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| Art by Jim Kazanjian |
It’s often said that the scientific way of thinking is
counterintuitive. Worse, the mathematical analysis of nature is alien and
incomprehensible to those of us who haven’t mastered that language or who
aren’t in the habit of thinking within the bounds of an austere standard of
precision. Scientific knowledge is hard to acquire not just because there have
been so many discoveries in the last several centuries, that delving into even
a fraction of modern knowledge overloads the human memory capacity. On top of
that and more importantly, the math-centered form of scientific thinking is estranged from the heuristics that
make up our innate logic that’s responsible for our intuitive, snap decisions.
Those genetically-preprogrammed cognitive rules give us a head-start in the harsh
business of surviving but also blind us to the nature of cosmic reality. Our
on-board techniques for coming to grips with the world are suitable for reading
each other’s minds and climbing social ladders, as well as for interpreting useful
terrestrial rhythms such as the cycles of night and day and the four seasons,
but not for fathoming chaos, quantum mechanics, or dimensions beyond space and
time. Early modern scientists made a heroic effort, based in part on the
antisocial leanings of geniuses like Isaac Newton, to develop an inhuman method
equal to the task of modeling the remote universe that’s perfectly indifferent
to the emergence of life.
We fall in love with each other, losing ourselves in
emotional bonds to the point that we risk being blackmailed as we strip off our
clothes and carry out sex acts that are banned in public spaces to preserve our
presumed dignity. That’s the extent of our preference for the familiar social
world. How alien, then, must be any form of cognition that encompasses the
ocean beyond the puddle that we call home! How alienated from our native
feelings and biases must we become even to entertain the antihuman thought that
the entire saga of our historical comings and goings is peripheral to universal
reality! And what madness must we court to study the undead shuffling of
natural processes, to deprive ourselves of the comfort of trotting out our myopic
metaphors that are so many gauche shout-outs to our brothers and sisters in the
‘hood of humanity!
Anthropocentrism: the Myth for Human Happiness
Anthropocentrism is
our original sin. It begins with the clueless egoism burning in the tiny
heart of every child, passing into the fragile pride of each toddler who’s
indignant whenever he or she is told “No.” We all enter the wide world unable
even to form the conception that anything could be other than ourselves. Everything from Mother’s milk to Mother
herself and the toys we play with are thought of as parts of our craving. We
demand this or that and we receive it as a matter of parental necessity or else
we throw a tantrum. In effect, as children we perceive every event as being miraculous,
because we don’t separate cause and effect in our imagination: everything
happens in the orbit of our self-centered expectations. Even after we pass the
trials of teen disenchantment, when puberty compels us to long for the Other,
in a morass of lusts and other hormonal intoxications, when we grow into
independent adults, we still rely on those childish habits of thought. We carry
our self-centeredness with us in the theistic delusions of our exoteric
religions, when we live with the knowledge of our certain death by spellbinding
each other in our collective hypnosis, daydreaming that physical death is
illusory because the spirit lives on for eternity in the House of the Lord. With
our cities’ light pollution that blots out the far-flung heavens, we facilitate
the illusion that the world revolves around us, as though by enveloping
ourselves at night in those electric screens we were telling each other, “Keep
moving, keep consuming; there’s nothing to see here”—no infinite void all
around terra firma, for example, which likely surpasses even scientific
understanding so that all our preconceptions about the worth of what we’re
doing would eventually be laughed off as so many naive fairytales if only they
could be remembered across the generations. Instead, the vain, wishful
narratives that contextualize our lives, in which we’re invariably the starring
attractions, will pass into obscurity, nullified by the outer void after the
curtain call on our species and on our epoch.
But those examples are just some usual suspects of our inborn
self-centeredness. In fact, the very happiness
which psychiatrists call the goal of normal human functioning depends on a kind
of tenuous stability, called sanity, which is impossible as long as we occupy
the view from nowhere that allows the world’s impersonality to seep into our
consciousness. Objectivity, the understanding of something as having no
subjective qualities is a paradoxical perspective that depersonalizes the
knower and the known together, rendering her robotic and functionally amoral.
It’s akin to the aesthetic stance in which we ignore our personal
preoccupations and allow something’s givenness to wash over us so that our
reaction to it flows from our unconscious side and helps reveal our authentic
self. Unless we actively suppress our inclinations and thought routines, and
think logically which is to say universally, objectively, and thus inhumanly, such as when we carry out
some scientific or technical analysis to get at the facts by interpreting the data
with minimal regard for our preferences on the matter, we’re playing the animal
game of thinking or acting out of self-interest; we’re attempting to succeed
according to some conception that, at best, merely rationalizes the pointless
flow of genes.
You might be thinking that the insanity of being wholly out
of touch with reality would be useless for evolutionary purposes, since some
knowledge of facts is necessary to our survival and procreation. But the
knowledge that suffices for evolutionary success has nothing to do with
objectivity. The “facts” you need to know to avoid falling down a cliff or to
help you identify a potential mate aren’t universal or fundamental. When we
behave as genetically-driven higher primates, we don’t describe the world as an
indifferent deity would or even as would an extraterrestrial intelligence in
the midst of conducting an experiment on us. Instead, we think of the world
pragmatically, interpreting things in terms of their instrumental relevance, or their being “ready-to-hand,” as
Heidegger put it. We view the cliff not in terms of its geological composition
but as a danger, and we construe the
potential mate not as an individual in his or her own right, but as the object
of our desire, as something to be won over to complete us as though that person
were put on earth to make us happy, as we’re wont to romanticize. The innate ways of thinking that are
evolutionarily most useful generate only practical conceptions that are one and
all anthropocentric.
By contrast, the inhuman knowledge that issues from
objectivity is likely detrimental to the genes, at least in the long run,
because it threatens all life with extinction. In fact, objective knowledge of
reality is as accidental and anomalous as the emergence of life. Certainly,
technoscientific know-how and industrial manufacturing have extinguished most of
the wild animal species that have been unfortunate enough to have been thrown
up by their genes in the Anthropocene. And we have the power now to slaughter
each other in a world war the effects of which would be measured in megadeaths,
thanks to the inventions of nuclear and biological weapons. Only the
anthropocentric presumptions at the base of the myths of liberal humanism make
the use of such weapons taboo. A purely rational, objective people could easily
resort to such weapons of mass destruction, since they wouldn’t labour under
the feel-good sentiment that humans have special rights in the animal kingdom. This
means that we currently survive in spite of
the fearsome power flowing from objectivity, because we’re seldom ruthlessly
detached and logical and we eagerly succumb to the childlike, magical thinking
that makes us happy. Again, unless we resist our natural tilt towards
self-glorification, our everyday conceptions presuppose that humans are central
to the universe, that the world owes us a fulfilling life. So-called normal human functioning is thus categorically (as opposed to
instrumentally) irrational, not because we’re ignorant of the means to achieve
our personal goals, but because those goals themselves stem from an
embarrassingly-false picture of the world in which we each truly matter.
The Horror at the End of Objectivity
Still, anthropocentric
normality in both its secular and religious guises passes for sanity, because a
deeper madness awaits those who override conventional wisdom and attempt to see
the world as it really is. Witness the stock character of the mad scientist such as Victor Frankenstein, Emmett Brown from Back to the Future,
Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, and numerous others from movies,
television, and comic books. The prototypical wise person was the shaman who
ingested psychedelic substances to shock himself out of his profane, pedestrian
worldview to formulate more fundamental truths. That rough form of antihumanity
would just as often mislead with projections of subjectivity in the form of
so-called gods and other spirits, as it would enlighten by decentering the
self. Next, there were magicians and occultists, saints and mystics who
professed to prove that mundane, consensus reality is itself a trick, by
performing or experiencing miracles made possible by a glorious, hidden realm.
To those forerunners could be added priests and other bureaucratic officials of
organized religions who merely speak
of such miracles, attributing them to greater spirits. In all such cases, the proof of wisdom was a bout of religious
ecstasy or the faith needed to believe in a promise of such ecstasy in the
afterlife. Then those occult figures morphed into the one-dimensional
scientist. Again, Newton is the link between them, although his esoteric side
is less well-known than his narrowly scientific one.
Notice, though, that the madness that ought to accompany
scientific understanding, which is credited still in the pop cultural caricature
of the mad scientist, became politically risky as scientists found themselves
at the center of world-spanning industrial enterprises. No one wants to
entertain the suspicion that the serious businesses that elevate our material
living standards are powered by the ravings of madmen. Sure, we’re titillated
by anecdotal confirmations that therapists and physicians are
disproportionately narcissistic, such as when we’re faced with the bizarre
character of Ben Carson in his brief starring role in the American political
spectacle. The popular comedy show The Big Bang Theory pictures young
scientists and engineers as only harmlessly mad, owing to their arrested
development. In any case, scientists and
engineers have learned to hide their quirks and to compartmentalize their
modern, secular form of ecstasy which is best characterized in terms of such
existential burdens as angst, dread, and an all-encompassing sense of the
absurd and the tragic.
One technique for erecting such mental barriers is scientism, the prejudice against
philosophy, artistic interpretation, and the search for meaning in general. If
all such interpretations in the humanities departments are just woo, meaning
frivolous opinions unwarranted by logic or strict adherence to the evidence, the
latter virtues being the mainstays of scientists and engineers, then the
madness of envisioning the world as composed entirely of objects, having no
purpose or intelligent design or any prospect for divine rescue from
annihilation, is of course postponed. After all, the mad scientist doesn’t
merely pursue evil schemes of world domination, but is driven to them by a mental
break from traditions of morality and religion, of family and community which
are the bedrocks of sanity for the anthropocentric masses. In turn, those
traditions are subjective articles of faith and value, and so the act of
leaving them behind is no mere mathematical calculation, but a comparable leap
of faith, albeit one into an inhuman
way of life. Indeed, neither the “sanity”
of anthropocentric ignorance nor the insanity of cosmicist awe is a matter of
strict rationality. No one proves
that humans are central to all beings or that the contrary scenario is dire for
our social conventions: logic and observation take us only so far, but they
don’t justify our ideals, goals, or stubborn convictions. Thus, the faith-based
insistence that the philosophical or religious search for meaning doesn’t
matter because it’s not scientific is an attempt to preserve the scientist’s or
the engineer’s peace of mind, despite that individual’s having no recourse to happy
anthropocentrism or to world-weary nihilism. The scientismist can’t be content
with the former because she knows too much about nature, and she can’t fall
into existential depression because that would be bad for business. So she
maintains the conventional happiness she shares with the unknowing folk, even
while she employs and often prizes the objective outlook, and she does this
under the cover of some halfway house of denial.
Interestingly, while
the embarrassment of common anthropocentric conceits is foreshadowed by the
crazed self-centeredness of children, the limit case of inhuman objectivity is
the subcriminal psychopath’s amorality, which is stereotyped by the mad
scientist. Children best display the arrogance of presuming that we’re each
a crown jewel of natural creation. Likewise, the predators who usually dominate
our social systems, owing to the latters’ tendency to become corrupting, are the
quintessential outsiders burned by their embrace of the antihumanist’s
objective worldview. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that the rules
that bind society are arbitrary and anomalous compared to nature’s evident
impersonality, and you don’t have to understand the mathematical formulas that
zombify our endeavours to feel alienated from the herds of frail, childish
lemmings that need mental crutches to feel happy. To be sure, the psychopath is a
monumental egotist, but his selfishness isn’t based on a conviction that the
world cares whether he lives or dies; instead, it’s a reaction against knowing
that the world is fundamentally a cold and indifferent place. The psychopath
doesn’t care about society, because he embodies nature’s indifference; thus,
all that remains to drive his activities is the genetic preoccupation with his
individual survival. This amoral avatar of nature’s heartlessness doesn’t feel
that he deserves to rule the world, because he has no feelings to take the leap
of faith that could generate that or any other value judgment. Whereas children haven’t yet developed powers
of reasoning and thus can only feel their
unparalleled worth, the supervillains who manage our most powerful institutions
have only the capacity for objective calculations, and so their amorality
represents nature’s cold-blooded regularity. The genius who’s forced into
madness, who makes a Faustian bargain for knowledge and pays for that curiosity
with a soul-destroying vision, takes a tragic route to an antisocial endpoint.
But that endpoint is found also by the psychopath who reaches that plateau from
another direction: the scientist only
learns about nature’s inhumanity, while the psychopath lives it.
What, though, do we see with objectivity? What does the
world look like when we understand we’re not integral to its development? Of
course, the details of scientific theories supply the full answer. But for an
analogy, recall your days in school as a teenager, when the boundaries between
cliques and castes were stark. Were you one of the popular kids who
participated in extracurricular activities, who had many rich, healthy,
physically attractive friends, who did well enough in schoolwork to gain the
status and knowledge for a successful career, but not so well that you were
ostracized as a nerd? Or were you one of the freaks? Were you an unpopular
outsider who resented being picked last in sports or in dating and who rebelled
against the whole social order for teens, by ridiculing the unfairness and
superficiality of that order’s recipe for success? Were you so obsessed with
learning, that puberty passed you by like a silly, irrelevant ad on TV? The
popular kids never feel alienated because their identities and deeds delimit
the holy ground that’s untouchable by the flawed lower classes. You can’t feel
like an outsider if no matter what you do, most everyone else wishes they could
have done it, because you incarnate the community’s ideal. The popular kids are
inescapably insiders because they can’t step outside themselves and everyone
else wants to be them. By contrast, short of some miraculous transformation, the
outsiders can’t be cool because they can only long to be perfect.
But weirdos and
losers have an inside track on understanding the objective status of the human adventure.
If you can recall sitting at home while the popular kids enjoyed the prom, if
you lusted after one of the beautiful people whom you could no sooner touch
than you could survive an impact with an ethereal angel, or if you longed to
have the privileged life of one of the cool kids, congratulations! You have an
affinity for knowing what it’s like to be outside the world’s orbit. Like the
noble deeds of our high schools’ upper echelons, the universe proceeds with its
phases and amplifications, with its complexifications and peregrinations which happen regardless of our lack of consent
or our absence. Like the voyeuristic outsider who steals glances at the revered
little aristocrats as they stroll down the hallways, we can peer into nature’s
depths to glimpse a fraction of what’s been happening long before our emergence
and of what will continue to transpire for unimaginable ages after we’ve
fizzled out of existence. We’re all
freaks as far as nature is concerned. To
understand that objectivity is the root of cosmic horror is to realize that our
show isn’t the whole of the universal one, and that what we do—whether in our
public or our private lives—doesn’t even adequately represent what nature does
at large. All our striving to learn and progress, to live well and to pass
on our knowledge to the next generation amounts to a side show that’s far
removed from the drama unfolding on the main stage. We have to read the tea
leaves of images transmitted by telescopes to discern the barest outline of the
incomprehensible complexity of what’s occurring on trillions of other,
preposterously distant worlds. And we can detect only the remotest aftereffects
of what’s happening in fundamental reality, such as what may be the vibrations
of one-dimensional strings that give rise to particles, but that are much
smaller than a person compared to a person’s size in relation to a galaxy. (If
a person occupies the 100 meter order of magnitude, the Milky Way is
1021 meters, while the subatomic length shrinks to 10-35
meters.)
“So what?” you might be thinking. “We have our stage and the
rest of the universe has its colossal platform. So be it!” But the abyss
between insiders and outsiders does negatively impact the latter. In the case
of teenagers, the issue is largely that the losers are jealous of the winners,
because some teens are better than others according to conventional standards.
By contrast, the cosmic show isn’t exactly better than the human one, although
we could compare them by saying, for example, that natural forces are much more
creative and destructive than are living things. However, that sort of
normative judgment has no place in the objective conception of our place in the
world. Objectively, what we have is a
vast difference in scale between the
intergalactic course of events and the blip that will be coextensive with all
of human history. Being on the
vanishingly smaller side of that value-neutral comparison, we’re still
positioned as voyeuristic freaks in relation to the universe. And if we set aside their understandable
jealousy, the teenaged underclass still can offer us insight into the horror at
the end of objectivity. The unpopular kids are often so much worse than the
popular ones that their difference becomes a division between types rather than
just degrees. The two classes are alienated from each other, since they live in
different worlds. What would it have been like to make out with the prettiest
girl or the hottest boy in school? The shunned losers can only dream of it, but
the contents of those dreams will be pitifully irrelevant, deriving as they do from
Hollywood fables. Unless they somehow switch their social status, losers can’t
know what it’s like to live as a winner. They can watch John Hughes films and other
romantic comedies, but those scenes are obviously staged. The loser can’t know
what it’s like really to be desired by a god or goddess, for example, because
the gods and goddesses cavort on Mount Olympus which is inaccessible to mere
mortals.
That difference in worlds which is bridged mainly by the
negative estimation that you’ll likely be on only one or the other side calls
into question everything that’s dear to you if you find yourself to be a
disadvantaged nobody in school rather than a cool kid with an edge in life. Next
to the rich, beautiful, popular teens, the opposite ones are nonentities. Thus,
they’re mocked and bullied so that they learn their position at the bottom of
the pecking order. While the teachers spout feel-good lessons of equality,
merely by mouthing empty words, the children learn through much more memorable
experiences that winners are unequal
to losers. The unpopular kids know they’re conventionally inferior, but they sense
also that their inferiority is absolute and that to persist in the shadow of the
greater beings they must distract themselves with pathetic fantasies. Jealousy is only the beginning of an
existential dread of having gods and goddesses in your sight to confirm your
metaphysical lowliness. Likewise, we know the universe is so much larger
than our world that it’s no longer even meaningful to suggest that we occupy a
central or a pivotal role in nature. There’s so much else that’s out there,
that our smallness becomes a constant embarrassment because we tend to cope
with our objective status by telling tall tales such as the panoply of
anthropocentric myths. Just as the
unpopular kids have movies that caricature the higher realm, and just as they
take voyeuristic glances to taunt themselves with evidence of their insignificance,
we generally have the capacity for objective, impersonal reflection on the fact
that our world is as though it were nothing. Our ability to objectify doesn’t make us adequate to the universe,
doesn’t make us less puny. Instead, our science is like the spycam installed in
a lady’s toilet or in a hotel room by some dejected pervert caught in a
downward spiral of self-loathing: instead of exciting him in some sustainable
fashion, the illicit images—like all pornographic navel-gazing—further
establish his worthlessness. The more you’re reduced to spying on others as
they enjoy what you crave, the more you must wonder whether that practice
demeans you even more than the act of having sex for money demeans the porn
stars. With our understanding, then, that the world is fundamentally physical
and impersonal, we learn just enough to appreciate that we too are inherently
vain, gullible, feeble creatures, and we begin to question the wisdom of our rational
enlightenment.
Coda for Aristocrats
For the illustrious alphas who may be reading this and who grew
up as privileged, esteemed kids in school, I should qualify my remarks on the
analogy between the teenager’s dominance hierarchy and the abyss between nature
and the alienated rational observer. While the popular kids are indeed typically
superior in various ways to the uncool ones, those advantages are short-lived or
fraught with peril. Privileged teens become spoiled and weak, and power over
others degrades the dominator (as well as the dominated). So we should expect the
inner life of a full-fledged aristocrat to be as vacuous as a stone’s. The rich
kid’s upbringing in elite institutions won’t refine her feelings or deepen her
character so much as it will establish a sophisticated façade to cover for the
psychopathy which accompanies her rise to power. We idolize the power elites
even when they have the coarseness of a wild animal, as in the case of Donald Trump.
We might as well anthropomorphize the moon.
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