…Defining consolation as "an argument about why life is the way it is and why we must keep going," Michael Ignatieff writes:
Console. It's from the Latin consolor, to find solace together. Consolation is what we do, or try to do, when we share each other's suffering or seek to bear our own. What we are searching for is how to go on, how to keep going, how to recover the belief that life is worth living.
For millennia, that belief was the domain of religion, with its promises of salvation in another world to recompense our suffering in this one. But because belief, unlike truth, is not something for which the test of reality can provide binary verification or falsification, there are many true paths to the same belief. To find consolation "we do not have to believe in God," Ignatieff writes, "but we do need faith in human beings and the chain of meanings we have inherited." Tracing that chain from the Roman Stoics ("who promised that life would hurt less if we could learn how to renounce the vanity of human wishes") to Montaigne and Hume ("who questioned whether we could ever discern any grand meaning for our suffering") to us, he contrasts the consolations of philosophy with those of religion to offer a foothold amid the quicksand of despair:
These thinkers also gave voice to a passionate belief that religious faith had missed the most crucial source of consolation of all. The meaning of life was not to be found in the promise of paradise, nor in the mastery of the appetites, but in living to the full every day. To be consoled, simply, was to hold on to one's love of life as it is, here and now...
—Maria Popova
On Consolation: Notes on Our Search for Meaning and the Antidote to Resignation – The Marginalian
https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/01/22/on-consolation-michael-ignatieff/
Depends on who you ask.
Not quite my definition:
Humanists are non-religious people who shape their own lives in the here and now because we believe it's the only life we have. A lot of people share humanist values without even knowing the term. Maybe you're a humanist! Find out by taking our quiz! https://humanists.uk/humanism/how-humanist-are-you/
My preferred version:
Some humanists (Spinoza, Einstein, John Dewey for example,) are natural pietists who revere nature and the cosmos, regard life as precious and sacred, and are vitally concerned for the future of life (while harboring no fantasy of a supernatural afterlife for themselves personally).
But some others are as you say.
Ross Douthat's arguments for a god based on "fine tuning" and human consciousness, while impressive coming from the "precocious undergraduate" he cites, do not finally compel assent. Undergraduate conversations about the possible existence of a god are fun, sometimes. But insisting, at this moment of political blitzkrieg in Washington, that they should make us all religious believers flirts insensibly with theocratic intolerance. We don't all need to be religious, any more than we all need to be Republican.
James Phil Oliver
Nashville
The writer is an associate professor of philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University.
Feb 15, 2025 online [Sunday Feb 16 print edition]
(They lopped off my first two paragraphs but it felt good to push back against Ross's over-reach.)
