Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.
"The Areas of the Continents and Regions Are Determined by Estimations of the Comparative Percentage of Inhabitants" (Goldstein 2026:xiii). SBNR on the Transcenders continent stands for "spiritual but not religious." You can click on the image to enlarge it.
In her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinks through the central paradox of the human condition, which she expresses by saying: "We are creatures of matter who long to matter."
We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us. And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death. We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives. We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do.
We have to feel that we matter if we are to feel our lives worth living. Goldstein observes:
We don't want to live if we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never truly matter. The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are "I don't matter." It's no accident that the URL for the US Hotline for Suicide Prevention is https://youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org (2).
I have not been able to find this website. But I have found a suicide prevention organization named "You Matter" at https://www.youmatterawareness.org.
Previously, I have written about Goldstein's book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. In that book, she suggests that the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.
But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.
And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.
FOUR CONTINENTS ON THE MATTERING MAP
In her new book, Goldstein identifies these people who rely on religious belief to demonstrate that their lives really matter as "transcenders." But if you look at Goldstein's Mattering Map, you'll see that transcenders are one of four continents that represent the four kinds of "mattering projects." These are four ways of answering the question--Do I matter? The transcenders say, I matter because I matter to the spiritual presence that is the transcendent ground of the universe. The socializers say, I matter because I matter to others. The heroic strivers say, I matter because I can achieve a standard of excellence in my chosen area of striving. The competitors say, I matter because I matter more than others.
Each of those four continents is divided into regions that represent subgroups within each category. The different kinds of transcenders correspond to different religious movements, such as Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. The socializers differ in the people they identify as the others to whom they matter: so, for example, some socializers want to matter to their friends and lovers, while others want to be famous and thus matter to many people who are not known to them. Heroic strivers differ in their chosen areas of achievement--intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical. Finally, competitors differ as to whether they compete as individuals against other individuals or as members of a social group against other groups.
Notice that most of the transcenders continent is covered by the "Axial Age" religions identified by Karl Jaspers--the major religious traditions that originated in roughly the same period, from 800 to 200 BCE (202-206). The "folk/traditional" category would include shamanism, the original evolutionary seed of all religious experience.
Goldstein claims that since the Axial Age, for "much of our history," almost all human beings have been transcenders. The ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) introduced a "secular approach" to mattering, which was lost during the Middle Ages, but then renewed by modern secular philosophers such as Spinoza and Locke (204-205).
Notice that the dimensions of the four continents suggest that about one-third of human beings today are transcenders, while two-thirds are not. And of those that are not transcenders, about half are socializers, who think they matter because they matter to others.
FOUR PEOPLE WHO MATTER
Goldstein fills in her Mattering Map with narratives of the lives of people who represent the different kinds of mattering projects. So, for instance, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is an example of a transcender. For a long time, he worried about the insignificance of his life in the cosmos: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified." But then, in one night, he had a mystical experience of being in the presence of God and Jesus Christ. He wrote down some notes about his experience on a scrap of paper, in which he concluded: "Let me never be separated from Him. He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel: Renunciation, total and sweet. Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director. Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on earth. May I not forget your words. Amen" (200-201). From that moment, he knew that his life mattered because he mattered to God--the divine creator of the infinite immensity of spaces that had previously terrified him.
Angela Rubino is an example of a socializer who found the purpose of her life when she became a cult follower in Trump's Make America Great Again movement in 2020. She lives in Rome, Georgia, in the congressional district represented by Majorie Taylor Greene. Before 2020, she had never felt that she mattered as a citizen. But then she became captivated by Donald Trump because he seemed to be speaking for her. She became one of the leading political activists for the MAGA movement in Georgia. She was determined to find evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through fraudulent vote counting. She was sure that the county election board in Rome had destroyed many of the ballots cast for Trump. So one night, she jumped into the dumpster outside the election board office. She found two plastic bags crammed with paper shavings. She took the bags back to her home where she tried to put the strips of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle that would show voting ballots for Trump that had been shredded.
She said that her being part of the MAGA movement made her feel "recognized and even important" for the first time in her life. She had found her purpose. She said that her wondering about the purpose of her life began when she was eight years old, sitting in the back seat of her mother's car on the way to a religion class.
The thought just came into my head. I was thinking, "What are we doing this for? What are we doing any of this for if we're just going to die? You die, and it's over. So, what's the point?" I felt afraid. Afraid to the point of not wanting to think about that anymore.
Speaking to a journalist with the Washington Post, she confessed:
Sometimes I'm like, what if I'm wrong? It crosses my mind. Then I ask God: If I'm doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out. Because I really want to understand what the point is. This can't be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home. That as humans, we're nothing (19-20).
Goldstein quotes this as showing the most melancholic thing about the longing to matter--we can never be sure that we have chosen the right way to make our lives matter. But even if we can't conclusively know that we matter, we must somehow appease the longing to matter--perhaps by becoming a political cult follower--if we are to get on with our lives.
William James is an example of a heroic striver whose striving was for intellectual achievement in philosophy and psychology. But for many years as a young man, James could not identify the project that would make his life worth living, and consequently, he fell into long periods of persistent depression. He suffered such a disgust for life that he would lie in bed for days contemplating suicide. In 1860, at the age of 18, he became interested in art, and he spent a year studying with the prominent artist William Morris Hunt. But he decided art was not his calling, declaring, "Nothing is more contemptible than a mediocre artist." In 1861, at age 19, he entered Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard. But after three years there, without getting a degree, he switched over to the Harvard Medical School in 1864, at age 22. He received his medical degree in 1869, at the age of 27. But he never practiced medicine. And shortly after leaving the Medical School, he fell back into a severe depression, in which he felt a "horrible fear of existence" (127-132).
Finally, in 1872, at age 30, he began to teach at Harvard, first teaching comparative anatomy and physiology, and later teaching psychology and philosophy. At that point, it seemed that he had found his life's calling, although he continued to endure occasional bouts of depression. The publication of his book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890 made James the founder of American psychology. The publication of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in 1902 made him the first evolutionary psychologist of religion. The publication of his book, Pragmatism, in 1907 made him one of the founders (along with Charles Sanders Peirce) of the pragmatist tradition of philosophy.
These intellectual achievements arose from his conviction that he could decide what matters in life, and in that decision he could make his own life matter. As he once said, he could "believe in my individual reality and creative power." Or, as he said in his lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?": "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
Frank Meeink Tells His Story--From Neo-Nazi to Faithful Jew
Frank Meeink is an example of a group competitor who thought that his life mattered because he belonged to a neo-Nazi group of white supremacists who mattered more than the targeted groups--particularly, Blacks and Jews--whom he hated. He grew up in the brutal neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where he faced daily violence not only on the streets but in his home, where his stepfather regularly beat him and called him a retard.
Then, at age 14, spending a summer with relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he came under the influence of a cousin who was a neo-Nazi skinhead, who persuaded him to join a white supremacist group. Later, he explained:
They knew what to do and say to snag the interest of a fourteen-year-old half-Irish, half-Italian kid from Philly whose real dad was an addict, whose stepdad was an asshole, whose mom was indifferent, whose school was a war zone, and whose only real desire was never to feel like a fucking victim again: they gave a shist about me. The Lancaster County white sup0remacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become. Then they told me I had a destiny. They told me I could become a warrior. They told me all I had to do was look in the mirror and see the truth: I was white and that was all that mattered. . . . For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered (261).
By the end of the summer, he had earned the red shoelaces in his combat boots by having shed blood. When he returned to Philadelphia, he organized his own neo-Nazi group, and he became a charismatic leader. But at one point, he had so many warrants out on him that he was sure he would be soon arrested. So he left Philadelphia, and eventually ended up in Springfield, Illinois, where he organized a skinhead group.
But then, at age 17, when he was convicted of kidnapping and torturing another teenager, he was incarcerated for three years. In jail, he became friends with two Black inmates. When he was released, he found that he could no longer hate Blacks.
Out of prison, he was looking for jobs, but someone with his record had dismal prospects for employment. He was so desperate that he took a job with a Jewish antique dealer in New Jersey who needed someone to move his heavy merchandise. But when it came time to be paid, the boss was not around. Frank assumed that the Jew was going to jew him out of his pay--because he had heard people talking about jewing as what you should expect from a Jew. But instead, his boss paid him a little extra for his good work and offered him a full-time job. Now Frank could no longer believe the stereotypes about Jews.
One day, Frank accidently broke a piece of valuable furniture. He apologized for being so "stupid." But his boss became angry that he so often called himself stupid. He told Frank: "Listen hard to what I'm saying. Smart people can fake being dumb, but dumb people can't fake being smart. You are just smart. Get used to it."
Those words had a powerful effect. When Frank quotes these words today, he tears up. That was the beginning of his transformation. He explains: "When people started to talk to me like I was a fellow human, it changed everything. We have to start talking. It's human beings being human beings among human beings."
He became a cofounder of "Love After Hate," an organization that helps to rehabilitate people who have been members of hate groups. An avid hockey fan and player, he organized "Harmony Through Hockey," associated with the Philadelphia Flyers, to teach kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, from different racial groups, to play together on a team. He has also lectured widely about his life. And he has testified before the U.S. Congress about the threats coming from white supremacist groups--particularly, the police brutality that comes from neo-Nazis who have joined police departments.
So at that point, Frank's self-mattering came from his moral activism against racist hate groups. He had changed his location on Goldstein's Mattering Map--moving from being a group competitor to being an ethical heroic striver.
But then another change in his sense of how his life matters came when he discovered that he was Jewish! He talked with a rabbi who told him that Meeink was clearly an Ashkenazi Jewish name, and that Frank also looked Jewish. Frank then discovered that his mother's maternal gread-grandmother had been Jewish. Since Jewish identity is matrilineal by Jewish law, this lineage makes Frank Jewish.
Now, after years of studying Judaism under the instruction of rabbis, Frank has become an observant Jew. He frequently invokes Ha-Shem, which is a Hebrew word which means the Name. This is the way observant Jews refer to God to avoid violating the divine commandment against taking God's name in vain.
Now, as Frank goes through his day, he reminds himself to STAY--"stop thinking about yourself"--and instead think about serving Ha-Shem and praying to him at least an hour and a half every day to ask for his guidance.
He has changed his position on the Mattering Map again--he is not just an ethical heroic striver but also a Jewish transcender.
DONALD TRUMP AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON THE MATTERING MAP
Donald Trump is an example of an individualistcompetitor who thinks that his life matters only if he matters more than anyone else. That's why he becomes so angry when someone disagrees with him, challenges him, or just doesn't profess to love him as much as he loves himself. That's why he must hate every person who stands up to him or who does not bow down to him. That's why he can never have any friends because friends respect one another as equals.
When Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic interviewed Trump a year ago, they asked him if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. "The first time, I had two things to do--run the country and survive--I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world." A few days ago, Parker and Scherer reported that a Trump confidant had told them: "He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live."
For Trump, his life matters because he thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live--because he thinks he runs the country and the world--and therefore he matters more than any other human being who has ever lived.
Trump often compares himself with Abraham Lincoln. But while Lincoln was politically ambitious, his ambition was different from Trump's. Although Goldstein never mentions Lincoln, he is a good example of a political fame-seeking socializer whose noble ambition makes Trump's juvenile craving for attention look petty by contrast.
I have written about Lincoln's ambition and his suicidal depression when he thought that his ambitious strivings might never be fulfilled. For example, at age 32, Lincoln was plunged into one of his deepest bouts of melancholic misery while serving as an Illinois state legislator. He withdrew into his room in Springfield and stopped attending sessions of the Legislature. He considered committing suicide, and his friends removed all sharp instruments from his room. He spoke with his best friend--Joshua Speed--who later reported the conversation to William Herndon:
In the deepest of his depression, he said one day he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived; and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow-men, was what he desired to live for.
22 years later, shortly after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he reminded Speed of this earlier conversation about his ambition for doing something great so that he would be remembered forever, and he told Speed: "I believe that in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized."
Lincoln thought his life would matter if he could link his name to the vindication of the American principle of equal liberty by the emancipation of slaves. Trump thinks his life matters if he can exercise such absolute power over the world that everyone will be forced to pay attention to him.
THE MATTERING OF TRANSCENDERS IS SPECIAL
Goldstein does not rank any of the different kinds of mattering projects as better than the others. And she warns against the mistake of universalizing one's own mattering project by moving from "this is what most matters to me, if I'm to matter" to "this is what ought to matter to everyone, if they're to matter."
She does say, however, that the transcenders are special in that "there is no greater sense of mattering than that experienced by transcenders" (193). She explains:
To be a transcender is to believe that your personal existence has a role to play in the narrative of eternity. You would not be at all unless you had a role to play in the drama of all of existence. There is no greater mattering that you can conceive for yourself, short of imagining that you are yourself a transcendent being existing on an exalted plane beyond other mortals--in other words, short of lunacy. Compared to transcendent mattering, any other sense of mattering limps far behind, which again explains why psychologists keep producing data showing that the religious and spiritual report comparatively higher levels of life satisfaction (197).
What I see here is a suggestion of Goldstein's envy of the transcenders for having a greater sense of mattering than she does. Or perhaps it's a regret that she lost the transcenders' sense of mattering when she lost her ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith at age fourteen. As she reports in her book on Spinoza, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, she attended an ultra-Orthodox all-girls high school, where her favorite teacher--Mrs. Schoenfeld--warned the girls that they must never read Spinoza because he was a Jew who became an atheist. But then as Mrs. Schoenfeld described his atheistic philosophizing and how the Jewish community in Amsterdam had excommunicated him as a heretic, Goldstein felt an attraction to him: "The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man. I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld's class, and I felt that I loved him" (47).
Goldstein became a professional philosopher whose sense of mattering comes from her being an intellectual heroic striver who finds her life's purpose in achieving intellectual excellence. But she still feels some faint longing for that most intense sense of mattering that she once had as an ultra-Orthodox high school girl.
She hinted this in one of her conversations with Frank Meeink:
Frank asked me once about my own Jewish faith and observance. We were in an Uber returning from the quirky marina where his waterlogged boat is still docked.
When I come clean to him about my lack of religious belief and observance, he give me his lopsided grin and tells me that it's all okay, but he hopes I know I'm going to hell. (A joke. Frank doesn't believe in hell.)
Wait a minute, I say, grinning back. You of all people have got to believe in redemption.
"Yeah, you're right," he says. "Me of all people. I gotta believe in redemption even if it ends up killing me."
In my next post, I will argue that Darwinian Lockean liberalism supports Goldstein's theory of the Mattering Instinct.
