I woke up this morning pondering whether the Universe is intrinsically unfolding in the direction of Goodness and Truth, those Platonic ideals which every human being ought to, however imperfectly, pursue.
The orthodox reductionist-materialist answer would presumably be no. The Cosmos has no direction in the moral sense. Matter and energy behave according to impersonal laws; stars form, burn and fizzle out; planets coalesce around them; chemistry becomes sufficiently complex for life to emerge. Eventually, here on our rocky planet, the conditions turned out to be just right for one particular species of primate to start asking “what does it all mean?”.
But the rationalist will argue: there is no meaning, because there is nobody or nothing doing the meaning. That we are here, they say, is simply stochastic happenstance, the consequence of sufficient time, sufficient complexity and the right roll of the cosmic dice, one roll out of trillions.
And yet our current theories of physics contain a number of fundamental quantities which seem remarkably hospitable to human-level complexity. Change the relationship between gravity and electromagnetism just a touch and you change the sort of stars that can exist. A tiny change in the nuclear forces and stellar nucleosynthesis leaves the Cosmos too poor in the heavier elements from which planets, chemistry and living things are made. Alter the relative masses of elementary particles just a smidgin and you affect the stability of protons and neutrons. Tweak the cosmological constant too much one way and matter flies apart so fast that galaxies can't form; tweak it too much the other way and the cosmos implodes in on itself.
This is the fine-tuning problem. It's not evidence of Divine fingerprints on the control panel, but it does make you think. Within our current understanding of physics, a universe capable of producing stable stars, complex chemistry, planets and ultimately conscious organisms appears to be miraculous. A one in a trillion-trillion chance.
The anthropic principle provides the obvious response. We live in a universe compatible with observers. If it were not compatible with observers, nobody would be around to observe it! Proponents of the multiverse hypothesis would contend that an unimaginably large numbers of universes exist, each with different physical parameters, nearly all of which are sterile. We're just fortunate enough to live in a universe that isn't – and therefore one that contains observers that can observe its existence.
And then comes the question that interests me still more. Our Universe has produced matter that is alive, stuff that feeds and breeds. Life is matter that can experience consciousness. Consciousness that is aware of being able to contemplate the Cosmos (just stare up at a starry sky to see what I mean). And also, we have evolved into beings capable of recognising Goodness and Truth.
Now time for a crashing change of gear from cosmology to human history. Are we as a species progressing towards ultimate Goodness and Truth? I realise as I write this that my thinking on this subject has been inspired by a talk with the pessimistic British philosopher, John Gray, with whom I found myself disagreeing profoundly. Over sufficiently long timescales, I think humanity is on a course towards Goodness and Truth. The path, of course, is neither smooth nor linear and is marred by appalling reversals; we need to be able to take a longer-term perspective
Homo sapiens has existed for around 300,000 years. For almost all that time we lived in small groups as hunter-gatherers. Around 12,000 years ago, in several parts of the world independently, human beings started cultivating crops, domesticating animals and building settlements.
Hunter-gatherers did not live as prelapsarian innocents; archaeology gives us abundant evidence of interpersonal killing and sporadic outbursts of group violence long before agriculture. Humans didn't invent violence along with the farm. But agriculture changed the way that violence was organised and channelled.
For the first time on any significant scale there were fields that could be seized, borders that could be disputed, livestock that could be stolen and stores of grain that represented many months of accumulated labour. A wandering band carries relatively little portable wealth. A farming settlement may contain enough stored food to sustain hundreds of people through the winter. There was now something worth raiding and therefore something worth defending.
Settlement also meant larger populations. Larger populations produced hierarchy, division of labour, inherited status and, over time, organised political power. Violence could cease being merely a quarrel between individuals or a raid between neighbouring groups and become something planned and collective on an ever-greater scale.
Archeology has unearthed enough fortified settlements, massacre sites and evidence of repeated organised conflict to prove that the Neolithic was the period in human history in which violence was dramatically scaled up. This is confirmed by several genetic studies that have identified a sudden reduction in Y-chromosome diversity after the adoption of agriculture. At one point, 8,300 years ago in the Near East, the inferred effective number of reproducing males relative to females became extraordinarily small – around one male lineage for every seventeen female lineages. When one clan defeated another, it didn't just mean the deaths of a few dozen random individuals: an entire cluster of related Y-chromosome lineages could be wiped out, while successful male lineages expanded dramatically. To the victors, literally, the reproductive spoils. Kill all the men, enslave all the women.
But killing, plunder and rape were not the only way. Another possibility gradually emerged in the Neolithic – trade.
Instead of taking what the other clan possessed by killing its menfolk in war, it turned out that exchange was a superior and risk-free way of obtaining what a given clan may need or want. Trading grain for pottery, wool for metalwork, wine for timber, and yes, livestock for slaves.
Trade requires something uniquely human; the recognition that the other clan has its own interests. “I may dislike you, distrust you, worship another god and speak an incomprehensible language, but if we can agree on the value of an amphora of olive oil, cooperation becomes more profitable than robbery, and without the risk of violent death.”
Unfortunately, as civilisations became more sophisticated, our reasons for killing one another also became more sophisticated. Territory and plunder remained and remain reasons to this day, but religion, dynasty, ethnicity, nationalism and political ideology could supply a grander casus belli.
Yet civilisation also invented mechanisms for restraining violence; law and legal contracts, upheld by courts; the notion of citizenship; governments; diplomacy, and the rules governing warfare. Multilateral institutions. Human rights. Property rights. “What's mine is mine, not yours, unless you pay me an agreed price for it.”
None of these mechanisms is anywhere near perfect, and each can collapse. And each one can be used as a smokescreen behind which the powerful continue doing what the powerful have always done. But the continued existence of these mechanisms is crucial; the fact that these mechanisms have survived and evolved over the centuries do suggest an upward arc of progress.
A critical inflection point bending the arc of history away from barbarism and towards goodness was Christ's injunction to love your neighbour as yourself – indeed, to respond to the stranger with empathy rather than aggression or indifference. And the spread of that idea into mainstream customs and laws.
The philosophical pessimist, however, sees a different pattern predicated by human nature. “We are status-seeking primates organised into hierarchies, inclined towards tribalism and perfectly capable of murder when circumstance licenses it. History therefore moves in cycles. Empires rise and fall. Peace is merely the interval during which exhausted combatants prepare for another war.”
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times” – the memetic quote is from G. Michael Hopf's 2016 novel, Those Who Remain, and is widely quoted as evidence for a cyclical model of history.
But history doesn't move in circles that loop back to exactly the same place. I rather think that history moves in spirals. Sometimes it can spiral downward for a whole generation. Sometimes there's no up or down motion for a century. Some societies are on a steady upward path while their neighbours decline or stand still.
Yet observe mankind long enough, and the spiral moves upwards and outwards, encompassing ever more goodness and truth, squeezing out the evil and the lies.
Knowledge and wisdom accumulate, as does a sense of ethical morality, and the understanding of the necessity for empathy within any society that functions smoothly. The understanding of the Prisoner's Dilemma – that in the long term it is better to get on with the Other rather than trying to cheat them – is crucial. Cheating only works in the short term.
In the past, until not so very long ago, slavery, torture, racial supremacy, religious persecution, aggressive conquest and the legal subordination of women have all been considered acceptable by sophisticated civilisations. They have not vanished, but increasingly they require justification, concealment or outright denial. Today, a tyrant won't announces: “I'm invading my neighbours because they are weaker than I am, and I want their resources.” He will make up some historical grievance, or claim self-defence or hold a referendum invoking national ideology.
Hypocrisy may be the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but the very need for hypocrisy (just listen to Sergei Lavrov lying through his teeth) tells us that over the centuries, standards have changed. Even out-and-out tyrants have to pretend to be the goodies.
The rules-based international order suffers setbacks. Civilisations regress. Evil persists, particularly when political systems fail to prevent psychopaths from acquiring enormous power.
But a mere twelve thousand years of civilisation is as nothing; our species is 300,000 years old! Earth is 4.8 billion years old! The Universe is 13.8 billion years old! Cosmically speaking, human intelligence (as opposed to consciousness) is in its infancy. We do not know how humans will evolve over the next ten thousand years, let alone another million. Nor do we know what consciousness may already exist elsewhere. Or even here.
I cannot derive Goodness from the cosmological constant, nor Truth from the strong nuclear force. Fine-tuning doesn't prove God, but then neither does the anthropic principle disprove God, and human history certainly doesn't prove a inexorable law of moral progress. My claim is philosophical rather than scientific; to me, the trajectory is strongly suggestive.
A universe initially containing apparently nothing but energy and elementary particles produces stars. Stars manufacture heavier elements. Those elements produce planets. Chemistry starts to happen on those planets, chemistry which becomes biology. Biology becomes capable of consciousness. Intelligent beings evolve that start to ponder why they exist – indeed, why anything exists.
Why should a meaningless Cosmos give rise to life capable of perceiving meaning? Why should a morally indifferent universe produce sentient creatures capable of coming up with the idea of moral perfection and judging themselves against it? None of these questions proves teleology, but then I don't think it's irrational of me to intuite one.
Plato's ideals of the Good and the True are more than fancy inventions dreamt up by some Greek bloke two and half thousand years ago; I believe that they're an integral part of our fundamental reality.
History repeats – it rhymes – it's cyclical. But looked at from sufficiently far away, I think the circle is moving. It spirals, raggedly, often painfully, upwards. Give it a few more millennia. And my faith, for that is ultimately that's all it is, is that Goodness and Truth are somehow baked into cosmic teleology.
Whatever happens next in our own short-term perspective, the ultimate destination – in the scale of billions of years – is divine perfection. From Zero to One.
This time last year:
Strange, storm-crossed sky
This time six years ago:
God and gratitude
[what a meaningful synchronicity...]
This time seven years ago:
Defending one's country is a costly business
This time 14 years ago:
Back to work
This time 15 years ago:
Clinging onto summer – cycling to Powsin
This time 16 years ago:
Composition in blue and yellow
This time 17 years ago:
Z-9
This time 18 years ago:
My favourite aircraft
This time 19 years ago:
Утомлённые солнцем
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