A Conversation about "Life's Core Questions"
Eugene Mornell
As appeared in Speaking of Values | Winter 2001

From the moment I began reading it, I was quickly drawn into David Blankenhorn's article, "Uncertain"... Not only did Blankenhorn beautifully present a deep understanding of religious faith and social change, but I soon realized that he and I, Christian and Jew, had traveled a somewhat similar path to many similar beliefs.

Blankenhorn begins with a brief story about his own "liberalism" in high school and the "conservative" friend who drew his attention to the key admonition of his article: "Don't immanentize the eschaton." Blankenhorn had no idea what this meant, of course, and he had to wait 30 years to discover the admonition's author, political scientist Eric Voegelin, and the meaning of those four words. (Nor will you discover their meaning until you read his article for yourself.)

I was immediately hooked by this story because I had also changed in my understanding of liberalism and conservatism over the course of many years, as Blankenhorn seems to have done, and because I was also late to discover Eric Voegelin when, after many years away, I returned to graduate school.

Blankenhorn, in his article, goes on to deny the assumption that metaphysical questions, "life's core questions," do not exist or can be rationally investigated only through quantifiable scientific methods, which make those questions unanswerable or irrelevant. (I will add Ludwig Wittgenstein's words here: "When all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.")

Blankenhorn proceeds to discuss God, the final goal of our lives, and the importance of uncertainty. But "don't jump too quickly to the question of whether or not you believe in God," he says.

Although Blankenhorn focuses on the most important arguments for uncertainty (yes, you will have to read them for yourself), there are two other kinds of uncertainty I want to mention: uncertainty about knowledge or understanding, and uncertainty about facts or information. I offer one quotation in regard to each of them:

In a recent novel by Todd Gitlin, Sacrifice, a psychiatrist and human rights activist leaves this statement in the personal journal that his son reads after his death: "Our problem in modem life is only sometimes ignorance; it is more that we don't know what to do with what we know."

And at The Skirball Institute's 1995 National Seminary Conference, Neil Postman told us: "If there are children starving in Somalia, or any Other place, it has nothing to do with inadequate information. If the oceans are polluted and the rain forests depleted, it has nothing to do with inadequate information. If crime is rampant on our streets, if children are mistreated, it has nothing to do with inadequate information. Indeed, if we can not get along with our own relatives, this, too, has nothing to do with inadequate information."

Postman then responded directly to "the delusion that our sufferings and failures are caused by inadequate information." What we really need, he said, is "a transcendent narrative to weave the unquestioned and uncombined facts of our lives into fabric."

Which brings us back to Voegelin and Blankenhorn and the question of how we should act in the face of evil, suffering, and the ever-present problems of this world. Voegelin answers: with a recognition that we should not "do the work of God himself, right here and now, in history." Blankenhorn answers: with a recognition that we cannot "bring heaven down to earth" and make man into God. But it is a complicated argument, and Blankenhorn writes with approval of religion's role in the anti-slavery, character education, temperance, and civil rights movements.

Blankenhorn concludes his article by paraphrasing Vaclav Havel, who "once said that he would rather have a beer with someone who was looking for the truth than someone who had found it." He thinks Voegelin, a seriously religious man, would have agreed and would have invited Havel out for a beer.

In writing to Blankenhorn for permission to reprint his article, I told him: "Voegelin is gone, but I'm ready for a beer with Havel and you at any time."

Now it's your turn to read the article itself. •

Eugene Mornell is the Executive Director of The Skirball Institute.

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