Rivka Weinberg's "The Meaning of It All"

Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of The Risk of A Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible. Weinberg specializes in ethical and metaphysical issues regarding procreation, birth, death, and meaning.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time, and reported the following:

In a book as ambitious as The Meaning of it All, which is a book that explains what Ultimate Meaning is (it's the point of leading a life at all), what Everyday Meaning is (it's the meaning in our everyday lives), what Cosmic Meaning is (it's the meaning of our role in the cosmos) and how death and time relate to meaning (death much less than has been claimed, time much more than has been noted), page 99 turns out to be a page on which a narrow point is made. It is therefore not the best sample page if you are looking for a page that gives you a good idea of the book, since this book addresses big, broad, deep, and important matters. But page 99 will suffice to demonstrate that the claims made in the book are well argued, with specific premises that lead to their conclusions, and that even the narrower points are of interest.

Page 99 of The Meaning of It All addresses the view that significance – how much something matters – is only relative to other things. On this view, our cosmic significance would be greater if we were the only intelligent beings in the universe and lesser if we weren't since significance is relative: "the broken knuckle on your finger is insignificant when you've also been shot in the face" (that's from page 98). So we should hope that we are the only intelligent beings in the cosmos because that would make us more cosmically significant.

I dispute this on page 99:

This perspective neglects intrinsic significance, which does not depend on how many things there are that can be considered similar to you. Although there are billions of people in the world, Kahane is wrong to conclude that we are each, therefore, “terrestrially insignificant” because significance— how much something matters— has both an intrinsic and a relative component. There’s no shortage of people in the world, “plenty of fish in the sea,” yet each person matters. Each person, like Walt Whitman, “contain[s] multitudes”; each person, a world, because each person has unique, untransferable, unfungible, and intrinsic value. You can’t kill a person and claim you did something insignificant because there are billions of other people. There is an intrinsic kind of significance, just as there is an intrinsic kind of value because how much something matters cannot be divorced from its value. Generally, the more valuable something is, the more significant it is: the more it matters if you lose it, destroy it, ignore it, create it, nurture it, etc. Intrinsic significance doesn’t disappear no matter how widely you pan out— even as far out as the entire cosmos—because it is inherent in the thing itself. Therefore, since we are intrinsically significant, we are significant wherever you find us. In this way, we have cosmic significance because we are significant in and of ourselves, and therefore significant anywhere, including the cosmos within which we reside. Does this make our lives more Cosmically Meaningful? I don’t think so because it doesn’t change how significant we are. It just reflects a fact about where that significance is located: in the cosmos.
[footnotes omitted]

This discussion tells us that even though we are intrinsically cosmically significant, that doesn't add a lot of meaning to our lives because it doesn't seem very different from our earthly significance, so what does it add, really?

And this challenge runs throughout the book's chapter on Cosmic Meaning. If we assume all the miracles in the world, what kind of meaning would that give us? How meaningful would it be to commune with god in the afterlife or enjoy heavenly bliss? Probably not very meaningful because, think about it: heavenly bliss sounds more like a drug trip than a meaningful experience, and communing with god probably gets old too. Why? How? Well, for that, you'll have to read the other 176 pages.

Visit Rivka Weinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacques Berlinerblau's "Can We Laugh at That?"

Jacques Berlinerblau, Rabbi Harold White Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, is author of The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography and How to Be Secular. His writing appears in The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

Berlinerblau applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age, with the following results:

If you opened to page 99–first of all, thank you, I really appreciate your interest–you’d be in the thick of a discussion about the French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala. What a fascinating and unsettling character he is! For more than two decades running he has been making jokes about Jews and the Holocaust. Page 99 reviews some of that material.

Page 99 would give you some indication of what this book is about, namely jokes that set the world on fire. But it would not really give you a sense of the scope, depth, and dare I say, majesty, of the arguments contained within We Can’t Laugh at That: Comedy in Conflicted Age. Sorry Ford Madox Ford (OMG is that really his name?) but your test just kinda sux. What my 99th page doesn’t reveal is the word-and-thought-defying complexity of the free speech tensions that comedy ignites in the digital age. FMF, my thesis is that some tectonic shift is taking place in the domain of free speech and for whatever reasons comedy calls attention to that shift (and exacerbates all of its attendant tensions).

This is a book about how jokes lead to outrage, cancellation, deportation, mass violence and even geopolitical conflict. Whether it’s Dave Chappelle lighting up the trans community, Vir Das denouncing India’s ruling BJP party, or Zimbabwean comedian Samantha Kureya mocking the brutality of her government, the responses to such quips are fast, digital and furious. They also raise some really difficult questions about free speech and how much of it we can allow in a digitally interconnected world where some people don’t “get” the joke

Visit Jacques Berlinerblau's website.

--Marshal Zeringue