A Pilgrim’s Creed

Recovering meaning in an age of cognitive migration

…the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.
- G.K. Chesterton

In 1467, soon after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman empire, the Balkan village where my family’s ancestors came from is mentioned in an Ottoman tax register. By the early 1900s, that empire itself had fallen and died, and my grandfather had left the village and was on a steamship headed for America, where he got a factory job in Detroit.

Back then it was a common practice to seek one’s fortune in a distant land, although it was never intended to be permanent. Men went away, worked for a year or two in the Western industrial Machine, and returned with bags of money; back to families, farms, orchards, tobacco fields, yards of chickens and pigs.

Here is a snapshot of daily life in that village circa 1916, about ten years after my grandfather was born.

Life was hard as a mud brick. If the journey to a distant land was a pilgrimage, it was not a spiritual journey but a practical one.

Eventually everyone left the village on that practical pilgrimage, and never came back.

The place is nearly abandoned now, with a smattering of residents who live among the crumbled, ghostly remains of those mud brick dwellings. There is no sign of any Ottoman tax collectors, nor any remnant of the prior East Roman empire, except for an Orthodox church on a hilltop, maintained by donations from overseas. The money is still arriving, mostly in digital bags, but no one is arriving with it.

If nobody is going back, why send the money? Perhaps it is a feeling of loss and a struggle to hold onto a source of meaning.

People left because they wanted a better life, which seemed possible only in the West with its abundant wealth; but by leaving, they had to risk losing a deep-rooted identity that was bound up with the land of their ancestors, their houses of worship, and tightknit community.

It was a bargain of sorts: more wealth in exchange for less meaning.

This trade-off between wealth and meaning is consistent with research, as reported by the Stanford Graduate School of Business:  

People with more money may be happier, but people with less money view happiness as tied to a sense of meaning — the belief that their life has purpose, value, and direction. And, remarkably, that connection is consistent across much of the world.

The study authors suggest that people with access to “external” sources of happiness—the things that money can buy—do not have to rely on an internally constructed sense of meaning and purpose to be happy.

The opposite may hold true for people of lower income. The less money we have, the more we might experience practical and emotional strain, which can force us to make sense of our difficulties through meaning, for example in religious faith or through human relationships.

My grandfather was an economic migrant to the West, as were most of the villagers when they began leaving the old country permanently around the 1960s. At the time only about a third of the world’s population lived in cities. Today, that number is approaching 60%, and by 2050 it is expected to reach almost 70%.

As this global economic migration continues, it will be inextricably tied up with the pursuit of money-happiness, and potential declines in traditional meaning.

This decline might not be immediately apparent, as traditional cultures moving into Western society often replant their traditional sources of meaning inside it, like potted plants, where they can thrive for a time. That was the case with my own family and those who left the old country.  

We built big new churches, where we met with big extended families, and at home we had big gardens. I remember all of these clearly from my boyhood—sitting on Sunday mornings under the central dome of the church, where Christ Pantocrator looked down on the nave, which was so packed it could have been a rock concert; playing with innumerable cousins and relations after the liturgy, in a massive multi-roomed banquet hall amid high-heeled women and bluish clouds of cigarette smoke and men debating politics over gin and tonic; and our garden, with its peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, onions, watermelons, apple tree, cherry tree, peach tree, and a grapevine for making red wine—a garden so big that we joked it could feed an army, with still enough space to play in the grass or find a spot to bury a dead budgie. Amid all this, I felt wrapped in warm abundance, never alone, and always belonging—and I took it for granted, knowing nothing else.

Big family, big garden, big church: these roughly correspond to Kingsnorth’s trio of people, place, and prayer, which he suggests are the ideal main cores of a society.

In the case of my family, the transplantation of these cores of meaning out of the old country and into civilization was, in retrospect, a middle stage to ease the transition into a mostly Western mode of life.

By the present day—some fifty years later—not many go to church regularly and cousins don’t see each other as much, if at all. Some still garden, and make wine and jar spicy peppers, although they tend to be the older generation.

Meanwhile everyone, even my own octogenarian mother, is on social media. 

Which brings us to technology. If money provides us with money-happiness at the expense of meaning, what does technology do?