How to Live a Meaningful Life

with Peter Boghossian

Earlier this year, while teaching a seminar at the University of Austin, I met the author Peter Boghossian, who invited me onto his podcast. Our conversation ran the gamut from systemic racism to social policy to the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, which had not yet come down at the time we recorded. Peter also asked me a number of more personal questions about family and life itself, as you’ll see in this clip. (You can watch our full conversation here.) I wanted to share it with you here, because it gave me the opportunity to talk about the things that make my life meaningful that aren’t captured by my roles as an economist and a commentator on race and politics.

It seems that every day brings some new crisis in the world that demands our attention, concern, time, and energy. Some of these developments are indeed significant, and we’d do well to heed them. But in such an atmosphere, it’s too easy to lose track of what is important to us; that is, what makes us who we are. I tell Peter, “I want to learn. I want to grow.” That means expanding the horizon of what I include in my life by tending to my wife, children, and grandchildren and trying to get outside my own necessarily limited perspective through immersing myself in the ideas and experiences of others.

I only have one life to live, and I try to make the most of it. That means drinking in as much of the world as I possibly can, exposing myself to as much of it as I can. I’m still excited by discovering new ideas and new corners of the Earth, and I’m still awed when I think of all that my grandchildren will see in their lives. But on this, my 75th birthday, I recognize that I still have so much more to see and learn myself.

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This is a clip from an episode of Peter Boghossian’s podcast. To get access to the early episodes of The Glenn Show, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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PETER BOGHOSSIAN: What do you think is important that your grandchildren know, not about you, but about life?

GLENN LOURY: That they can make their own fate and it's up to them, that the ball is in their court, that the world is their oyster, that they are amongst the most privileged people ever to have walked on the planet. That living in good faith, dignity, self-honesty is vitally important. That respect, honor, and the good opinion of your fellows is worth seeking and is not something that anybody can give you or do for you. It's something that you have to earn for yourself. That the possibilities are unlimited here in this great country that we are here in the United States fortunate enough to be citizens of. That the spiritual questions are profoundly important and a long way from being self-evident.

You know, we could talk about religion. I'm not especially religious in terms of a denominational commitment or whatever, but I think the meaning of life is worth pondering and is not trivial. Something like that.

Would there be meaning in your life absent to God?

Yeah. I'm not at all certain about the existence of God.

Where do you derive meaning in your life?

I'm going to say work. I'm going to say family. Self-command. I'm a recovering drug addict. I'm a recovering born-again Christian. I think there's more going on in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in my given philosophy. So I'm on a quest. I want to grow. I want to learn.

What do you want to learn about?

I want to learn about how people deal with the problems of life. I'll tell you a book that I'm reading right now. It's called A Certain Ambiguity. It's by two Indian mathematicians. It's a novel. I don't remember their names, to be honest with you, but the book wouldn't be hard to find. A Certain Ambiguity.

And the question of the book is, is there anything that we can know for certain? The narrative pits an atheist South Asian mathematician against a Christian, a decent, fair-minded establishment figure in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Jersey.

The mathematician happens to be visiting in the United States. He says publicly that he doesn't believe in this Jesus stuff, and the local townspeople take offense and they have him arrested for blasphemy. And the decent, believing Christian judge who is charged with adjudicating his case enters into a dialogue with him, and the whole book is about this dialogue. Should he be punished for blasphemy because he's offended the townspeople by declaring that this Jesus stuff is bunk? His reasons for declaring that Jesus stuff is bunk is that there's no proof. There's no logic to it. It's just pure faith.

He doesn't believe in what he can't demonstrate, and he makes his case by going to Euclid, the Greek geometer, and saying, “Here's how you demonstrate stuff for sure. You start with axioms and you deduce.”

Now, the Christian, decent burgher, the judge, wants to have as an axiom that there is nothing without a cause. No thing exists without it having been caused. From that he's going to deduce the existence of God. And therein lies the argument between the Indian mathematician and the judge.

Along the way, some of the great accomplishments of mathematics, Georg Cantor's dealing with the paradoxes of the infinite, for example, are exposited. And the reader of the book is transported—I am transported. I'm transported in time back to a pre-World War I or just immediately post-World War I America. I am invited into an intellectual disputation that is rich and deep and resonant, and I'm taken out of my own place and time and I'm elevated. I'm edified. Edification, I guess, is what I'm really looking for. My spirit is enhanced.

These are big ideas. These are profound reflections that are illustrated in this little novel that I'm talking about. This is not Dostoevsky that I’m talking about, but I love the playfulness, the inventiveness, the creativity, and I can sit and read this novel. This is just one that I happen to be reading right now. I like reading novels, among other things.

Another recent nonfiction work that I've encountered … and I'm answering you. You ask me, in effect, what do I find meaningful in life? What I'm saying is reading books I find meaningful and taking myself out of my time and place and out of my immediate concerns and absorbing ways of thinking that I would not have ever come to on my own.

What was the nonfiction book?

I was going to mention another book, Reza Aslan, author of this biography of Jesus that was very widely read some years ago called Zealot, has a nonfiction book about an American missionary, a student of Woodrow Wilson's at Princeton, a man called Howard Baskerville. He's a Presbyterian missionary who goes to Persia in 1907 and takes up residence there at a mission teaching Mohammedans, the Muslim residents of Tabriz in Persia, 1907, on the eve of a revolution in what is now Iran, in which the people demand from the Shah, who's a hereditary monarch, a constitutional assembly, a parliament, a voice in the governance of the country. And the Shah resists and violence breaks out and there's a revolution and Howard Baskerville gets caught up in it.

Anyway, to make a long story short, Aslan, in this biography of Howard Baskerville teaches me about the constitutional upheaval in Iran before the First World War in a country that I knew nothing about, a culture that I knew absolutely nothing about, about the mentality of a person who would travel from, I think Baskerville is originally from like North Dakota or Montana or something like that. He comes to the East Coast. Christian, a Presbyterian believer. He's at Princeton and he's imbibing the spirit of the time there and he gets absorbed in this mission work.

And this is so far from my day-to-day life. I mean, I'm elevated by just taking all of this on.

I love that word, “elevated.” So it's not just “transported,” which is a kind of parallel, neutral term. It's “elevated.”

Well, so it feels to me.

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