The Right Thing for the Wrong Reason

Steinbeck’s East of Eden shows us how today’s “crisis of meaning” discourse misses the point.

By Christian Lingner

So much is said these days about “the crisis of meaning”—the idea that the felt purposelessness of people in Western societies is reaching a breaking point, such that if we do not restore our sense of life’s significance in short order there will be dire long-term consequences for our civilization. Certainly, this is true. There is little doubt that the fallout of the meteoric rise in mental health issues—another way of referring to the same phenomenon—could include societal collapse.

Still, something in me cringes when I hear “crisis of meaning” rhetoric—especially in Christian circles. Just recently, I witnessed a worship leader asking his congregation to yell out things they were thankful for. After a minute or two, a man finally piped up over the solicitous keyboard’s hum: “I’m thankful God gave my life meaning!” The worship leader nodded his head in approval, and after allowing a few more moments of imploring silence, returned to the chorus along with his relieved throng of churchgoers. I left the service wondering why I found the man’s response so disconcerting: Surely it isn’t wrong to be grateful for a sense of meaning, right? Jesus doesn’t just promise life, but life abundant, after all. As long as our sense of fulfillment comes from devotion to Him, why should there be anything suspect in psychological satisfaction? Yet the more I dwelt on it, the more I felt that to speak of “meaning” was to somehow miss the point.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t until I began to re-read Steinbeck’s East of Eden that the reasons for my apprehension about meaning rhetoric began to crystalize. The novel’s narrative centers on Adam, a young man who enlists in the military at the insistence of his domineering father, who wants his son to learn the “holy joy” of soldiering, “a companionship almost like that of a heavenly company of angels.” Though he expresses repeatedly that he does not wish to enlist, Adam spends five years fighting Indians out west before surprising his father and brothers—and, most of all, himself—by signing up for a second five-year stint. Adam’s decision to re-enlist is not motivated by bloodlust, for he spent his first tour quietly proving his aim by failing to kill an enemy. Rather, Adam returns to the military out of “a crippling loneliness for the close men in the barracks and tent.” He misses being part of something bigger than himself.

After finishing his second five-year contract, Adam ventures out on the road, wandering from town to town across the United States begging for food. Clearly, in losing his military service, Adam has lost his direction, and this experience as a vagrant only serves to reduce his “personality to a minus” such that “he made no stir of anger or jealousy.” Though the narrator indicates that this experience developed Adam’s ability to sympathize with the needy, noting how “he developed a love of poor people he could not have conceived if he had not been poor himself,” Adam’s behavior upon his eventual return home reveals a calloused and confused man. He is brusque with his brother, who stands in desperate need of affection, grieving as he is their late father. Adam only stays long enough to admit that he never loved their father before taking his inheritance and exploring South America. When he finally returns home again, he falls into despondence. He wants to move to California but cannot decide whether to go or stay, just as he cannot decide whether to lounge in bed or get up each morning. All he can do is look at his brother and wonder out loud “what the hell we’re working for.” Adam is depressed. His days are a Sisyphean labor to be endured rather than enjoyed. His life feels meaningless.

Adam’s trajectory reveals the risk we run in pursuing “meaning” over truth, goodness, and beauty.

All of this changes when Adam and his brother find “A dirty bundle of rags and mud… trying to worm its way up the steps” of their farmhouse. The reader already knows what Adam does not: This “bundle of rags” is the murderous, sociopathic Cathy, rendered unrecognizable at the hand of a whoremaster she manipulated into falling in love with her. Adam’s brother recognizes Cathy for the monster that she is, telling her to her face that he thinks she is a devil. Yet Cathy’s presence restores to Adam his sense of purpose by providing him with a narrative and role to live into, just as the military had done before. In having her to take care of, Adam finds the world transfigured before his eyes; like a child first individuating his surroundings, Adam’s senses are filled to brimming with the dance, the sparkle, the crackle of life. Adam immediately falls in love with the “helpless child” under his care, and he asks Cathy to marry him. Recognizing that her options are limited, and that a marriage and relocation to California would ensure her safety, Cathy consents. In a matter of months, the newlyweds are settled in the verdant Salinas Valley.

Adam’s fundamental flaw, as has perhaps already become clear, is his tendency to allow his feelings—even very good, admirable ones—to dictate his decisions. Adam’s respect for his father and his desire for close communion with his fellow man are, no doubt, natural and admirable enough motivations. However, they so control the desperate Adam that he wastes ten years fighting a war he doesn’t believe in. In the end, his military experience may have provided him with a sense of psychological and social comfort, but the real meaning of his soldiering was service to an unworthy cause—even by his own standards. A similar dynamic is at play in his relationship with Cathy. Adam is so enamored with his feelings for his version of Cathy that he cannot see her for the evil manipulator that she is. As the narrator explains, “[Cathy] set off the glory in Adam. His spirits rose flying and released him from fear and bitterness and rancid memories. The glory lights up the world and changes it the way a star shell changes a battleground. Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes.” Though Cathy provides Adam with happy feelings, his infatuation blinds him to the actual meaning of his life as Cathy’s caretaker—service to the devil. The negative consequences of his infatuation abound: He fails to “notice the sullen pain in his brother” when departing for California, shows little desire to develop relationships with his neighbors there, and even displays a remarkable lack of interest in the twin boys that Cathy bears him. He is, in short, a ghost of a man, entirely consumed with the gratification of his feelings, even if he sees himself as trying to provide for a girl in need.

Adam’s trajectory reveals the risk we run in pursuing “meaning” over truth, goodness, and beauty. Having no direction in life, nothing governing why and how he should live, Adam jumps at the first thing that makes his heart leap. He trusts his instinctual emotional reaction to the Cathy’s presence in his life, takes a leap of faith—and the result is disaster, both spiritual and physical. Even at the end of the novel, seventeen years after Cathy blew a .44 caliber hole through his shoulder and departed to take over a local whorehouse, it is clear that Adam is still nursing the wounds she left.

What I’m saying is this: The extent to which something can provide a sense of psychological fulfillment is no sure-fire indication of its merit.

Plenty of well-intentioned ideologies—not to mention blatantly evil lies—can provide us with “meaning” in the short term, while leading to devastating consequences in the long run. The high ideals of fascism and communism have given plenty of people reason to get up in the morning, even as those systems barreled millions toward death and destruction. The euphoria of adultery has proved its ability, time and again, to provide that special “zest of life” to spiritually bankrupt souls, all at the cost of spouses and families. Violent gangs prove notoriously seductive and fulfilling to confused teenagers aching for acceptance and purpose. Abusive cults thrive on the backs of the spiritually homeless and psychologically destitute. The history of Christianity itself reveals how religion can so easily be employed for mass manipulation.

What I’m saying is this: The extent to which something can provide a sense of psychological fulfillment is no sure-fire indication of its merit. To say that Christianity can provide a sense of meaning is simply to say that it successfully manipulates the universal human desire to mean something. If what Jesus taught isn’t actually true, then Christians are simply those pitiful enough to trade their souls for a false sense of comfort. So how, having recognized that our feelings are not a good judge of what is true, are we to know whether we’re receiving a sense of meaning from something that is, in fact, true, good, and beautiful? How do we know, when something appeals to us, that we aren’t just being manipulated?

Steinbeck offers pragmatism—the philosophy that says we should adopt whatever action works—as a possible solution to this problem. A particularly clear embodiment of Steinbeck’s pragmatism comes in one of the most perplexing scenes in the novel, when Samuel Hamilton, a wise neighbor whom Adam has hired to sink wells on his property, uses a forked stick to identify where he should begin to dig. Adam looks on as Samuel follows the lead of his “magic wand” until it seems “to be pulled strongly downward against his straining arms.” Samuel tries to explain the function of the stick: “I don’t believe in it save that it works. Maybe it’s this way. Maybe I know where the water is, feel it in my skin…Suppose—well, call it humility, or a deep disbelief in myself, forced me to do a magic to bring up to the surface the thing I know already.” Though the clear-sighted, William–James–reading Samuel has too much of the empiricist in him to speculate on the metaphysical properties of the stick, he is too much a pragmatist not to recognize the very real dependability of the stick to direct him to water. It works, so he’ll use it.

It is clear from other passages that the narrator, who is none other than Steinbeck himself, is happy to apply pragmatic logic to religion. When speculating on why people in past generations were more willing than his contemporaries to take significant risks and engage in heroic ventures, Steinbeck counters the idea that faith in a “just, moral God” had anything to do with the matter, positing his own theory instead: “I think that because they trusted in themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units—because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back.” In other words, Steinbeck is saying that religion acts in a similar way to Samuel’s magic wand, helping to externalize an inherent and beneficial human instinct—the moral instinct. People have always known, deep down, that life has moral implications and that they are valuable, but religion is admissible only insofar as it helps to actualize that instinct in life.

The only good reason to become religious is to be so convinced that the religion is true that we are willing to be changed—that is, to undergo the struggle required to become the kind of person we have encountered in those who have accepted the religion on its own terms.

There is much to be said for the pragmatic approach. If Adam had been attentive to the actual effects of Cathy’s presence on his life, then he and many others could have been saved from the worst of their heartache. He should have prioritized the effects of that relationship, but he was too concerned with his happy feelings to do so. Certainly we can all agree that evidence that our beliefs actually work is a much better gauge for what to believe than how we feel about those beliefs. Jesus himself advocated for a straight-forward, pragmatic approach to recognizing bad ideas: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits.”

This leads us, however, to the primary shortcoming of pragmatism: It can tell us all day that we need to do what works, but it cannot define what it means for something to work. In other words, pragmatism is helpful in identifying whether a certain action moves us toward a desired end, but it’s much less helpful when we’re trying to identify which end to move toward. To illustrate, let’s go back to Steinbeck’s pragmatic appraisal of religion. Though Steinbeck was a self-professed agnostic who believed that faith was unnecessary, he believed that religion used to “work” insofar as it helped people live morally. Yet, when it comes to what “living morally” actually consists of, his pragmatism does not provide an answer. All Steinbeck can do is shrug and say, “It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.” In the end, pragmatism, for all its talk of judging beliefs by their results, leads us right back into the realm of feelings. The only difference is that the Steinbeckian pragmatist must make judgements based on speculations about the future feelings of others rather than his own present feelings.

What the pragmatist needs, of course, is precisely what religion provides: an answer to the question, “How am I supposed to live?” Religions take seriously the universal human desire for meaning, each positing a final, once-and-for-all explanation for why we exist and how we are supposed to act. Whereas pragmatism says, “Do what works,” religion says, “This is the truth about the world, now live accordingly.” The only good reason to become religious is to be so convinced that the religion is true that we are willing to be changed—that is, to undergo the struggle required to become the kind of person we have encountered in those who have accepted the religion on its own terms. In Christian terms, we must be willing to become a saint.

The problem with appeals to Christianity based on Christianity’s psychological benefits is that it makes following Jesus about us, about our happiness, when the whole of Christ’s message is that we must stop caring so much about the pursuit of happiness on our own terms and live on His terms instead.

My worry about Christian “meaning rhetoric” is that it makes its appeal based on our existing notion of what would “work” for us, whereas the whole value of Christianity is the transformation of our values, of our whole self. These kinds of appeals encourage people to join the faithful in bad faith, suggesting that Christianity is just another therapeutic path to a modicum of comfort, just another identity that provides a sense of self-satisfaction, just another tribe that provides us with a feeling of safety. Yet Jesus did not come to give us a sense of meaning, but to reveal to us the real meaning of our lives—who we were made to become. And who we are meant to become, to Christians, is encapsulated by our Lord on the cross: We are to be a people characterized by radical self-forgetting and sacrificial love. The problem with appeals to Christianity based on Christianity’s psychological benefits is that it makes following Jesus about us, about our happiness, when the whole of Christ’s message is that we must stop caring so much about the pursuit of happiness on our own terms and live on His terms instead, by His definition of happiness, which is righteousness.

The meaning of life, according to Jesus and His most devoted followers, is to align our will with the will of God, and God’s will is that we learn to love as He loves, for He is love. We are called to learn to love Him by loving our neighbors, and to learn to love our neighbors by loving Him. Steinbeck says that the final question that every man will ask himself is, “Was he loved or was he hated?” Jesus says quite the opposite: Stop trying so hard to convince yourself and others that you’re worthy of love, and start loving God and neighbor instead. Life is not about you and your sense of meaning—it’s about righteousness, which is nothing less than a life characterized by loving, honest relationships with God and man.

Understood in this way, it may seem like being a Christian means that we must trade our hopes for happiness for a life of striving after perfection. Yet Christians also believe that God is the kind of Father who loves to bless His children and does not want them to suffer needlessly. We can take comfort in the promise that goes along with the exhortation, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Our Father knows what we need, psychologically as well as physically, and He longs to give us His good gifts—among them, an assurance that our lives have significance. Yet, precisely because He is a good Father, He will not allow us a counterfeit feeling—the sense of meaning and happiness and purpose—before our lives are actually aligned with the meaning for which He has made us. And he has made us for love.

Fifteen months after Cathy bore twins and then left in a cloud of gunpowder, Samuel pensively picks his way up to Adam’s place, gathering the courage to do something he had never done before: Beat the sense into someone. Since Cathy’s departure, Adam’s sons had been ignored—even left unnamed—by their father, to whom they remained only “symbols of his loss.” Epitomizing the good, long-suffering father, Samuel has tried his hand at gentle encouragement, but he knows a dire case when he sees one. He throttles Adam, successfully working himself into a lather and snarling invectives at his astonished, foolish friend. Finally released from Samuel’s grip, Adam stumbles to his feet, feeling his throat.

“What is it you want from me?”

“You have no love.”

“I had—enough to kill me.”

“No one ever had enough.”

All photos by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Christian Lingner is a poet, songwriter, and teacher living in Nashville, TN. He is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St. Thomas–Houston.