Dogmatic Resilience and the Perils of Purpose
1. Doing means coping
Somewhere right now another dreadful war wreaks its havoc. Many die. Others have their homes taken and their families, gone their life as it used to be. We are watching, shocked and trying to understand what’s going on in that war zone over there. Images reach us. Their horror perforates the walls of blissful ignorance and ridicules the innocence of daily life. How are we to deal with it all? What is it supposed to mean to us?
These are quiet questions. They often go unheard in the clamor of answers always already at hand. Because the quiet bears down heavy and dark, few of us decline the quick relief offered by Good and Evil, Right and Wrong. Binaries tell us whom to support and whom to hate, whose voice to amplify and whom to shout down. If nothing else, at least we can make others see the truth…
We resent feeling helpless and need to be useful. Why? Because we really want to find something sensible to do. Because for most of us, not knowing what to do is itself a kind of suffering. Consider: The dread of being lost. The burn of gnawing doubt. Dull throbbing meaninglessness.
Where not knowing what to do is suffering, doing is coping. This is where many of our divides and conflicts originate, and those sprouting at our dinner tables are of one species with the ones in distant countries. Let’s trace the morbid flowers’ common root. We will bring back into sight what should never cease to be obvious.
2. Power and peril of purpose
The quiet that bears down heavy and dark, in which meaning and doing become questionable, is what existential philosopher Martin Heidegger called angst.[1] Being in the world, Heidegger argued, we must deal with the world—that is, we care. But when angst abides the world turns silent. It doesn’t speak to us anymore, sheds all attempts at domestication, offers nothing to seize on, looms ungraspable. We are left to face the now unconcealed condition we’re in: thrown with momentum into situations and intentions that we play along with but never chose, that nonetheless we must make the best of, but—anxiously we realize—what’s best is never clear. In angst becomes threatening our precarious being-in-the-world that we have to assume responsibility for.
The answers always already at hand spare us from these oppressive revelations. We escape continually—fall away, as Heidegger puts it—into ready-made interpretations and soliciting business. And what we escape to need not be homey; even fear gives refuge. It diverts existential angst onto some partial danger in the world that we can respond to, that’s manageable at least in principle. Thus, our deafening involvements cover up the conditions of our being. But when some experience perforates the everyday and ridicules our errands’ relevance, beneath all fear and outrage grows a quiet question: What to do when all we used to do makes no sense anymore?
…We need a role and a task that matters. That was the dictum of the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl. In the concentration camps he came to believe that such purpose, preserving self-efficacy, is integral not only to fulfillment but for our very existence: “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”[2] The will to meaning Frankl saw as our primary motivation in life, satisfiable only through that role to be fulfilled only by us. His voice reverberates today, as prophets of purpose proliferate amidst people hostile to their progenitors’ practices, ridden with the guilt of privilege, and blinded by protective barriers.
Why do we seek meaning and purpose? Wherein resides their power?
In all its intersecting overlapping variations, purpose is that which we can put ourselves behind. Love, create, enjoy, never stop growing, carry out the Word of God, contribute to a better, more just and beautiful world: more or less successfully for any one of us, these self-expanding endeavors dissolve doubt, forge a motivating alliance of drives, and provide affirming meaningfulness. It comes back to this: meaning and purpose have the power to tell us, finally, and with the necessary fervor, what to do; that there is indeed something we can do; that we need not feel useless nor without power. Although this power isn’t all there is to purpose, it is often enough to motivate its invention. That’s one message of empirical sensemaking research, inspired, among others, by Heidegger.[3–5]
Purpose is a resource for sensemaking, as are identity, traditions, rules.[6] They make things matter in specific ways and endow them with meaning. A thing or event presents itself to you as one who does this and likes that, as conforming to this tradition or violating that rule. As Heidegger pointed out, we understand, interpret, and narrate things and events according to their relevance to our practices and as entailing possibilities for our doing and (well)being. Thus, meaning is disclosed. And meaning is orientation. It says what’s going on and how to deal with it. Meaning is an answer, and purpose is an answer that answers many questions.
Frankl talked about purpose and meaning in the strong sense, as growing not just from any project but from our inhabiting a unique role for something or someone we care about deeply. According to him, that’s the kind of meaning and purpose we seek and which kept him going in the concentration camps. “There is nothing in the world,” Frankl suggested, “that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.”[2] How so? Meaning in this sense signifies a kind of orientation that rests secure, unassailed by competing trajectories of possibility and continuing, as circumstances worsen, to reveal things as suggestively significant. It defies, therefore, that which gives suffering its bite: disorientation.
Frankl’s discussion of strong meaning and purpose makes salient: What’s troubling to us is troubling partly because it casts doubt on what we have been doing. Tiny setbacks turn into grave tragedies if they make us question ourselves and our ways. Knowing our way, grave tragedies become learning opportunities, challenges to prove our worth, hardships to embrace for our purpose’s sake. “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice,” wrote Frankl.[2] Understanding hardship as sacrifice, for instance, reaffirms that we’re on the right track, that we need not doubt nor regret but move on. Suffering that finds meaning is domesticated suffering that we know what to make of and how to deal with.
Thus, in despair, purpose provides remedy. It helps us face adversity and makes us resilient. And it gives direction for post-traumatic growth—without direction, no growth and no gain. Purpose endows tragedy with value. And the most valuable tragedies are those that reveal some purposeful truth. When hit hard, dig the sore for deeper meaning!
Pause here.
Where we dig for meaning, conflict finds fertile soil and divisions will flower in no time. Because when we dig, we seek to appropriate the power of meaning and purpose, turning the power into a purpose unto itself. But once we seek purpose for a purpose, then anything will do for our purpose so long as it fulfills its purpose. We then have reason, in other words, not to be overly critical with purposes and their providers. Thus, in the power grows the peril.
3. The cycle of dogma and conflict
Think back to the dreadful war raging somewhere right now. The people who have their homes taken and families and life as it used to be. Us watching, shocked and trying to understand what’s going on in that war zone over there. So, from explanations, we’ll expect directions about how to deal with it. Because what do we do when all we used to do makes no sense anymore? Good and Evil’s explanations give direction, culprits give purpose, as does fear, and when the horror overwhelms, relief is found in the next redeeming skirmish with someone else who also needs it. Countless fights between friends and family. So much despise for strangers reduced to their despisable opinion. Violence perpetuated. That’s how we cope. Carried by the thrust of sanctified outrage over and above a dark gulf of angst.
What about the people who lost their homes and families and life as it used to be? They too must all find a way to respond to the situation. For a while, they’ll be busy trying to survive. Then the question looms: “What will I do now that everything I was and did is gone?” Standing by one another is an answer and helping those still struggling. When few are left to stand with, seeking justice for the dead becomes another answer. Some answer the living must find to keep going. Because to not keep going means to stop conversing with the world and to lose touch. If we lose touch for too long, we’ll lose our minds. All the world’s voices growing distant and alien.
When we’re well, we move about drawing from various resources for sensemaking. They come into play flexibly, engage, enrich, and complement one another. When more and more sources of meaning and purpose are blighted by misfortune—identities, projects, community lost—we begin to depend on any that still give orientation. And these we then have reason to fixate and defend, asserting against all else their indisputable truth. In turn, our now dogmatic purpose will help us keep going when the going gets rough. We will be dogmatically resilient.
Dogma is a troublemaker, the spring bloom of animosity. We depend on its ministry and are invested in its subsistence. Thus, we introduce a complicating interest, prone to produce conflict, to our conversing with the world. For instance, if the dogma was revealed to us as a tragedy’s deeper meaning, the redeeming lesson to learn, then, wherever its authority falters, all overridden angst, grief, and regret will resurge. To question dogma and raise doubts about its legitimacy means, therefore, to stir the pain, and our fear of the pain elicits aggressive defense and self-deception. When our dogma is pressured for damage done or increasing implausibility, we will strive to fend off the heralds of doubt, the severity of our response in just proportion to the dogma’s imperilment—and to the agony it averts. And we cannot recognize our dogma for what it is, cannot acknowledge our vested interest in its service, for that would undermine its credibility.
Dogma defines what is thinkable to us and which circumstances and other minds we can inhabit. The limits to our dogma’s plausibility are the limits to our dogmatic resilience. Beyond: the dark of angst and disorientation. Thus we are bound, the bondage concealed, to continually reaffirm in action and perception our fixated truths. And the unforeseen losses we incur in our compliance? Guilt-ridden, they will merge into the mass of pain we’ll have to face if ever we want to concede that we were wrong all along—until it will appear that there’s no choice but the flight forward. Once we embrace the helping hand of dogma, there’s good chance we can later witness that commitment escalate—under the names, mind you, of grit and guts, determined mind, authentic integrity. Inaudible by then the quiet knowing that courage sometimes turns the other way.
Thus, in the dynamics of dogma and dogmatic resilience we rediscover what should never cease to be obvious: that violent conflict is self-reproducing and that most of us continually partake in its proliferation—if not in deed then in speech.
The cycle of dogma and conflict is most obvious in its extremes, as in a war seen from afar. Every life lost, every torn relationship will raze meaning and leave wounds that people will only know to close, if at all, with meaning. They’ll cling to what remains to keep their heads above the blood and their senses in the shelling. Ingenious resilience will save the lives of many—and lead the most desperate onto the perilous path of dogma. Once the redeeming purpose of the desperate ones demands ever more aggressive dedication, it will weave for them an increasingly volatile environment; that is, it will provoke conflict, always on the edge of violence. If violence erupts, it will again scorch sources of meaning, and as they wither away, those remaining will engender aggressive defense.
Yet, the sway of dogma and conflict travels with images and is propelled ever anew where the violence moves an all too open heart that doesn’t find another way. To find purpose in despising an other and in winning their demise, is on the way of violence. But seeing the coping in their violent purpose and their coping’s need, that’s to look for other ways.
4. Returning to the origin
When Frankl advocated finding resilience through meaning, he didn’t have in mind revenge and fanaticism. He spoke of enduring for the sake of a loved one or a great service still left undone, of seizing the opportunity to actualize our ideals and meet hardship with grace and compassion. But which particular meanings we will revert to—and whether they’ll turn dogmatic—depends on which remain available, circumstantially as well as culturally. “Woe to him who found that the person whose memory alone had given him courage in camp did not exist any more!”[2] What meaning did he revert to? We don’t know, but Frankl recounts that survivors thus disillusioned had yet to face their deepest suffering.
Dogma is nothing exotic, to be found only where sermons resound or cries for religious war. It is instead often our best, and sometimes our only shot at coping. We may distinguish it only once it has flowered in violence, physical or verbal, oppressing all hostile evidence and appeals for temperance. But the aggression is accidental, up to chance and circumstance. Dogma is merely fixated meaning, defined by our dependence on its directives. We can witness its proliferation every day within ourselves and all around us. Its seeds are in our aversion to angst, and whenever we attempt to quell what we do not dare to experience, dogma has already sprouted. It has sprouted wherever we engage in conflict we know to be of no good for no one. And it’s about to blossom when we need to believe in the deeper meaning of some unbearable tragedy, in that it tells us something about our purpose, our fate, and that dramatic events demand dramatic response.
What instead then? Our wish to escape angst gives purpose its pull—but what if we dwelled for longer in the anxious sorrow bared by the collapse of meaning, where rage and fear are still nascent, unformed, shifting? Heidegger thought that if we do, bearing with absence and remaining open, we will expand our engagement with the world and enable unforeseeable transformation.[7] He himself, fearing a vanishing of meanings in modern societies, fell for the purpose of those who built the concentration camps that Viktor Frankl suffered through. Heidegger demonstrated, like many others, that knowing alone isn’t enough. If, as individuals and societies, we learned to linger for a while in the emptiness of not-knowing, we might therein witness richer, multifarious meanings emerge, reminiscent perhaps of Frankl’s more benevolent kind.
Already, many are deciding in myriad moments every day not to perpetuate the sway of violence. Releasing fixated purposes, they choose, over pained assertions, the pain that raises questions. Their ability to embrace not-knowing rests in their trust that they won’t be abandoned by meaning, and this trust signifies a healthy mind and a culture remaining capable of health. And because they trust, they can acknowledge how difficult it is to tell what’s just, what it means to be happy, what would make a better world, or what God tried to say, and that this uncertainty is a reason to be a little careful with every purpose, especially those that purport to know what they’re after.
References
1. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. (Blackwell, 2001).
2. Frankl, V. E. Man’s Search For Meaning. (Washington Square Press, 1984).
3. Karreman, D. & Alvesson, M. Making Newsmakers: Conversational Identity at Work. Organization Studies 22, 59–89 (2001).
4. Maitlis, S. Who Am I Now? Sensemaking and Identity in Posttraumatic Growth. in Exploring positive identities and organizations: building a theoretical and research foundation (eds. Roberts, L. M. & Dutton, J. E.) (Routledge, 2009).
5. Davis, C. G., Nolen-Hoeksema, S. & Larson, J. Making sense of loss and benefiting from the experience: Two construals of meaning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, 561–574 (1998).
6. Weick, K. E. Ambiguity as Grasp: The Reworking of Sense. J Contingencies & Crisis Man 23, 117–123 (2015).
7. Holt, R. & Cornelissen, J. Sensemaking revisited. Management Learning 45, 525–539 (2014).