Affording A Sense Of Proportion

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.