The fatuous idea of a single order amidst the multifarious diversity of modern life flows from our conventional iconographies of the prejudices that nurture them - the ladder of life and the cone of increasing diversity. By the ladder, horseshoe crabs are judged as simple; by the cone, they are deemed old.* And one implies the other under the grand conflation...- down on the ladder also means old, while low on the cone denotes simple. I dont think that any practicular secret, mystery, or inordinate subtlety underlies the reasons for our allegiance to these false iconographies of ladder and cone. They are adopted because they nurture our hopes for a universe of intrinsic meaning defined in our terms. We simply cannot bear the implications of Omar Khayyams honesty: Into this Universe, and Why not knowing, Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing: And out of it, as Wind along the Waste I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. A later quatrain of the Rubaiyat proposes a counteracting strategy, but acknowledges its status as a vain hope: Ah Love! Could you and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits - and then Re-mold it nearer to the Hearts Desire! Most myths and early scientific explanations of Western culture pay homage to this hearts desire. Consider the primal tale of Genesis, presenting a world but a few thousand years old, inhabited by humans for all but the first five days, and populated by creatures made for our benefit and subordinate to our needs. Such a geological background could inspire Alexander Popes confidence, in the Essay on Man, about the deeper meaning of immediate appearances: All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good. But, as Freud observed, our relationship with science must be paradoxical because we are forced to pay an almost intolerable price for either major gain in knowledge and power - the psychological cost of progressive dethronement from the centre of things, and increasing marginality in an uncaring universe. Thus, physics and astronomy relegated our world to a corner of the cosmos, and biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape. To this cosmic redefinition, my profession contributed its own special shock - geologys most frightening fact, we might say: by the turn of the last century, we knew that the earth had endured for millions of years, and that human existence occupied but the last geological millimicrosecond of this history - the last inch of the cosmic mile, or the last second of the geological year, in our standard pedagogical metaphors. We cannot bear the central implication of this brave new world. If humanity just arose yesterday as a small twig on one branch of a flourishing tree, then life may not, in any genuine sense, exist for us or because of us. Perhaps we are only an afterthought, a kind of cosmic accident, just one bauble on the Christmas tree of evolution. What options are left in the face of geologys most frightening fact? Only two, really. We may, as this book advocates, accept the implications and learn to seek the meaning of human life, including the source of morality, in other, more appropriate, domains - either socially with a sense of loss, or with joy in the challenge of our temperament be optimistic. Or we may continue to seek cosmic comfort in nature by reading lifes history in a distorted light. If we elect the second strategy, our maneuvers are severely restricted by geological history. When we infested all but the first five days of time, the history of life could easily be rendered in our terms. But if we wish to assert human centrality in a world that functioned without us until the last moment, we must somehow grasp all that came before as a grand preparation, a foreshadowing of our eventual origin. The old chain of being would provide the greatest comfort, but we now know that the vast majority of simpler creatures are not human ancestors or even prototypes, but only collateral branches on lifes tree. The cone of increasing progress and diversity therefore becomes our iconography of choice. The cone implies predictable development from simple to complex, from less to more. Homo sapiens may for only a twig, but if life moves, even fitfully, toward greater complexity and higher mental powers, then the eventual origin of self-conscious intelligence may be implicit in all that came before. In short, I cannot understand our continued allegiance to the manifestly false iconographies of ladder and cone except as a desperate finger in the dike of cosmically justified hope and arrogance. I leave the last word on this subject to Mark Twain, who grasped so graphically, when the Eiffel Tower was the worlds tallest building, the implications of geologys most frightening fact: Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him* is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the worlds age, the skin of pain on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent mans share of that age; anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno. *Twain used Lord Kelvins estimate, then current, for the age of the earth. The estimated ages have lengthened substancially since then, but Twains proportions are just about right. S. J. Gould,
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 23:18:51 +0000
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