The universe is monstrous

I read recently in the newspapers that according to Stephen Hawking, the Higg’s boson, that is responsible for the existence of all matter, is an unstable particle. Apparently, it could quite easily break down and cease to function altogether, at some point, in a rapidly expanding universe like this one. If that happens, human beings, everything around us and everything that human beings know about, would just disappear, like that, without warning. This seems to me to be without a doubt the ultimate natural disaster scenario: goodbye, game over, problem solved.

So far as I can tell, this is just the latest in a long series of possible, end of the world disasters that the world’s leading scientists have been communicating to the rest of us over the past few years. Some of them are at the level of the entire universe, but most of them are concerned with smaller entities such as our own solar system, our own biosphere, or our own species. The one that seems to have been around the longest is the idea that our solar system is full of assorted space junk, such as asteroids, and that any one of several thousand pieces of rock, much larger than the ones that burn up in the atmosphere most of the time, some of them known and others unknown, could come crashing into the Earth at some point. Any reasonably large piece, such as the one that presumably wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, could easily eliminate all the larger animals on this planet, including all humans.

Another well-known scenario involves the Sun, which is inevitably going to explode several million years from now. In the meantime, a much larger sun storm, or giant flare, than the ones so far observed, could presumably happen at any time. A very large incident could wipe out our biosphere, but a more medium sized event could eliminate modern communications systems, plunging us humans back into a pre-industrial kind of world, not at all conducive to supporting the lives of seven billion people, and counting.

On the Earth itself, one of the most frequently mentioned disaster scenarios is the eruption of a super volcano, like the one lying underneath Yellowstone Park. That particular volcano apparently explodes every 300 000 years or so, and is now long overdue. The enormous pollution caused by that giant explosion would presumably bring about another kind of biosphere disaster, possibly by setting off a new ice age, or some other, equally unpleasant, event.

There are also quite a few more such scenarios of natural origin, even before the conversation turns to disasters of human origin. What makes all such natural events so monstrous is not that the whole universe, or the local solar system, or just this particular planet, somehow feel like doing something bad to human beings. The natural world has no feelings, nor does it think. Anthropomorphic theories have never impressed the world’s scientists, who are at least theoretically immune to any kind of religious nonsense, or belief in magic.

It is only the existence of sentient beings, all the ones known to us currently living right here on Earth, that make any of these scenarios potentially monstrous. This is the case not only for most other animals, who are definitely sentient, but particularly for humans, who are presumably the only animals capable of envisioning the universe beyond any particular natural habitat. Only in a monstrous universe, or at least a section of it, could thinking animals like ourselves possibly be threatened by such incredibly disgusting disasters. The natural universe is monstrous precisely because sentient, thinking animals like us could all be wiped out at any time, with no regard whatsoever for our feelings or our thoughts. Not just one person at a time, which is everyone’s future, but all humans, or at least quite a few of them, at once.

Why have people gradually evolved to the point that they are capable of realizing the situation they are in, when that situation could be, and some day probably will be, so incredibly horrible? This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so many different civilizations invented all those comforting, infantile, anthropomorphic, religious fantasies in the first place. Those human beings who think a bit more deeply, and rationally, than their religious cousins do, still have to put up with the fact that there is no way out of this fundamental, ontological dilemma. Rational humans are forced to realize that everyone lives in a truly monstrous universe, even though many people are not capable of dealing with such a thought.

But the horror of that grown-up acceptance of reality is certainly compounded by the equally mortifying realization that a large percentage of the human population does not utilize its theoretical capacity for free will. Inventing religious traditions is just one of the ways in which millions of people behave like the objects in space mentioned earlier, pushed into current trajectories by enormous forces, and unable to change direction without some other equally enormous counter-force, intervening from outside their own limited attention spans. Their incredibly strong devotion to tradition and to ultra-conservative ways of thinking, indicates that they are really much too terrified of reality to accept the capacity of exercising free will in any genuine sense.

Much of the time, this overpowering inertia is even disguised as its opposite. People will say that they are in fact exercising their free will when they refuse to conform to any evolutionary restrictions on their traditional activities. Millions of people all over the world continue to practice ancient religious habits that are in total contradiction with current living conditions, the sacred cows of the Hindu culture having become a metaphor for all  those completely outdated traditions. In search of some particular version of parochial identity, millions of religious or ideological fundamentalists in every country or denomination insist on trying to recreate ideas that reflect the social conditions prevailing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of years ago, thereby preventing them from adapting to the kind of globalized world that exists nowadays.

Some people try to argue that human beings are capable of controlling their passions sufficiently to avoid causing at least man-made disasters by pointing out that weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, did not lead to a catastrophic third world war during the Cold War (1945-1991). Leaders back then were able to use their free will to prevent their imperialist passions from overpowering their sanity and leading into what was then dubbed “spasm or insensate warfare”. But the fact that those people back then were capable of pulling back from the brink on several different occasions by no means guarantees that today’s leaders would be just as capable. The continued existence of huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons nowadays, not to mention (in spite of official denials) chemical and bacteriological stockpiles, and the proliferation of such weapons to a much larger group of political entities than before, make that kind of global disaster a very real possibility still. Even a limited exchange between relatively minor nuclear powers would probably not remain limited for very long.

But such completely inappropriate geopolitical passions, given the very existence of weapons of mass destruction, are not the only kind of antediluvian behavior that could wipe out many millions of human beings through more or less man-made causes. Another major contender is the world-wide epidemic, which at first glance seems to be a natural phenomenon, before numerous, contributing, human causes are factored in. In the past, some of the world’s worst epidemics apparently killed more people than such disasters normally do for other than natural reasons.

Even the toll from the Black Death of the fourteenth century seems to have been much greater than usual because many of the affected regions suffered major famines just prior to the arrival of the epidemic. Apparently, those famines were themselves caused by crop failures brought about by the cultivation of vast, marginal forested areas not suitable for agriculture. Most European historians also believe that it was Genoese plunderers arriving back home from what is now the Ukraine who brought the plague with them, after being bombarded by catapulted corpses from plague victims deliberately thrown at them by Muslim defenders of besieged cities. Other historians have also postulated a causal connection between the First World War and the unusually high number of deaths in the 1919 Spanish flu.

In a somewhat more obvious way, it seems that the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa was originally caused by a local tradition of touching the corpses of dead relatives before they were buried. The number of people who have so far died in that region from that particular epidemic is much smaller than from the ones previously mentioned, but the death toll from Ebola has also been exacerbated by several other regional prejudices. Not to mention popular skepticism about the real motives of national and international authorities in trying to control the spread of the disease. This resembles the commonly held but utterly ridiculous assumption a few years ago, even by several heads of state, that the AIDS epidemic was originally caused by the CIA to control the number of Black people in the world, or, alternatively, that it was somehow God’s punishment for homosexual relations.

In India, 700 million people, half the national population, apparently still defecate outdoors all the time, partly because that country is way behind many other countries in providing modern toilets but also because some of those people find that practice to be more natural and more satisfying even after they get their toilets. They either do not know, or they do not care, that outdoor defecation causes many of the most murderous diseases and epidemics that plague their land, as well as infecting their neighbors. But India is only the biggest example of that horrible practice, with dozens of other countries also participating, not only in outdoor defecation but also in hundreds of other completely inappropriate kinds of behavior.

Throughout history, the most important source of violent and premature deaths, not to mention extensive physical and psychological damage that did not immediately kill all its victims, has been sexual assault. Billions of women and girls, as well as millions of men and boys, have been variously mistreated, often raped and murdered, by egotistical monsters, mostly but not exclusively male ones, using sexual desire as camouflage for domination. Although this form of primitive behavior cannot properly be classified as an epidemic, it certainly is endemic in virtually every human society. Nowadays, the methods used by the perpetrators are the same as those that existed long ago: honor killings, forced marriage, excision, the death penalty for adultery, seclusion, premature sexualization, virginity testing, the list is endless.

In each and every case, the monsters and their lawyers have always argued their inalienable right to dominate what they call inferior beings in the most horrific ways possible, domination of those deemed weaker than them being interpreted as a natural outcome of evolution. Sexual assault is at the very origin of the survival of the fittest gambit that is also constantly being used to somehow justify racism and the domination of financially superior social classes. For these monsters, freedom is just a synonym for the slogan that might makes right. Even more now than in days gone by, racism and social inequality are also responsible for millions more premature deaths, all over the world.

Incredibly, the death toll from those particular sources is sometimes compounded by the fact that even oppressed people and classes often try to pass off mistreatment of dominated individuals within their own communities as part of their fight against race and class oppression from outside their borders. For example, some communities go so far as to refuse modern medical treatment for their afflicted children on the grounds that traditional remedies, though useless, are more politically correct. In many such cases, local authorities often uphold such decisions on the completely bogus grounds of reverse racism.

In the USA, as well as in many other countries, millions more people somehow manage to convince themselves that they are fighting for communal freedom when they continue to buy enormous gas guzzlers, in the form of SUVs or trucks, just as they used to do back in the twentieth century. They democratically refuse to listen to any of the constantly repeated ecological arguments about increasing consumption of fossil fuels leading inevitably to unprecedented levels of pollution and harmful climate change. They readily dismiss all scientific projections about how such changes in climate could  cause catastrophic numbers of deaths in the very near future, especially if those changes affect the food supply in many different regions. These people describe doing what they used to do before, even relatively recently, as an exercise in popular freedom, while simultaneously misinterpreting social pressure to control pollution as a form of totalitarianism.

Some of these same people occasionally try to rationalize their attitude by proclaiming that since rich and powerful people can always get away with anti-social behavior, then people in the middle-class should also be allowed to do whatever they want. Their egoism mirrors that of the leaders of the newly industrialized countries, like China, who rationalize their major contributions to world pollution by pointing out that the Western countries and Japan started along the same path a century or two before they were allowed to join in. Middle-class people trying to imitate the rich are also similar to oppressed people in many different parts of the world, like the poor white trash in the southern USA, who find it impossible to abandon racism because they think that mistreating Black people is the only way they can compensate for their own humiliation by rich Southerners, and rich Northerners as well.

Millions of middle-class polluters have also been brainwashed by billionaire propaganda into believing that excessive government is the primary cause for every major problem nowadays, including the series of major recessions that were in fact caused by the colossal greediness of huge private investors. Even after government presumably saved the world economy from impending disaster, with massive handouts to major investors through such programs as quantitative easing, the brainwashed ones refuse to acknowledge reality and cling to free enterprise fantasies instead. They refuse to recognize that private capitalism has always relied on government intervention in order to survive. The same laissez-faire fantasy also afflicts dozens of other countries and millions of other people, including such rather unlikely adherents as the newest prime minister of India.

However, he is only the most recent example of a leading politician combining fundamentalist religious views with libertarian economic policies. The USA practically invented that curious combination of seemingly contradictory belief systems, existing simultaneously within the same overheated brains. That chaotic combination of ingredients has also been copied by several other kinds of religious fundamentalists, particularly by the world’s leading Muslim extremists.

In the USA also, the same people from the religious right who believe in neoliberalism also proclaim that the only way to stop a bad guy carrying a gun is by using a good guy carrying a gun. Their incapacity to think in a dynamic way means that they refuse to realize that as soon as many of those good guys start carrying guns for any length of time, they often start to become bad guys themselves. In reality, as soon as any small minority of people begin to get used to having an enormous advantage over anyone else, such as by getting a license to kill, or by making a million times more money than most other people do, the corruption process starts to take over. It does not take very long for most people possessing some kind of major advantage over their fellow humans to let that power go to their heads and turn into the kind of person that many of them may have originally intended to oppose.

But this process of creeping corruption not only affects potentially murderous people with guns, such as police, criminals and military forces. Most of the world’s reformists, as well as most of the revolutionaries in history, who succeeded in gaining the power to put their political agendas into practice, have ended up betraying the cause later on. Those people gradually started doing exactly the opposite of what they were initially supposed to be doing, thereby contributing to the world’s problems rather than helping to solve them. The Communist Party of China is perhaps the most extreme example of such corruption, among hundreds of thousands of other such betrayals.

What fundamentally differentiates knee-jerk reactions, to any of these potentially catastrophic problems, from people who genuinely use their capacity for free will in a dynamic way, is the ability to understand empathy. Reductionists always interpret free will as the freedom to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences to other groups of people, and ultimately to themselves. They forget that they cannot really be free unless everyone on this planet is free, which is even more evident nowadays than it ever was in the past. True believers in any particular religion, or any particular ideology, cannot justify imposing their faith on everyone else as easily in today’s world as they used to do in the past when most such prejudices were confined to one particular region. In a super globalized world, with so many opposing belief systems vying for attention, trying to impose an extreme version of any one faith on everyone else is just another invitation to disaster.

Similarly, defecating outdoors, or touching corpses, are simply different ways of potentially visiting massive death tolls on one’s neighbors as well as on oneself. Continuing to promote the increased use of fossil fuels is another excellent example of a knee-jerk interpretation of free will, as is supporting libertarian fantasies about non-existent free enterprise, or by opposing gun control. In reality, free will means adapting to current political, economic, social and cultural conditions by abandoning ideological postures that may have seemed appropriate dozens, hundreds or even thousands of years ago but have no justification whatsoever in today’s world. To paraphrase Lord Acton, liberty means having the right to act responsibly for oneself, and for others, without having to kowtow to outdated traditions. Nor, in fact, to the reactionary manipulation of popular opinion by billionaire political action committees, or billionaire governments in ultra-conservative, theocratic nations.

Over the centuries, human beings have become intelligent enough to figure out, at least partially, how the monstrous, natural universe that we are all forced to live in really seems to work. But it remains to be seen if we can become intelligent enough to avoid any of the equally monstrous workings of our own, human nature.