When did living morally and with purpose become a faddish life?

Here’s another story to put you to sleep. Literally this time. According to Monday’s Post, “the secret of a good night’s sleep may be having something worth getting out of bed for the next day.” Which seems a characteristically modern case of putting the cart before the horse.

Don’t get me wrong. I try to get eight hours a night. I fail consistently, but as Franklin said, the man who’s aground knows where the shoal is. Sleep is very important, and being frantically busy and tense is bad. But here’s the weird thing. The story actually started, “It is said that a clear conscience makes the softest pillow, but the secret of a good night’s sleep may be having something worth getting out of bed for the next day.” And it went on to say that sleep is important especially as you get older because, “Sleep problems are associated with many illnesses, including Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, heart disease, diabetes and even colds and flu, so promoting better sleep could help overall health.”

Now wait a minute. Is the idea here that by somehow deceiving myself that life has meaning I can stay pointlessly alive longer? It seems so. Senior author Jason Ong, an associate professor of Neurology at Northwestern University in Illinois, said, “Helping people cultivate a purpose in life could be an effective drug-free strategy to improve sleep quality, particularly for a population that is facing more insomnia,” and also that, “Purpose in life is something that can be cultivated and enhanced through mindfulness therapies.”

For that matter it’s possible that as science rumbles on it could be cultivated and enhanced through improved psychotropic drugs, better “tranquillizers” and “uppers” and so forth. Dr. Ong seems to have the purpose in life of reducing the use of drugs, even ones that aren’t fun. But why? If it’s all about avoiding anxiety so as to sleep better what’s the argument against doing it with pills, provided they work? And more fundamentally, how did we get to the point that the good life was defined essentially as a sleep aid? Passing out isn’t exactly knowing thyself, now is it?

In days of yore, when operating systems were unknown, people sought purpose in life for its own sake, not as a lifestyle aid, asking questions like “Why am I here?”, “What does it mean to live a good life?”, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and “Aaaaaah is that Genghis Khan?”

It wasn’t all gravy. I’m not blind to some of the drawbacks of ye olde days, nor ignorant that the “y” in “ye” is actually a “thorn,” a diphthong pronounced exactly like “th.” But I digress. The point is that we live in an upside down world, materialist and reductionist, where purpose in life is an aid to health not the other way around.

Even Francis of Assisi, scornful of material possessions, wanted his material legs, arms and even stomach working so he could go about doing good. But if you’d told him to do good so he’d feel good he wouldn’t have regarded you as wrong but as demented. Arguably with reason. The Post article also said Canadians do seem to get enough sleep on average, which means someone somewhere is getting about two of mine a night and is probably overdoing it and becoming sluggish and unwell. But in Britain more than a third of people sleep less than six hours a night which, typically, the article blamed on things. Well, it blamed “modern life.” But that turned out to mean “Light pollution and glare from smartphones and tablets mimic daylight, disrupting the release of melatonin, the rest hormone, and altering our sleep patterns. Health and lifestyle problems are also known to affect sleep, including obesity, excessive alcohol and sugary drink consumption, smoking, lack of activity, mentalhealth problems and stress at work.”

No doubt these are all things people are doing to themselves with pernicious consequences. But why? Isn’t a frantic, unexamined, unsatisfying, hedonistic life a symptom of something deeper being wrong? Isn’t it possible that people are tossing and turning through oldfashioned “long dark nights of the soul” because something important is missing? And by that I don’t mean some artificial purpose conditioned into you through “therapies.” I mean real purpose, something grounded not in our navels, health needs or quantitative studies but in the structure of the universe, something arising from objective moral law and binding us to do our best and be content with those things to which a combination of duty and accident call us?

Now you can call it therapy if you like. I suppose seen from below, from the reductionist biochemical standpoint of modern medicine it can plausibly be described thus. But you know what it really is?

Right. A reasonably clear conscience. Weird, huh?