Meditation on a T-Shirt (Standing Up for Science, in Good Faith)

A really neat T-shirt on sale on the web says on its front,

            Earth Is Not Flat

         Vaccines Work

         We've Been To The Moon

         Chemtrails Aren't A Thing

         Climate Change Is Real

         Stand Up For Science

But if I were making a shirt for myself, I'd want on on the back,

         Teaching Flat-Earth v. Round-Earth Hypotheses Is a Fine Way to Introduce Kids to Scientific Method and the History and Philosophy of Science

         The Human Species Evolved Like the Other Species, and Is Contingent, Not Special

         In a Universe of "Billions and Billions of Stars," the Human Species Is Trivial

         If There's a Multiverse of Universes, the Human Species Is Really Trivial

         If the Human Species Is Trivial, You Certainly Are Nothing Special

         If You Eat Carrots, Let Alone Hamburgers, You Deny that Life Is Sacred

         Like the Carrot or Steer You Eat, When You're Dead You're Dead

         Belief that "in the Big Picture" Humans Have Value Over, Say, Sheep or Cockroaches Is Necessary But Absurd

         Stand Up For Science and Its Implications

Herman Melville's Ishmael (or just the Narrator of much of Moby Dick) tells us that "[…] the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. 'All is vanity.' ALL" (ch. xcvi, "The Try-Works"). In a bit more detail, and more modern language — "vanity" means "emptiness": "All is emptiness" and "a striving after wind" — Koheleth tells us that he looked deeply into the truth of things and "decided as regards men, to dissociate them [from] the divine beings," gods and angels, "and to face that fact that they are beasts. For in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing" (Tanakh Ecclesiastes, 3.18-19).

Since the Renaissance and increasingly since the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, scientific research has expanded the human-eye view of the universe in space and time and displaced us from the center of things. This is good for human humility — a virtue we generally lack — but it has its dangers.

Robert Ardrey tells is in his African Genesis about a theory that circulated for a bit in the mid-20^th century, on "The Illusion of Central Position" as the birthright of every human child. I look around, and I see that the universe revolves around me. "With maturity, however, the illusion is undercut and the child and then the man comes to a truer perception of his place in the scheme of things." 

Nonetheless the theory grants that should a man ever attain a state of total maturity — ever come to see himself, in other words, in perfect mathematical relationship to the tide of tumultuous life which has risen upon the earth and in which we represent but a single swell; and furthermore come to see our earth as but one opportunity for life among uncounted millions in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy as but one statistical improbability, nothing more, in the silent mathematics of all things—should a man, in sum, ever achieve the final, total, truthful Disillusionment of Central Position, then in all likelihood he would no longer keep going but would simply lie down, wherever he happened to be, and with a long-drawn sigh return to the oblivion from which he came. (145; ch. 6)

So let us Stand Up for Science and Truth — but count its costs and face the pain of the human position and condition in the real reality of such materialist truth.

Prayer-Book Meditation 2: Human Worth (∞ and Zip) [16 Sept. 2013]

            According to my prayer book for the Jewish High Holidays, the Hassidim of the 18^th century taught, "Keep two truths in your pocket, and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be: 'For my sake was the world created.' And the other: 'I am dust and ashes.'"

            I liked this teaching and intended to write on it, but my rabbi liked it more: she had cards printed up suitable for literally keeping in one's pocket.

            Realistically speaking — which for me means viewed in terms of post-Enlightenment science — realistically speaking, neither assertion is correct, but the "dust and ashes" one is closer to reality. We humans are the product of evolution and mostly water and microorganisms with unique DNA defining us as a species. Eventually we will all become like dust and ashes, but first we'll compost and become food for worms and putrefactive bacteria and such; meanwhile, though, it's more scientifically accurate to say something like, "I am a living variation on the theme of the primate, a larger but weaker chimp, with language and some other talents."

            The Enlightenment, however, is part of what the 18^th-c. Hassidic movement was in reaction against, and even on what Medieval Christian theologians would call "the Literal Level," the assertions are figurative: hyperbole with metaphor. Plus, when one talks of Creation and the purpose of Creation, one is in the world of mythos, not logos: stories of the sacred, not of logic.

            Most of all, though, the Hassidic teaching is of practical use, psychologically. That "need of the moment" for most of us, much of the time, is to be brought down several pegs — a point I'll return to — but for most of us also, some of the time, we need reassurance that we're somehow of worth.

            If you are Hassid, one of the pious ones, you can believe, fairly often, that the Creator of the universe loves not only the world and humankind but also you, personally, individually: "For my sake," in the wording of the card, "the world was created." Now such a belief is probably delusional, but to recycle an idea and a half from T. S. Eliot and Henrik Ibsen, "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality," and pretty much all of us need a "vital lie," starting with that idea that we and our lives are somehow significant.

            At least now and then, "the need of the moment" is reassurance.

            More often we need our gratuitous lies undermined: our cockiness, our arrogance, our inevitable but dangerous Illusion of Central Position; then, "the need of the moment" is to remind oneself "I am dust and ashes": in Modern terms, I am one of seven billion human beings living on a pretty but minor planet on the edge of a pretty but unexceptional galaxy in a universe doomed to the Big Crunch of final collapse or — if the currently less fashionable theory proves right — the Big Fizzle of the final entropic winding down. Or, if there are an infinite number of universes — then I'm worth even less, like approaching zero-value as a limit and pretty much arriving at zero.

            And with such thoughts in our hearts as well as our minds, take out the card and read, "For my sake the world was created."

COSMOS: Tyson, Bruno, and Despair (31 March 2014)

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            I'm writing this blog post pretty much while viewing the third installment of the new iteration of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, this time with Neil deGrasse Tyson as our guide on this "Spacetime Odyssey" (30 March 2014).

            I was a devoted watcher of and listener to the Sagan version, and so far I have enjoyed greatly the Tyson program and, I hope, I've learned from it.

            Still, I'll complain this far (excluding using a buggy whip with a buggy with horses to illustrate movement faster than the speed of sound, which I'll trust PETA to cover).

            Tyson presents Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) as a great martyr to science for his standing up for his belief in an infinite universe and standing up to the Inquisition and getting burned for it. Two things: first, Bruno was burned more for his heresy of pantheism — which got Baruch Spinoza in trouble later — than for his cosmology, and, second, he was, personally, something of an asshole: an unpleasant person who could have stayed out of Italy and (probably) out of the flames. The Inquisition was despicable because it tortured and killed people for all sorts of reasons, not just because one of them was the usefully radical thinker Giordano Bruno. (Galileo was a different story: he was naïve enough to go to Rome to speak Truth to Power, but sensible enough to shut up when Power showed him the horrible things they'd do to him if he didn't shut up.)

            Also I am definitely prejudiced against Isaac Newton after listening to Neal Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE novels, but even allowing for that I'll throw in that Tyson is soft on Newton and, so far in the series, unfair to Newton's opponent on the invention of "the Calculus," Gottfried Leibniz. Stephenson's fictional villain aside, Tyson understates just how weird some of Newton's ideas were. Newton's dedication to alchemy was a bit much moving into the 18^th century, and the guy was an oddball among exegetes of the Biblical Book of Revelation, and there's an impressively high bar for weirdness among people obsessed with Revelation.

            Far more important, Tyson usefully takes on Creationists, but, like most people arguing for scientific cosmology and world-view, Cosmos argues past the God-folks' major concern — and, therefore, argues a bit in bad faith.

            Tyson and Cosmos beautifully demonstrate how scientific thought has, so to speak, moved human beings from the center of the universe. To start with we have moved from the center, in terms of the physical structure of the cosmos as we usually think of it. After that, we have been decentered in terms of time. What scientific cosmography, cosmology, and — to warp a word's meaning a bit — scientific "history-ography" has done is show us that the traditional idea of human centrality is a natural enough illusion, but an illusion.

            And here I'll quote one version of several of my quotations of Robert Ardrey on what Tyson et al. don't get into with the human implications of that illusion.

         In African Genesis (1961), Robert Ardrey recounts a theory from the early 1940s: The Illusion of Central Position. According to the theory, this illusion "is the birthright of every human baby." A baby boy enters the world and "Bright objects appear for his amusement, bottles and breasts for his comfort. His groping consciousness finds no reason at all to doubt the world's consecration to his needs and purposes. His Illusion of Central Position is perfect" (African Genesis 144; ch. 6). With maturity, however, the illusion is undercut and the child and then the man comes to a truer perception of his place in the scheme of things.

Nonetheless the theory grants that should a man ever attain a state of total maturity — ever come to see himself, in other words, in perfect mathematical relationship to the tide of tumultuous life which has risen upon the earth and in which we represent but a single swell; and furthermore come to see our earth as but one opportunity for life among uncounted millions in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy as but one statistical improbability, nothing more, in the silent mathematics of all things—should a man, in sum, ever achieve the final, total, truthful Disillusionment of Central Position, then in all likelihood he would no longer keep going but would simply lie down, wherever he happened to be, and with a long-drawn sigh return to the oblivion from which he came. (145; ch. 6)

And we can add today that our universe may be only one among several or many or an infinite number of universes, and that whether our universe peters out through entropy or reduces to nothingness in The Big Crunch, our universe is doomed; so even if a human being gained galactic glory, that, too, would be, in terms of the Big Picture, fleeting.

            Now when I'm operating in scientific or scholarly mode, I am a good materialist (though recognizing that nowadays even the concept of "matter" is problematic), and I accept a universe of, in Carl Sagan's words, "billions upon billions of stars" and galaxies; and I would like every human being on Earth to accept that universe. But that mode of scientific thought is responsibly realistic only when the "hard" sciences are combined with the "softer" ones dealing with human beings as such, and with philosophy.

            Human beings need myths of human significance, or Buddhist techniques of embracing nothingness, or instruction in a bracing philosophy like atheistic Existentialism that starts with human insignificance, moves into despair such as Ardrey describes, and then tries to carry on. What we don't need, what is acting in bad faith, is expanding the universe infinitely beyond human scale and then failing to deal with the human implications of such ultimately philosophical moves.

            There are theistic Existentialisms and other philosophies where one takes a leap into the absurd and says God exists and functions and for some mysterious reason cares about the physical universe and maybe consciousness down to the minute and trivial level of human beings. Such beliefs are respectable, I think, so long as one robustly admits the leap of faith there, and insists on its absurdity. What annoys me is ignoring the problem or — what Tyson is not guilty of but some are — what annoys me is people holding in contempt a leap into absurd faith in God while asserting the downright lie that we humans, in terms of The Big Picture, are somehow important or that human life has value beyond that which we have chosen, egotistically and arbitrarily — and necessarily — to assign it.

            Carl Sagan is one of my heroes, and I strongly respect Neil deGrasse Tyson, Seth Macfarland, and the other people responsible for the new Cosmos. But I hope someone on local access or in a very small niche market gets out a money-losing, unpopular show on Cosmos and Chaos and the Human Implications of a Rigorous Materialism.

            Nowadays to assert the literal truth of creation myths such as the two in the Biblical Book of Genesis is to lie and to lie ignorantly and arrogantly. To accept the Cosmos concept of the universe as, to put it gently, unproblematic for human worth and dignity, is also to lie.

            I'm a life member of the American Civil Liberties Union and condemn the Roman Catholic Church for their condemnation of Giordano Bruno and prosecution of Galileo Galilei; to punish people for beliefs and speech is to do evil. This much, though: in Bruno even more than Galileo, the Church sensed danger, and, that far, in the long term — for secular Humanists as well as for religious folk — they sensed correctly. 

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ADDENDUM, 1 Jan. 2018: Tyson does get into human smallness, but in a cheerful, upbeat way <http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/01/01/neil-degrasse-tyson-brings-astrophysics-down-to-earth>.