Everything Is Sandcastles
on meaning and the ravages of time
Yesterday, Rivka Weinberg spoke at UCR from her forthcoming book, The Meaning of It All, on how time erodes meaning. As is often noted, in a thousand years it will (probably) be as though you had never lived. Everything you strived for will have crumbled to dust. Weinberg doesn't argue that this renders our efforts entirely meaningless -- but it does deprive them of a meaning they would have had, if they had endured. We ought to admit, she says, that this is disheartening, rather than brushing it off with a breezy recommendation to "live in the moment".
Weinberg carves out an exception to time's corrosive power: what she calls atelic goods (drawing on Kieran Setiya's work on the "midlife crisis"). Atelic goods are complete in the moment: strolling through the woods, enjoying a sunset, licking an ice cream cone. Contrast these with telic goods, which aim toward a goal: walking to the store, taking the perfect sunset photo, finishing the cone.
In her talk, Weinberg argued that time drained meaning from telic goods -- not entirely, but substantially -- while leaving atelic goods mostly untouched. Yet she cautioned against retreating wholly into atelic pleasures. A life composed only of strolls and sunsets would be vapid. Telic goods, like building a career and cultivating long-term relationships, are essential to a full life.
But during the discussion period, Weinberg introduced the idea of sandcastles as an interesting middle case. (I don't recall this in the talk itself, but it moved fast and I haven't seen a written version.) Building a sandcastle is telic: It unfolds over time and can be interrupted before completion. But it's also ephemeral. Nothing is lost if the sandcastle is gone tomorrow. It was never meant to last, any more than an ice cream cone.
Maybe everything is sandcastles.
Weinberg gave examples of paradigmatic telic goods whose meanings are ravaged by time: Martin Luther King's activism, Jonas Salk's work on the polio vaccine. In a thousand years -- or ten thousand, almost certainly a billion -- it will be as if King and Salk had never existed. But should King have felt disappointed that his activism wouldn't ripple through deep time? Maybe not. Maybe he should have regarded it as a sandcastle: designed for a particular time, not reduced in meaning because it didn't endure forever.
When I raised this during Q&A, I didn't fully grasp Weinberg's reply. The sandcastle example is hers, so I might not be doing her view full justice -- but let me run with the idea.
If we think of all of our projects as sandcastle building, then they aren't necessarily ravaged by time. Of course, many will be wiped away too early. The waves will sweep in before your castle is complete or while you were still relishing its beauty. A rude stranger might trample it. Maybe almost every truly important project loses its impact before we're ready. But that's not an inevitability built into the structure of telic meaning and the nature of time. It's a contingent fact about the fragile, unstable nature of our chosen projects in a risky world.
Maybe, by shaping our intentions differently, or thinking about our projects differently, we reduce their vulnerability. Suppose I build a sandcastle knowing there's a 50% chance it will be swept away before I finish -- and thus, perhaps, not intending to finish but intending only to get as far as I can. If the wave comes early, I can still be disappointed -- but the wave no longer robs the act of its intended meaning. I did, in fact, get as far as I could. And if I build right at the water's edge, knowing there's a 90% chance I won't complete the castle's final envisioned tower, then finishing is a delightful surprise: a bonus meaning, so to speak, beyond my expectation. If brevity is the default intention and expectation, then the collapse of my castles does not deprive my actions of their expected or intended meaning, while unlikely endurance adds meaning relative to base line.
Could we adopt the same attitude to our relationships and careers? The waves of life could sweep them away any day. A realistic sense of hazard might be folded into the intention itself. I intend to start a marriage and nurture it -- not with the expectation that we will still be happily together at eighty, but with the hope that we might. If we make it, wonderful! Like a sandcastle surviving high tide. If it happens, I'm surprised and delighted, and I'll do what I can for that. Similarly, I intend to begin a career and pursue it. If the wave comes, well, the plan was always only to build toward something that I knew from the start would sooner or later be taken by the surf.
There will still be grief and regret. Things rarely go as well as they might have gone. But if I fully embrace this mindset (let's be honest: I can't), my projects won't have less meaning than intended, even if the waves take them sooner than I would have liked.
[remember this meme from 2007?]
I think I also reject the premise, but for a different reason from Kenny. I just think that there is no reason to think that my importance has anything to do with things a long way away from me, in distance or in time. The fact that I can't affect things happening in Brazil doesn't make me less valid.
So, for example, there are probably a few hundred/thousand people in China whose actions can affect Brazil, and on some level those people are "more important" than me. One obvious such person would be President Xi, and there are lots of senses in which he is a bigger/more important person than I am. But we have lots of ways of thinking about people that also makes me his equal. I'm quite comfortable believing that I have equal worth as a human being; I'm equal in the eyes of most Chinese law (I'm a permanent resident, not a citizen, so there are some differences). I have social and emotional authority within my own family that Xi does not have...
Similarly, the fact that I can't affect people in the past or the far future doesn't trouble me much. I would only be troubled by it if I had the arrogance to declare "look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair" or "so long as men have breath...so long lives this".
But most of our teloses (teloi?) are bounded. I'm engaging in some homeschooling at this very moment [sidenote: my sons are both displaying an interest in philosophy, and you can take a chunk of credit for that! Older son was attracted by the title of Jerks, and is working his way through it. Thank you!], and this activity is telic, but bounded - quite sharply - by my son's autonomy: I expect to give him the best intellectual start to life that I can, but I aspire to take only a very limited role in the direction of his life once he's an adult, because I want him to be in control of his own decisions. That is to say, this telos is self-limiting.
I think there are lots of factors like that. Something doesn't have to be eternally worth it to be worth it. In the intellectual sphere, you can have a bounded goal of fully working out a theory X (think Ptolemaic geocentrism). Geocentrism was swept away, and all of the work that went into those epicycles was meaningless. And yet I still think the project had value, in part because it laid the foundations for the proofs that geocentrism doesn't work. Seeing as most science is going to prove to be wrong in the long run, that same logic will end up applying across the board, I imagine.
This is perhaps a slightly different idea to sandcastles, because the digging of a sandcastle is a pleasure in itself (I think I regard sandcastles as more atelic than telic, though I recognise the telic element to the process). I just think that there are lots of goals which can be worthy objectives, while still being non-eternal. And that can still be true even if the process contains no atelic pleasures at all.
“ in a thousand years it will (probably) be as though you had never lived”
This premise seems quite wrong! Even just the butterfly flapping its wings isn’t ineffective on the weather thousands of miles away! In a thousand years, my life will have had impacts and echoes and chaotic interventions in almost everything anywhere near earth (and perhaps quite a bit farther).
Now it’s true that in a thousand years, it will likely be very difficult to look at all those effects and infer what my life must have been like, or how any of those things depended on my life. But I don’t see why that takes away from their meaning.
I especially don't see why this should take meaning away from telic acts like the civil rights movement, since those are likely to have some stable effects for a very long part of that time.