leads, but the “I” is never far removed. Her rigorous research, acuity, and personal focus are powerfully displayed in this most recent of her books, which takes the idea of immanent contentment to cosmic proportions.
O’Gieblyn writes about “technology and religion,” a Venn diagram as expansive as it sounds. Through the lens of metaphor—a narrative technique old as the Bible—she reports and reflects on the restless advancement of technology that not only shapes how we live, but how we think about human identity in the broadest sense. Believers, mystics, and humanists alike cannot help but become entangled in the possibilities and questions of “transhumanism”—the power of technology to transform the human race.
Readers will find plenty to marvel and shiver over. I was less disturbed by questions of free will in a world of predictive modeling, but chilled that super-intelligence is not only possible but seemingly desired by some members of the Silicon Valley elect. When we begin with the premise that consciousness is scientifically uncertain, that self-awareness arises out of material connections, then perhaps it becomes easier to cede our minds over to techno-utopian visions of AI, simulation, and parallel metaverses.
O’Gieblyn recognizes familiar metaphors from her Christian upbringing lurking within the lexicon of the scientific elite. Connections between technology and eschatology become clear: the cumulative revelation of knowledge, resurrecting the dead through mind uploading and digital avatars. Ideas about human transcendence that seemed implausible only decades ago are now embedded in the missions of Google, Apple, SpaceX, and Meta.
Believers, mystics, and humanists alike cannot help but become entangled in the possibilities and questions of “transhumanism”—the power of technology to transform the human race.
“As global networks have come to encompass more and more of our human relations, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to speak of ourselves … as living agents with beliefs, preferences, and opinions,” writes O’Gieblyn. We see this within the lexicon of marketing analytics, where online clicks, likes, and purchases reduce human beings to secondary versions of themselves, and data-ism begins to succeed humanism as a ruling ideology. “Whereas humanism commanded, ‘Listen to your feelings!’ data-ism now commands, ‘Listen to the algorithms! They know how you feel.’”
Throughout the book, O’Gieblyn’s journey of religious disillusionment and doubt provides meaningful lily pads of rest between quantum physics, algorithmic determinism, and information theory that whipsaws the mind between space and time. Just as the specter of “Singularity” looms—the place where human intelligence merges with the divine—it is vaporized, not by theologians or scientists whose views on rapture are too closely intertwined for comfort, but by a philosopher whose understanding of human ache is drawn from her lived experiences in an imperfect but beautiful world.
O’Gieblyn cites Hannah Arendt, whose recollections of the atom bomb during World War II should be enough to cool the decidedly male ambitions of the Silicon Valley set. For Arendt, the issue is less that we’re creating things in our own image and more that we insist on imbuing them with transcendent power. For Arendt, when we abdicate our duty to embed justice, truth and quality of life within empirical quests, we let go of our humanity with both hands.
Cheryl Sadowski writes essays and reviews from Northern Virginia, where she works in nonprofit management. Her writing explores the plain weave of everyday life with philosophy, art, literature, and the natural world. Cheryl's work has appeared in The Broadkill Review, EcoTheo, After the Art, and the Bay to Ocean Anthology.
