The upside of monotonous labor is
the time provided for contemplation, if you're into that sort of thing. This
may be a sentence to hellish boredom for people who have little to analyze or
wonder about, but I savored it. Five years washing dishes at a small local
restaurant had offered me many long a productive hours of this sort. I’m not
the first to realize that creative juices flow less viscously when the body is
occupied in repetitive labor of the sort that can be completed on autopilot.
(For some, a long walk might suffice.) This is why I began looking forward to
busy work nights, bringing a small notepad to help remember what came to mind
on evenings like this one.
I was mulling over something I read
in Douglass Adams' outrageous and insightful science fiction novel The
Restaurant At The End of the Universe. Zaphod Beeblebrox is captive and
being shuttled into the Total Perspective Vortex, which he is told will kill
him. The Total Perspective Vortex was created by a man named Trin Tragula in
order to annoy his wife, who always told him to "have a sense of
proportion." In his usual absurdly humorous tone Adams writes,
“And
into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of
fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned
it on she saw in one instant the whole of creation and her relation to
it.
To
Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his
satisfaction he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a
universe this size, then one thing it can not afford to have is a sense of
proportion.”
Unlike the limp fall characteristic
of victims' usual exit once the machine's door is reopened, Zaphod sprang out
like a flower on an April evening and ate the fairy cake with delight. The
reason he survived, he is later told by Zarniwoop, is that he is actually
inhabiting an artificially constructed universe (made by Zarniwoop) that was
made specifically with him in mind. He concludes by confiding that "[y]ou
are therefore the most important person in the universe." In the real universe, Zaphod is assured, he
undoubtedly would have perished.
Adam’s style makes quick reading
and tempts you to move on past this ageless insight because of his ability to
communicate it with innocuously absurd humor. Our sense of proportion haunts
us, especially as we have discovered so much more about the literally
incomprehensible immensity of the universe.
Homo sapiens carries
the burden of needing to feel a sense of meaning, which is not a burden shared
by other animals insofar as we can tell. Not in the same way, at any rate. This
need has historically been in conflict with our increasing understanding of
reality, the limits of which have been expanded far past the alleged firmament.
Its known limits have retreated to distances so great they can hardly be
comprehended by us except in the form of numerical measurements. These limits
may be pushed beyond the universe itself, if the multiverse theory is correct.
This contradicts what common sense tells us is possible, but so do many other
things we now take for granted. Its worth echoing the theoretical physicist and
cosmologist Lawrence Krauss’s reassurance, that if common sense were enough to
understand the universe, we’d have no need for science.
Appreciating the size of the
universe necessitates acknowledging our cosmically insignificant
position. We're capable of terrifying influence locally on our own planet,
but not cosmically. Yet despite what many worried minds believe, our
unimportance to the amoral universe and our inability to significantly
influence its fate is not itself the issue. The issue is the emotional reaction
to this observation. People often react to cosmic insignificance with
unenjoyable emotions and blame the insignificance itself rather than their own
method of interpreting it. The irony there is that after a moment of shedding
our anthropocentric view of reality to understand humanity’s position within
it, you discover only a moment later that you are knocking your head over what
consequences this understanding has for your view of self. In other words, we
are back to assuming we are so important, or ought to be at the very least.
Marianne Fredriksson's novel Simon
and the Oaks opens and answers this curiosity with beautiful brevity.
Simon and his new acquaintance, the mysteriously felicitous and prophetic
trucker named Anderson, are sitting atop a large rock, which Simon compares to
the Rock of Gibraltar, overlooking Sweden's Lake Vättern. Anderson begins the conversation,
'Isn't it odd' he said, 'that all knowledge
from the outside has you believe that you're nothing but a fly spot on the
universe? But what comes from inside insists that you're everything and have
everything.'
Simon
hadn't given that any thought. He pondered for a moment before answering. 'I
suppose its some instinct for survival persuading you that you're so damned
important."
Spoken like someone with a firm
grasp of evolution, his explanation makes sense. The takeaway is that we are
saddled with this natural inclination for better or worse. One of the chief
tasks of Homo sapiens is to continuously recreate the stories
it tells itself about its existence in light of newly discovered facts of
reality, and doing so in a way that confers a feeling of importance and a
comfortable sense of control. Professor Youens put it more succinctly to Lip
Gallagher in the television series Shameless. "We have only
two jobs on this earth. The first, to learn. The second, to cope." The
alcoholic professor may not be a proper model of the best coping mechanism
however.
The most human way of coping is
through stories that make us feel our lives have meaning. Religion has long
done this, and has in fact done a good job in sedating people when their
discomfort arises. The Abrahamic religions even declare that, in the eyes of
God and therefore the universe, our existence is paramount. They create an
imaginary universe in which we, like Zaphod, are the center, and are protected
from the vulnerability we feel when afforded with a sense of proportion. Today,
increasingly more people reject the trappings of organized religion but adopt a
vague belief in "something greater" for the reason that it makes them
feel better. Need I explain that the benefit a belief may bring to the person
or group that believes it is not evidence for the truth of that belief? The
evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein gave an example (in a slightly different
context about how false beliefs can be adaptive) of believing a porcupine can
shoot out its quills. It can not do this, but believing it can will seriously
decrease the believer's likelihood of approaching a porcupine close enough to
be quilled in the first place. The belief may serve a purpose, but it is still
false.
What I am building to is that a lot
of time and energy is spent worrying about one's feelings and especially one's
sense of meaning in life. We exert extraordinary effort just so we might feel
comfortable with our own existence. We are but poor players who strut and fret
our hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more. Is there any confusion
about what Shakespeare meant when he concluded that "Its a tale told by an
idiot?" This indictment can be taken cheerfully if you, like myself,
believe that the death of your brain is the end of your consciousness and
anything meaningfully "you." Raising your consciousness to be aware
of the idiocy of the tale as commonly told should couple with an understanding
of your imminent destruction and allow you the beautiful privilege of
perspective. Perhaps you’ll one day gaze back on a long life lived, or you’ll
too soon cross that hair’s breadth between you and death. If looking back, what
will you feel you have wasted time and worry over? Where could you have been
more kind, more attentive to the stories of others? If your end comes tomorrow,
or next week, or next year, what would you most regret having squandered your
precious time and happiness over now? Considerations of this kind turn many
troubles trivial as you decide what matters most to you.
Lifetimes of scientific inquiry
have revealed a poetic aspect to our existence that also ought to be kept in
mind. We are not separate spectators observing the universe, we are the universe.
We do not reside within it but arise from it. Echoing Carl Sagan’s fond phrase
that we are all “starstuff”, Lawrence Krauss explained this in a 2009 lecture
on A Universe From Nothing in a
manner necessary to include in full. He said,
“Every atom in your body came from a star
that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different
star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about
physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded,
because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that
matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time.
They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them
to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget
Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
The obvious conclusion is that
insofar as we learn about the world and everything outside it, as many have
said before, we are at least one example of the universe knowing itself.
Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene that
"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the
reason for its own existence." Could a similar statement be made about a
universe "coming to age" when it first becomes aware of its own
existence? If so, we are on the forefront of that coming of age tale, and its
author is no idiot.
