By Wayne Allensworth
Militant atheists love to play the scale card in their fervent arguments for meaninglessness, which always exempts their own opinions. Yet if their theories are correct, their opinions are also meaningless. The argument goes like this: Our planet and humanity are tiny specks in a vast universe that renders us terrifyingly insignificant in the vast scheme of infinity. It’s an argument that doesn’t quite work, as one could easily turn it around. If anything has become apparent since the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe became widely accepted, it is that the Anthropic Principle is hard to get around. The chances of a vast number of events in cosmic evolution taking place at just the right pace, just the right temperatures, to produce the universe and life are so infinitesimal as to be impossible to dismiss as mere chance. Gravity, for instance, is just strong enough to have prevented the universe from collapsing back into itself.
Fred Hoyle, one of the leading astrophysicists of the 20th Century, was an adherent of the steady state theory, which posited that the universe simply always was, that there was no point of the universe coming into being, no creation. Scientists like Hoyle seemed very uncomfortable with the idea of an event like the Big Bang, and all those troublesome and highly unlikely events that followed, as it implied a creation and a Creator. It implied purpose, and thus, meaning. Hoyle once wrote that mankind had “scarcely a clue” as to whether “our existence has any real significance.” What seemed to upset Hoyle, however, was that the notion of a purposeful and meaningful universe seemed to diminish his significance.
However hostile he had been to the Big Bang and all that it implied, Hoyle and cosmologists like him were forced to change their minds in the 1960’s as a torrent of new evidence undermined the steady state theory. As it turned out, the scale of the universe was just right, not too big, not expanding too fast or collapsing back into itself, to form planets and produce life. Scale mattered, but context had to be considered as well. Taken in context, considering the specifics, the picture looked very different.
What we see and experience depends on both scale and context. As we, the collective observer, move from the scale of “large objects,” those large objects vanish as we approach the molecular level, then the atomic, and, as we approach ever smaller levels of scale, subatomic particles. The observer would have to back away, so to speak, from those ever vanishingly small entities to perceive the whole — a human body — for instance, though at each level of perception what is observed is a wholeness, a gestalt, of its own. In quantum physics, depending on how an experiment is conducted, photons can appear as either a wave or a particle. In the first instance, we observed varying scales. In the second, we need context — how the measurement is made. The meaning, the conclusions we make, are shaped by scale and context.
A mountain range appears to us within the context of time, which we experience as duration, as a static object or series of objects. If we could back up the development of the mountain range, however, then play it in fast forward, what we would see would be a wave. The mountain range rises, erodes, and eventually is gone. The mountains are the “particles,” the seemingly static objects we observe in our frame of reference. They are slices of a bigger reality that is moving and changing, albeit at a pace we can barely perceive. What lies just beneath the surface of our everyday perception of reality as a collection of separate “things,” is not static at all, but a universe constantly in motion, constantly changing while at the same time maintaining a certain distinctness of the entities we perceive that are simultaneously part of an inter-related whole. This is time and being, or becoming, as motion. Think of a river, which Heraclitus supposedly said no one could step into twice, as its waters were constantly moving, yet it remained that river.
In a social context, I recently wrote about what we could learn about human relations, identity, modernity, politics, morality, and ethics from The Godfather. Don Corleone is a criminal in the eyes of the larger American society in which he and his clan-based Cosa Nostra “family” are embedded. That society was rooted in Anglo-Saxon law and framed within a unified state, which in theory extended equality before the law, adjudicated disputes in courts, and maintained the state’s near monopoly on violence. If we shift our focus, changing the scale and context of how we view that story, the Don is a highly ethical man within his world. To paraphrase Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, the most moral Comanche warrior who observed all the unwritten rules of his society could also torture and rape captives from outside his tribe or band without compunction. The most ethical Texas Ranger could summarily hang Mexican bandits without a second thought, as they were outside his society — outside its constitutional, one might say, protections.
In the context of the frame of reference modern Americans have adopted, our government can launch undeclared wars, bomb foreign lands thousands of miles from us, and kill on a scale Don Corleone could hardly imagine. Yet we accept it. We walk a moral tightrope. As Christians, we profess and, if we are conscientious, attempt to live by the Golden Rule, which I would define as treating all other human beings decently and considering their humanity. Of course, we have family and national ties to consider as matters of priority, and responsibilities as parents and brothers and sisters to consider. We have moral precepts and laws to consider. Context matters. Thus, I felt some sympathy for the position of Don Corleone, as well as for Michael’s identity dilemma. In the old America, Union and Confederate veterans attended reunions with each other respectfully, with due regard for the duties and courage of their one-time foes. The last Comanche war chief, Quanah, was called “Quanah Parker,” as he was half white. He undoubtedly participated in all the depredations the Plains Indians inflicted on vanquished foes. But he commanded respect, even honor, from his one-time deadly foes.
These are ways of being — dispositions — with which post-modern people struggle. Our sports heroes nowadays taunt and attempt to humiliate their opponents as often as not. Radical individualism has diminished our sense of mutual obligation and fair play that made civilization possible. Even our military has sometimes stressed individual job opportunities and self-realization — “Be All You Can Be” — over honor and duty. In a world without boundaries, we forget that they have a purpose. They provide context and set a scale with which to cope with the vagaries of human existence. Boundaries and a sense of context individuate us within the larger flow of existence of which we are a part. Entrapped by what Iain McGilchrist has so brilliantly revealed as a certain way of perceiving reality — via a narrow, specific, Left Hemisphere way of perception so prevalent in a techno-industrial society — we have lost an ability to see reality holistically, and to consider that reality within its peculiar context and at its proper scale so we can integrate those into a wider view.
We call that wider view “wisdom.”
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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