There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it
Part II: More sex and love?
In the last issue, in fact Part I of the issues on ‘Purpose of Life’, I argued that the purpose of life is those activities we directly pursue, because we have been evolved to pursue these activities to ensure the survival of the species.
There are indeed linguistic issues: one might interpret the purpose of life as meaning the purpose for which there is life. Surely there must be an intelligent power to bring about the manifestation of life. My argument is that if something is conceptually possible, then in all likelihood it will happen at least once.
But we must return to the activities we directly pursue: thus if I am a stag, I will not see my purpose of life as maintaining the quality of the gene pool. What? The purpose of life is to save the girls from those other guys. They manage both to be wimps and maltreat the kids at the same time (mine of course). And if anyone questions that they must be philosophers or the like, and probably not very good philosophers at that.
In Part I, I argued that within a socialist framework, it is the activities we directly pursue rather than socialism itself, that is the purpose of life. And under socialism there must be a fair opportunity to pursue these goals. A stag would say fair’s fair, why not, as long as this represents equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome.
Now this might suggest that a stag has a lot in common with an economic liberal, where competition is all. But let us look at my earlier analyses, not least that for the self-image of a supposed exploiter (RHS):
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self-image of ‘maroon’ socialist
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self-image of economic liberal
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I have shown both diagrams in previous issues, but here I have annotated them. Note that the outer maroon from last time on the socialist diagram has now been termed ‘customary care’, a term I have come up with in the last week: culture, society and custom all overlap. It should be said that these diagrams, ‘saying it in maroon’, represent an informal account of stages in a socioeconomic process, and as such should be regarded as a tool for formulating a more rigorous hypothesis.
What we see on the right-hand side is that the wider environment, a resource to be exploited rather than respected, is divorced by the market, via supply and demand, from culture, which is now valued for its feeding the demand curve. One can say a lot about this, but often a species evolves not so much to improve the gene pool as to make it more sexy. Or better equipped for fighting the other guys. So perhaps one can say that life is for antlers, but antlers are not necessarily for life.
But coming back to the liberal agenda, the modern market does in fact need infinite expansion - often most profitably exploiting resources to extinction – it sows the seeds of its own destruction and periodically it needs to be bailed out by those exploited. This purpose of life seems to have more in common with a cancer cell.
Would a stag do this?
By Martin Prior
