The Nature of Sympathy

Recently, at the end of a work day, I parked the company car at a public parking lot. When I exited the car I happened to notice, just in front of the left rear wheel, a curled-up baby mouse. I knelt down and saw that its eyes were closed and it was periodically shivering. I wondered whether I’d struck the mouse with the car, but there was no sign of blood. Perhaps the mouse was cowering before the giant vehicle, as I had only nearly crushed it. More likely the mouse had been abandoned by its mother, since there were no other mice I could see nearby. I wondered whether there was anything I could do to help. But I quickly realized I might do more harm than good, since as soon as I left with the baby, its mother might return to fetch it. Cynically, I reminded myself that the world is cruel, that untold millions of animals everywhere suffer unspeakably, that the mouse might carry some disease, that even if I did somehow rescue it, I’d thereby be depriving some other hungry creature of an easy meal. In any case, I didn’t have the time during the day and night to care for a baby mouse. Later, I checked the internet and there are indeed steps that could be taken to rescue an abandoned mouse, one of which is to drop it off at an animal shelter, which I didn’t think of at the time. In any case, I left the shivering baby to its devices, my rationalizations overcoming a pang of anguish I suffered on the mouse’s behalf. 

The next day, I returned to the car, expecting to see a tiny corpse in front of the wheel, but there was none. Had its mother returned? Had a raccoon gobbled it up during the night? I’d never know.

This raises several issues, but I want to focus on the nature of that spasm of pity that provided the backdrop for my musings on what to do as I stared at the helpless rodent. What exactly is sympathy? The least helpful answer is the rationalist’s, which is that sympathy is in recognition of the golden rule that we feel for others in need because we fear to contradict ourselves. Ethics in that case would be a matter of logic. We ought to help others, because we’re no better than they and we would want to be aided in return or if the situation were reversed. All of this may be so, except that it has nothing to do with logic. Instead, it’s based on the implicit social contract: if I scratch your back, you scratch mine; otherwise, society breaks down and we all lose out. But the free-rider, who takes that chance, violating social expectations such as by accepting a favour but failing to return the good deed, hasn’t acted irrationally by gambling, since the odds are indeed in his or her favour. Society likely won’t crumble as long as the majority dutifully respects the social contract while only a minority has the audacity to be selfish. Indeed, in so far as logic is at issue, unethical behaviour has the merit of being supported by that probabilistic inference. The free-rider (the con artist, sociopath, or criminal) who excels at pretending to care about others or who is protected from the victim’s reprisals, by wealth or social connections, can have the best of both worlds, including society’s protection from the elements and the benefits of enriching herself at everyone else’s expense. Life is short and so a pragmatic decision might well be in favour of selfishness, in which case the Golden Rule is for dupes who are merely lacking in self-confidence.

In any case, even the free-rider may sympathize with a stranger in need, which suggests an evolutionary origin of the emotional reaction at issue. Sympathy for the helpless likely began as an instinct that compelled adults to care for human infants, since the latter happen to be almost entirely defenseless (unlike the young in many other species). An infant’s only defense is to scream or cry when danger approaches and that noise is intolerable to adults, compelling them to aid the baby. This mechanism for protecting the species, by shielding the infants who carry the next generation of genes is then extended, as any sort of helplessness comes to remind us of an infant’s pitiful state. This would certainly include a shivering baby mouse, but it would include also an adult whose predicament renders her dependent on others.

Once again, all of this seems so, but a causal explanation of pity and sympathy is incomplete, since the long series of causes and effects shows only how it came to be that we universally suffer when confronted by a stranger’s plight. This answer doesn’t touch on the meaning of this fellow-feeling in the context of an up-and-running culture which didn’t exist when the instinct was first formed, hundreds of thousands of years ago. When we ask, “What is pity?” we needn’t mean only “What is pity for the genes?” and are free to ask what pity is for us who occupy our jaded, late-modern vantage point. We can see that the scientistic gambit of theoretically reducing an autonomous human adult to a robot controlled by genes is ironically undone by the science that’s thereby worshipped, since our autonomy is itself a genetic strategy for ensuring our global domination in the Anthropocene. This is apparent, for example, from the development of the cerebral cortex, which services language and abstract thinking; those traits, in turn, liberate culture from the narrow confines of the biological life cycle. Moreover, we can appreciate the lameness of the religious rationales for pity, since the likelihood of supernatural rewards for ethical conduct is now widely understood to be negligible. What is it, then, for a scientifically and philosophically-informed individual to feel disgusted with himself and with the world at large, when, for example, he almost accidentally crushes a baby mouse and then abandons it for a second time, to its fate?    

We can approach this question indirectly by considering a context in which sympathy is unwelcome: a courtroom juror’s deliberation. The juror’s role is only to consider the evidence and to follow the law. Sympathy for the defendant would count as emotional bias. You might think that this expectation for jurors conflicts with the need for them to be the defendant’s peers, and that a computer would be more ideally rational. However, what human jurors are supposed to contribute isn’t emotion, but commonsense reasoning which computers lack. Certainly, if a juror identifies with the defendant’s race, religion, age, or with some other irrelevant detail of her background, and lets that sympathy affect her judgment of the facts, the juror isn’t discharging her duty.

Suppose, though, a saint were called upon as a juror, and the saint’s sympathy for the suffering of all creatures prevents her from neutrally weighing the facts. Even when confronted with the evidence of the defendant’s alleged violent crime, the saintly juror can’t help but reflect on the hardships that led to the crime, such as the adversity the defendant failed to overcome in her upbringing, which formed her character that lashed out in the case of this particular violent act. The saint interprets the act not in isolation, but in a collective, even mystical context in which every event is tragic in a fallen, inhuman cosmos. The saint might have failed even to condemn Hitler, were Hitler to have been dragged before the judges at Nuremberg. If the saint wouldn’t be positioned to forgive Hitler, she would still regard his monstrous acts as sorrowful outcomes of a much larger catastrophe such as the continuity between the two world wars.

This suggests that respectable sympathy may be rooted in a holistic, rather Gnostic perspective on life, according to which all living things are united in the misfortunes of finitude.When one creature suffers, all ought to suffer along, assuming the others comprehend the larger processes at work in that suffering. If, on the contrary, we don’t sympathize, because we’re caught up in our egoism or even in our sociopathy, as in the case of individuals lacking any moral center or capacity for selflessness, we betray our myopia. We don’t see the event in its metaphysical or mythical context, but are blinded by our narrow-minded preoccupations. As I said, the Christian basis for sympathy is antiquated, but there may be a naturalistic sort of mysticism or pantheism that supports a viable, spontaneous (and sometimes debilitating) reaction of sympathetic suffering.

As with the saint’s irrepressible sorrow on behalf of everyone struggling beneath the veil of tears or in Plato’s cave of ignorance, the naturalist might sympathize with all sufferers, regardless of the circumstances. The sympathy might flow from the pessimistic outlook, which needn’t regard us as slaves, as in the case of scientistic reductionism, but which could juxtapose a hope for a progressive future with tragic knowledge of that future’s improbability, given our animal limitations. Whereas the implications of scientistic worship of science and of physicality are just nihilism and the baselessness of caring about anything, pantheism may entail sympathy much as comedic paradoxes provoke laughter. When we appreciate the humour in a situation, we laugh involuntarily, and when we perceive a situation’s tragedy, we might naturally feel sad for those caught up in it. The deeper the sense of humour, the more cause for laughter until the humourist might become mad from an overdose on the world’s absurdity. Likewise, the more profound the naturalist’s enlightenment, that is, the more uncompromising the sympathizer’s subversive awareness of our shortcomings in the existential scheme, the greater her inclination to suffer in response to what she would have to see as a world overflowing with senseless wrongdoing.

Let’s return to the cowering baby mouse. The immediate causes of its suffering are almost insignificant compared to the total, holistic cause, which is the mouse’s role in the universe as a whole. While we can’t fathom the entirety of that role, we can surmise that the mouse’s position is at least absurd in that there is no redemption for that hapless animal. Ultimately, the mouse shivers, abandoned by its mother and left to be eaten on dusty asphalt, because the mouse’s whole life is accidental and at odds with uncaring broader forces which inevitably win out against all organic anomalies. All animals are hungry, because the genes mindlessly and thus tirelessly replicate themselves in competition with other lineages (species), which necessitates animals’ war over resources. Thus, an unenlightened omnivorous animal couldn’t afford to gawk at the mouse and feel appalled by its helplessness, but could only exploit the situation and accept the free meal. The baby mouse shivers and dies because life only evolves, meaning it creeps onto a stage on which it doesn’t belong. An individual who is awakened to this existential context will suffer alongside tormented strangers, because the cosmic tragedy is a sorrowful affair and she sees that tragedy whenever our pretensions give way to the monstrousness of the underlying natural processes.

In my case, I suffered a pang of enlightened sympathy when I saw the shivering mouse, but my reaction wasn’t saintly because it wasn’t one-sided. My sorrow for the mouse was informed by disgust for the world that’s metaphysically responsible, but I had room also for mundane, pragmatic and selfish rationalizations. What, then, is sympathy? When we’re saddened by a stranger’s misery, we’re thinking not as animals but as transcendent, withdrawn observers of the misery. We attain something like Kohlberg’s universal perspective, at which point we can step outside our egoistic concerns, however briefly, and interpret the event in light of a myth that speaks to the paradox of natural tragedy and progress: we suffer with the baby mouse because the mouse had a chance for a better life, but the inhuman odds decided against that happier outcome. Moreover, when nature displays its godlessness and there is, then, no remorse or apology from the heavens, when the forlorn creature is left to a gruesome fate, the musings of an overly-philosophical passerby notwithstanding, we’re burdened by our understanding of the wider malady. We may cry for the mouse not because reason dictates any such reciprocity, but because sympathetic grief amounts to an existential battle cry, to a futile but noble gut reaction against the world that unveils itself in that particular affront.    

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Is Nature Beautiful or Monstrous?

Art by John Kenn

Who but a mad person would attempt to characterize the universe in its entirety? The ancient Greek conceit of all things forming a cosmos, a unified, ordered whole, seems quaint, notwithstanding the cosmologist’s persistent, utopian dream of a single Theory of Everything. Early maps of the lands and seas filled in unknown areas with pictures of monsters and captions like “Here be dragons,” and there are still voids in our knowledge of what’s out there. In addition to the singularities and thus baffling unknowns in black holes and in the Big Bang, there’s an alien weirdness to quantum, merely statistical or nonmechanical events; moreover, there’s dark matter as well as dark energy which comprise most of the universe and yet which are still enigmatic. 

Still, despite those areas of ignorance, there’s an intuitive way of summarizing not just the empirical knowledge we nevertheless have, but the limits on such knowledge to which we cynical hypermodernists are especially sensitive. This is to say that the universe, that is, all of natural reality, is monstrous. But what does it mean to blaspheme in this fashion, to tar the beautiful heavens with such an insult? Is this bit of cosmicism just a nihilistic projection of a wounded soul? No, nature is a monstrosity in every sense of the word, and seeing how this is so is vital to understanding our existential situation as metaphysically homeless individuals whose consciousness, reason, and freedom alienate us from the world. 

The Universe’s Immensity

One sense of “monstrous” is obviously fitting, this being the sense in which a monstrosity is extraordinarily great in physical size, meaning huge or immense. We take such knowledge for granted, but the ancients thought the universe is considerably smaller and indeed centered on our planet. The Age of Reason decentered us as a result of increased understanding of how life arises accidentally, without any personal creator’s plan or good intentions. This sense of never having been as important as the ancients intuited feeds into the experience of nature as horrific; at least, this experience is thrust upon those whose scientific and philosophical knowledge deprives them of the conventional feel-good delusions. So the universe is indeed monstrous in scope, not a mere terran neighbourhood but an inhuman, stupefyingly vast X in which living things aren’t even afterthoughts exactly but hapless drifters, vomited up by blind and dumb material exchanges and interlocking mathematical codes.

Even this most obvious kind of natural monstrosity is deleterious to our preferred way of life. We’re biologically driven to want to feel at home rather than lost, because we’re social mammals hormonally compelled, for the most part, to form families and thus preoccupied with the task of protecting our loved ones by laying claim to a plot of land and calling it home. Homelessness is thus a mark of evolutionary failure, since it implies either dereliction of duty towards your family members or a lack of such members to keep safe in the first place. A familiar place called home that keeps out the alien noise beyond is required to ensure the healthy upbringing of children and thus the passing on of genes to future generations. In a smaller, geocentric universe, our planet could serve as home for the extended human family because the ancients could trust in the landscape’s good intentions. In the decentered universe in which there are no such cosmic guarantees of our survival let alone our happiness, our planet begins to creek like a haunted house. How safe are we really on this rock which we’ve taken for taken for tens of thousands of years, but which must likewise be fundamentally as bizarre as the rest of the universe that pursues its strange business? With the world’s alien scope comes the high probability that our genetic code’s pointless trek through the ages will eventually cease; just as an earthquake or a tornado can rip apart a house, depriving the parents of the ability to safeguard their descendants, the universe will surge in our cozy corner of it and terminate our evolution. Along with the loss of faith in our home, there’s the growing postmodern distrust in all natural, commonsense intuitions since those too bear the world’s inhuman stamp. In short, our cosmological decentralization disaffected us with the world we’d once cheerfully interpreted as being run for some familiar, social purpose, such as its being a testing ground to prove our worth to the deities. 

Formal Beauty and Natural Ugliness

Another sense of “monstrous,” according to Dictionary.com, is “frightful or hideous, especially in appearance; extremely ugly.” Is the universe, then, ugly or beautiful? According to cosmologists and mathematicians, the universe displays qualities of formal beauty such as symmetry, harmony, balance, and proportion. Platonists distinguish between nature’s deep reality and its surface appearance, the former comprising a structure that corresponds eerily well to human mathematical analyses. Thus, nature would have to be as beautiful as the mathematical inferences are elegant: the intellectual virtues of the laws of nature would transfer to an aesthetic praiseworthiness of nature’s fundamental physical relations themselves.

This scientific sense of nature’s beauty rests entirely on the nature of mathematics, since it was Pythagorean mathematics which influenced not just Plato’s philosophy about a harmony between truth, goodness, and beauty, but the flavour of what Oswald Spengler called Apollonian or classical Greek culture in general, which culture in turn was the foundation for modern Western rationalism. According to Spengler, the ancient Greeks were preoccupied with the geometry of finite, particular bodies, as shown by their sculptures and architecture. In any case, as Smolin and Unger propose in The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, mathematics is effective not because ultimate reality is timeless and abstract, but because math abstracts from the peculiarity of particular situations, providing us with a much-simplified map of the world. Platonists then reify the map, mistaking the timelessness of the game-like aspect of mathematical reasoning for the form of reality itself. Mathematical objects are “evoked” in that we invent the rules for such reasoning so that once the rules exist, the moves in the game become highly constrained as in a game of chess or even in poetry or music or a shared fictional universe like Star Wars. We create an artificial world—in this case a model that abstracts from nature’s particularities, focusing on the most general patterns in our recorded observations, and just as fanatical players in some virtual world like World of Warcraft lose touch with reality, Platonic mathematicians and cosmologists can no longer see nature without the filter of their cherished map.

What Platonists ignore, of course, is time and thus the changeability of everything, the world as Becoming rather than Being, the Heraclitean flux that mocks our generalizations and dwarfs even the insights of our most intrepid investigators by its chaotic fickleness and preposterous magnitude. Mathematics abstracts also from the world’s substance, leaving just the barest outline of natural patterns which Plato treated as metaphysical Forms. That substance includes the content of our experience—not just the overall pattern but the identity of what we observe. Nature’s formal beauty is indeed skin deep. Underneath the forms, that is, the patterns simplified by mathematics, are the processes that are actually unfolding, the evolution of galaxies and most importantly the tragic destiny of everything in the universe, the end of all things in time. Platonic heaven is as unreal as the theistic anthropomorphism and thus so is the presumed beauty of nature’s mathematical structure. In fact, the notion that nature is beautiful involves a mental projection that’s just as dubious as theism which personifies ultimate reality, replacing Plato’s Good with God. Even our concept of formal beauty derives from our genetic preference for a certain human form. Symmetry, harmony of parts and so forth are all signs of physiological health. Moreover, that aesthetic judgment is pleasing because of what such beauty promises, namely enjoyable sex, not to mention healthy offspring, whereas sex with an ugly person would be closer to a nightmare. Of course, naturalistic cosmologists don’t think of the world in such biological terms, but their Platonism carries the vestige of teleology and perhaps even of deism. Thus, instead of the fantasy of sex with the beautiful Mother Earth, nature’s formal beauty promises an eternity in the heaven of abstract Forms or at least the bliss of contemplating such a permanent reality.

Compare this biological basis of the cosmologist’s positive aesthetic judgment with that of the philosopher’s negative one. If we think of something as monstrous, we’re disgusted by it due to a trigger of our fight-or-flight mechanism. As the definition has it, a monstrous thing is frightful and ugly. A monster’s ugliness indicates that it’s a threat, so we’re repelled by its surface features to escape the underlying danger. We instinctively fear bugs and snakes not just because their bites can be deadly, but because their alien forms threaten our childlike comfort in nature, reminding us that our happiness rests on delusions of anthropocentrism. Likewise, the universe is monumentally alien, however we might distort the truth with our power of abstraction, comparing nature’s symmetry and harmony to that of a beautiful human face or to the ratio of human body parts. The formal features notwithstanding, the substanceof nature, that is, the actual shapes and sizes and temperatures and other properties and tendencies of everything from stars to black holes to atoms to the outer void are terrifying and humiliating rather than forming a pleasant, harmonious whole. The universe’s hideousness to an objective person indicates the colossal danger of venturing into outer space. If you step foot in outer space without an arsenal of protective gear, you die in around ninety seconds from ebullism, hypoxia, hypocapnia, decompression sickness, and extreme temperature variations, not to mention the long-term effects of cellular mutation and destruction from high energy photons and other particles. The alienness of bugs and snakes is magnified a trillion times over by that of a godless, undead universe that evolves until it unravels due to exactly no one’s good intention.

(Even the physicist Frank Wilczek admits in A Beautiful Question that nature’s beauty isn’t exactly like the ordinary kind. As he says, ‘by studying the Artisan’s (nature’s) handiwork, we evolve refined concepts of “symmetry,” and ultimately of “beauty”—concepts that reflect important aspects of reality, while remaining true to the spirit of their use in common language’ (200). The cosmologist isn’t supposed to be merely misusing the word “beauty” or changing the subject, but Wilczek begins his case for nature’s beauty by saying, “Many varieties of beauty are underrepresented in Nature’s style, as expressed in her fundamental operating system. Our delight in the human body and our interest in expressive portraits, our love of animals and of natural landscapes, and many other sources of artistic beauty are not brought into play” (11). Given that delight in the human body is the biological basis of all aesthetic appreciation, it’s unlikely that the cosmological kind of beauty remains true to the spirit of ordinary aesthetic judgments, after all. This suspicion is supported by the kind of “beauty” Wilzcek shows that we find in physics, namely symmetry and economy (11). Symmetry would count as beautiful, as I’ve said, but why think that economy, which is to say thriftiness, avoidance of waste, and “the production of abundance from very limited means” have anything to do with beauty? Who says a bean-counting avoidance of waste is generallypleasing rather than virtuous especially to a money-grubbing bureaucrat? True, an abundant universe would be more pleasing than a homogenous one, if only because the former is needed for life’s evolution and thus for anything to be found pleasing in the first place. But this says nothing about whether an economical means of producing a great variety of things is generally attractive to people. Wilczek seems to be showing that nature is beautiful, largely by redefining the word.)

Both the positive and negative aesthetic judgments, then, have biological causes, but only the negative one is consistent with philosophical naturalism. Platonic teleology and deism are obsolete and even the pleasure of contemplating mathematical structures goes too far if we mistake the game world of mathematical models for the real, time-bound universe. The dangers to life presented by the universe at large are obviously real. Asteroids have already smashed into Earth, exterminating millions of species. Nature’s indifference is present also in the savagery of natural selection: life is a struggle, because the competition for resources amounts to perpetual war. Animals are at war with viruses and bacteria as well as with each other. And natural forces and complexities produce not just environments that sustain life but changes in those environments that obliterate living things, as in volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and the like. Again, ugliness can indicate physical as well as mental threats, and both are perfectly real in godless nature: the world’s fundamental impersonality is opposed to all the anthropocentric delusions that have traditionally kept us blissfully ignorant. The ethically and epistemically superior aesthetic judgment of nature, then, is the negative one that the universe is monstrous rather than beautiful, since this is the judgment that coheres with the worldview which we’ve an intellectual obligation to maintain.  

The Deviant Universe

Monstrousness is also a matter of “deviating grotesquely from the natural or normal form or type.” It might seem as though nature couldn’t be monstrous in this sense since nothing is more normal than nature. Indeed, if nature is normal and artifacts and their anomalously-free creators are the deviants, then we rather than natural processes must be monstrous in this sense. But this rests on an oversight. Although normal and deviant behaviours may be objective in that the former ones can outnumber the latter, the norm is still often selected due to the interpreter’s preference even when the so-called deviant behaviours happen to outnumber the normal ones. This comes across in biology when the effect a trait is selected for needn’t materialize most of the time. For example, a cheetah’s speed is selected for the purpose of catching prey, but a cheetah may fail more times than not at that task. All that matters for the judgment that fast cheetahs are functional and thus biological normal, whereas slow ones are malfunctional and deviant is that the cheetah in question be fast enough to catch prey enough times to sustain the cheetah until it can reproduce and transmit its genes to its offspring. The preference here is to explain adaptability, and the evolutionary explanation holds even when functional behaviour doesn’t usually succeed.

A similar point holds in the case of nature’s normality. Nature was regarded as the epitome of normality only when nature was misinterpreted as being friendly to human purposes due to its being full of spirit or God’s benevolence or wisdom. That is, natural processes were regarded as normal not just because of their frequency but because nature was regarded as fulfilling our preference for having a permanent home to comfort us. After what Nietzsche called the death of God (the theistic myth’s loss of power to enchant intellectually responsible persons living in the Age of Reason), there’s no longer any such convergence. Accordingly, hypermodernists have retreated to extreme forms of relativism and skepticism, like those pioneered by the presocratic philosopher Protagoras who applauded humans for being the measurers of everything. Natural processes may vastly outnumber artificial ones, but that’s only because nature isn’t what we thought it was: specifically, nature isn’t artificial! In the Aristotelian worldview which dominated the West for centuries, everything aims towards a good that befits its type so that normality becomes the same as normativity, as being subject to a standard. Deviation meant falling wide of the proper mark. Presumably, large, heavy stones would have been more “normal” than small ones, because the large ones are more liable to fall towards their “proper” place underground. In any case, modern naturalism severs normality from normativity, so that just because natural processes differ from artificial ones and the former outnumber the latter doesn’t mean the latter are normatively deviant and thus monstrous in the sense at issue. On the contrary, postmodern solipsism and narcissism dictate that godlike, personal sources of artificiality set the standards for everything so that nature becomes deviant in its undead inability to discriminate.

The traditional aesthetic judgment must therefore be reversed: natural laws aren’t superior to human ones because the former are closer to God’s design, whereas we rebelled thanks to our accursed freedom; instead, nature is monstrous in the sense of deviating from all normativity, having no objective value or purpose, and even having laws only as an interpreter’s pragmatic simplifications. Nature deviates from the human norm of projecting standards, because natural processes do no such thing, being entirely godless as we’ve recently come to appreciate. That which is good (not monstrous) isn’t God- or purpose-infused nature, but just the emergence of godlike beings whose subjectivity allows them to create the artificial worlds of symbols and value judgments on which the notion of deviating from a preferred norm depends. The natural world deviates not because it misses its mark, but because it doesn’t rise to the level of our complexity. We prefer our artificial worlds and thus we don’t take natural processes for granted, but counter them at every turn. For example, we don’t assume that because rape or racism has a biological basis, rapists or racists should be applauded for hitting the natural target. We understand that there are absolutely no natural rights, that the difference between right and wrong emerges under social, subjective conditions, and we evidently prefer to live in the artificial worlds that take that difference seriously, as opposed to the grim, impersonal wilderness. Therefore, nature is arguably monstrous in this manner of deviating from the human norm of assigning standards in the first place.    

Sublimity and Nature’s Revolting Strangeness

One other sense of “monstrous” has to do with whether something is shocking, revolting, and outrageous. The strangeness of those parts of the universe that surpass our understanding, or at least that confound our intuitions with their inhuman aspects, provide more than sufficient warrant for the sense that nature is grotesque and monstrous rather than serenely beautiful. But the situation is more complicated because another way of saying that much of the universe surpasses our comprehension is to say that nature is sublime, which calls not just for disgust but for awe and even veneration. Here the negative aesthetic judgment shades into holy terror, into religious faith that’s indistinguishable from fear of the divine. Rudolph Otto explained holiness in terms of the numinous, which he defined as a mystery that’s both terrifying and fascinating at once. In saying, then, that nature is monstrous, perhaps I’m arbitrarily casting aspersions on nature’s mystical enormity which could just as well be interpreted optimistically, as a greater good. The earlier question reasserts itself: How could a pessimist be so arrogant as to pronounce aesthetic judgment on the entire universe after admitting that most of the universe (including dark matter) is wholly mysterious? Shouldn’t we be agnostic about nature’s ultimate aesthetic status as a stupendous work of art, merely marveling humbly at what unguided natural forces and elements have achieved?

I concede that philosophical naturalism so far leaves much of the universe as a great mystery, which allows for mystical contemplation. I deny, however, that the choice roughly of optimism or pessimism is arbitrary. If nature is sublime and therefore holy, if the world is strangely inhuman precisely because it’s so much greater than even our entire species and genera, with our primitive, parochial preconceptions, the noble response isn’t to lapse into agnostic apathy but to take what Kierkegaard called a leap of faith in some conception of the admittedly unknowable Absolute. The task isn’t to settle for an idol or to anthropocentrically mistake the map for the terrain in the manner of a Platonic cosmologist like Wilczek, but to relate to the unknowable Other in some honourable fashion, knowing that in the end all such relations and assessments of sacredness are absurdly inadequate and futile. That’s to say that religious myth makes the best of our ludicrous existential predicament.

Further blurring the line between cosmic beauty and monstrosity, there’s a tragic aspect of beauty that depends on precisely those features of nature that are lamentable such as the finiteness of material objects and the universe’s wanton immensity. Without the transience of phenomena or the gross mismatch in size between any particular thing and the background universe, the aesthetically-assessed item would lack the fragility that pleases an interpreter by making her pity it and be nourished by fantasies in which she saves and preserves that which she assesses. A flower is a classic example of something that’s perceived as beautiful in view of a greater tragedy: the fragility of its petals, the curve of its stem as the flower bows before its inevitable end thanks to natural forces like gravity, the scent that can only be remembered because it’s gone almost as soon as it’s produced. Here beauty seems preconditioned by a prevailing ugliness. This isn’t just the familiar point about the binary divisions between human concepts. The presumed beauty of heaven would make sense only in relation to the ugliness of hell, but the latter wouldn’t exactly give rise to the former. In the case of real beauty, the beautiful thing stirs the emotions because beauty is most powerful when the pleasure is a prelude to pathos: a beautiful form encapsulates the universal and tragically doomed struggle against the nature of reality itself which entails the inexorability of everything’s demise. What’s beautiful is the idiosyncratic way in which something vainly exercises its limited capacities, giving off its scent or presenting its intricate petals if it’s a flower, flapping its wings or cocking its hollow-boned neck if it’s a bird, or even showering the cosmos with its mighty light rays if it’s a star that’s nevertheless made puny and pathetically small in relation to Time.

This ambiguity emerges in the Gnostic interpretation of that which classical Platonists prized, namely the lawfulness of the cosmos. As Hans Jonas pointed out in The Gnostic Religion, the formal beauty of the geometric regularities of nature that gave rise to natural laws was interpreted by dour Gnostics as a sign of the menacing instruments with which natural forces hold us prisoner. Just as a jail cell should be constructed by sturdy materials to isolate the prisoner and prevent her escape, so too the particularity of natural forms imprisons all of us as well as distracting and alienating us. The cold beauty of natural laws looks like just a means of subduing the sentient creatures trapped within the realm of material forms. Now, Gnostics practically werePlatonists, albeit bitter ones as Plotinus pointed out. Both Plato and the Gnostic condemned the embodied aspect of nature in relation to a transcendent and ineffable Good, although the Gnostic went further in vilifying the demiurge. But the main difference is in their existential leaps of faith. The Platonist sees beauty everywhere because she loves herself and she presupposes anthropocentrism as she projects her vitality onto the world at large, such as by reifying mathematical models. She trusts the validity of her inner life as a basis for comprehending and potentially overcoming the outer world. Whether she’s a theist or a humanist, Mind for her is prior to undead Matter. By contrast, the Gnostic impulse is to accentuate the world’s horrors to preserve our sense of alienation from it, thus testing the will so that heroic individuals might be all the more honoured. She’s inspired by the twofold nature of tragedy, by the foregrounding of beauty that’s necessarily juxtaposed by an oppressive, ultimately overwhelming background of monstrosity. For the Gnostic, there is a greater good but it transcends anything we can imagine, so that the all-consuming mission is to resist the cosmos that pales in comparison to the true deity.

Both Platonists and Gnostics are supernaturalists, so their ideologies are anachronistic in contemporary hypermodernity. Cosmicists line up with Gnostics except that the former deny there’s any metaphysical basis for liberation from nature’s horrors. Still, there’s a common subversive stance that’s opposed to the Platonist’s conservative trust in the greatness of human reason. For the cosmicist, that which transcends reason isn’t metaphysically supernatural or mystical; it’s merely another part of the one sprawling universe so that our ignorance is a sign not of reality’s greatness but of our puniness. The horror is that we needn’t wait until some mythical Judgment Day before we’re humiliated by being made servants to the erstwhile absent God. Nature itself which entirely surrounds us already subverts our every inspiration, revelation, or joy just by having an inhuman, monstrous scope so that we must in the end indeed retreat to hypermodern subjectivism, solipsistic multiculturalism and other sorts of decadence. The point is as David Hume showed, that we can’t rationally justify the trust we place even in our tools that have proven themselves reliable. Reliability and the whole pragmatic overlay on experience, of what Heidegger called the ready-to-hand in which anything familiar can be perceived as a potential tool or practical good, become illusions in the wholly godless big picture. Something is reliable until it’s not, because the world changes without concern for what we find useful. The search for truth-as-usefulness-or-empowerment is a fool's errand because in the end our entire species will be overpowered by a universe we’ll likely never fully understand, in which case in pragmatic retrospect no one will have ever uttered a single true statement; truth will have been a trick of limited perspective. The rationalist’s and pragmatist’s leaps of faith, then, aren’t aesthetically compelling because they rest on incoherent ideologies.

In the meantime, the cosmicist’s interpretation of nature as a haunted house, as a place in which horror should be the default reaction even to a beautiful foreground is least liable to embarrass us in the long run. The cosmicist trusts that the sublime unknown won’t vindicate our vain or petty preoccupations. What’s sacred to her is the meaningfulness of defying so outrageous a foe as an unappeasable, mostly lifeless universe. The darker and colder the background, the more stunning the candle’s fleeting light that burns in our will to create a world to replace the manifestly disgusting wilderness.

Do we live and die inside a monster?

Finally, there’s the sense in which a monstrous thing is comparable to a “fabulous monster.” Is the universe monstrous, then, because it’s literally a monster? The point about fabulous monsters is that they’re incredible, so that a traveller who thought he saw one could resort only to a tall tale of how he didn’t just glimpse a whale but a kraken, or how the tall person who crossed his path was actually a Cyclops or a Minotaur. The enormous size and other deviant features make for a monster’s fantastic appearance and behaviour, and we’ve already seen that nature as a whole has those same features. We still tell legendary tales of monsters, since aliens and UFOs have replaced the classical monsters in the public’s imagination. Most people don’t take such stories seriously because somehow the monsters always elude capture. The monstrous universe is likewise elusive because its freakishness hides in plain sight. The universe is so immense that no one can hope to see more than a minuscule fraction of it, so that we’re easily fooled by the illusion that nothing’s amiss, that we’re at home in the center of the heavens in which the stars are gods who smile down on us—rather than the stars being pointless fusion reactors that will exhaust their fuel sources according to a truly monstrous timeframe and deprive the universe of even the illusion of having, as it were, light at the tunnel’s end. Moreover, despite suffering from the world’s indifference to our welfare, we’re again easily fooled because we’re prone to anthropomorphize everything so that we can more easily understand and deal with it, being instinctively social animals. And few people are capable of believing the extent of the universe’s deviation from the norms we take for granted, because few have the stomach or the intellectual wherewithal to formulate the concepts of such grossly undead, impersonal activity that transpires all around us; no one can intuitively grasp the universe’s vastness, and few care to dwell on its cosmicist implications. The universe is, then, like a fabulous monster even to the extent that its monstrosity is shrouded in mystery. 

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Opposing Nature: Life's Meaning in the Monstrous Universe

While most people are blissfully ignorant of academic discussions of philosophy, at least one quintessential philosophical question has long been mainstream: Does life have a meaning, a point, a purpose? Because this question is philosophical, it’s obscure, which is what lends the question its mystique. Thus, there’s the preliminary matter of the meaning of the question of the meaning of life. Douglas Adams satirizes the need for such prior analysis in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, telling of a supercomputer that discovers that the answer to the question of “life, the universe, and everything” is 42, which bafflers the questioners because they haven’t figured out the true, ultimate question. What kind of answer, then, do we want and what exactly is at stake? Could life be the sort of thing that has a purpose or a goal such that it might have a specific, knowable one? And whose purpose would it be? Could life be meaningful without a personal creator of living things?

Biofunctions and Absurdity

The prescientific approach is to interpret the problem as teleological and thus to compare organisms to artifacts, which entails that organisms are intelligently created. By comparison, a shovel has meaning because we assign it a standard which determines when the shovel performs well or poorly. A broken shovel fails to work as planned so that it no longer approximates the ideal for shovels. For a person or even an animal to have meaning in this teleological sense would seem to require that we be artifacts designed by some foreign intelligence whose plan for us includes the ideal we’re meant to fulfill. (A natural, as opposed to supernatural, creator of terrestrial species would need a comparable creator in turn and that creator would likewise need one, in which case either the series of creations would be infinite, like a baton race that has no beginning, or else there would be an ultimate Creator who would be a deity, a miraculously self-creating or eternal person.)

The mystery of life’s meaning would amount to the mystery of the content of our creator’s mind: the answer would consist of a revelation of what that creator intended to do by creating us or of what the creator hoped to achieve. The movie Prometheus explores this scenario, depicting protagonists who discover both that powerful aliens created life on our planet and that the aliens might have had dubious rather than noble, let alone divine motives for doing so. Were our creator flawed or inhuman, our ultimate function might be horrific rather than anything we’d want to enshrine. We might have been created on a whim so that we’d be akin to an absentminded doodle, in which case our life would be fundamentally absurd. Alternatively, we might have been spawned by a malevolent or arrogant deity so that our highest purpose might be the moral one of opposing our original function, of malfunctioning, in our deity’s judgment.

The conventional secular wisdom is that this teleological interpretation of the ultimate question has been superseded by Darwinism, according to which life forms evolve from each other: each is created by an impersonal process of natural selection. This scientific explanation will be completed as soon as we come to understand how the simplest living things developed from nonliving things. Assuming that sort of final understanding is on the way and life does evolve to that extent, from nonlife, life’s origin isn’t planned. Thus the analogy between species and artifacts breaks down, and we have no nonhuman, pre-assigned purpose. (Even if there were intermediary intelligent designers, such as extraterrestrial but carbon-based seeders of our planet, the mechanistic, Darwinian view would be that the first organisms emerged from nonliving matter.) The process by which we deliberately devise technologies differs greatly from that by which natural forces, initial conditions and elements come together to produce organisms. In particular, personal traits like reason and desire have nothing to do with life’s origin, according to the Darwinian perspective. 

For this reason, the question of life’s “meaning” would rest on a false premise. The answer is that there’s just as much or as little point to life as there is to the existence of anything else that emerges from blind and dumb physical regularities. Instead of the purpose of life in general, there’s only the function of a naturally selected trait. That function is just the job done by the trait that explains how the trait originated by a formative interaction between the organism’s genetic code and its ancestral environment. For example, a heart is supposed to circulate blood in the body, because that’s the effect that explains biologically why the heart has its capacities. What a trait is for depends on what it is and what it is depends on how it was made. Organic bodies are made by natural selection, so the function of our body parts is determined by the usefulness of what our ancestors did to survive long enough to reproduce members of their type, which members include us.

A biological purpose isn’t mystical or even ideal, that is, something that’s worthy of religious devotion or that ought to be fulfilled; instead, it’s the probability that a creature, whose body parts behave as those of its formative ancestors did, will sustain its species by transmitting its genotype to its descendants. There’s no scientific presupposition that the species’ continuation is good or that a malfunctioning trait fails to fulfill an ideal. Natural selection is an aimless series of events involving chemical interactions and mass extinctions that nevertheless assembles hordes of goal-directed creatures. The blind and impersonal creative process complexifies, producing animals that can sense the world, as well as people who create by means of real rather than merely apparent intelligence, thus differing from natural selection. But life in general has no meaning, and purposes are either biological or psychological, that is, species-preserving effects of evolved traits or desires of creatures that are strangely preoccupied with achieving goals, including unrealistic ones.

This is where the secular discussion of that popular philosophical question usually ends. Scientists have found that life is objectively absurd, as existential philosophers like Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre suspected. We’re all waiting for Godot, for the meaning of life to be revealed, but science has turned our faith into desperate hope and we’ve become pitiful and ridiculous in our childish refusal to leave behind our naïve prejudices. At most, we content ourselves with subjective goals which we set for us, lacking any cosmic role. In a liberal society, we’re free to choose our ideals as long as we accord others the same right. We thereby become both gods and artifacts, after all, the sovereigns we hoped resided somewhere in the heaven of outer space and the objects fashioned by our actions that reveal merely our personal plans. In turn, the hypocrisies and degradations of liberal society disclose life’s underlying absurdity. The consumer’s infantilization and shallow materialism, the accompanying displacement of liberal and democratic institutions by a plutocratic military-industrial-security-media complex, the postmodern incredulity towards any myth or social ideal and the apathy arising from the paradoxical idolization of irony—all such letdowns of modern civilization are so many reminders that an absurd, indifferent world permits only comically-defective substitutes for a divine world order. As in Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we make for laughably inept gods.   

Pantheism: Nature as a Monstrous God

However, the inquiry shouldn’t end there, because the scientific picture of the universe entails not the folly of the question of life’s meaning, but a kind of pantheism which the orthodox physicists and cosmologists obfuscate by eliminating time itself from their theories. Early modern scientists from Descartes to Galileo to Newton and then on to Einstein, Hawking and the string theorists mistake the frozen, geometric image of nature in their mathematical models for the nature of reality, and so they infer that time is unreal. They think that because mathematical truth is timeless, so must be nature. The laws of physics are time-symmetric, since the scientists abstract from time’s arrow and depict natural events as happening all at once—and thus not as happening at all. If time is illusory, so is causality and the deepest understanding of natural phenomena requires our intellectual elites to master exotic mathematical concepts that defy human intuitions as well as ranging far beyond the available evidence. So argues theoretical physicist Lee Smolin in his recent books that culminate in The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, written with the philosopher Roberto Unger.  

If causality and the nowness of the present moment are illusory, all our concepts of change, process, evolution, and creation must be misleading. In this prevailing, math-centered picture of nature, nothing changes because time is just a fourth dimension of space which can be geometrically visualized and objectified. And if nothing really happens, nothing can happen for a reason or in pursuit of an ideal. Thus, life certainly has no meaning and the mystery of whether our suffering now on this planet will one day be vindicated by the achievement of some cosmic good should be dismissed as a trick of maya. However, if Smolin’s critique of this paradigm is justified, we might wonder whether, instead of merely replacing myths with rational knowledge, the anti-time scientists also inadvertently bury the philosophical upshot of their work, by spatializing time. Again, the upshot isn’t atheism but pantheism: whereas science eliminates the need for the theistic hypothesis, scientists discover over and over again that nature does all the divine work we could ask for, by creating everything that exists in time.

This doesn’t mean, though, that everything has a purpose. After all, the reason scientists would have found themselves retreating from the pantheistic significance of their theories is that the creative power in question is monstrously impersonal. Instead of nothing happening in nature, because mathematical models tame natural processes so that they might be intellectually dissected, there’s the ominous unwinding of a headless universe. Far from being beautiful, as scientists from Einstein to Dawkins are wont to aver, nature’s mode of creation is creepy since it proves that personal creativity is laughably inferior and virtually insignificant by comparison. When I say that nature is “monstrous” I have in mind the full-blown Lovecraftian, cosmicist sense, which is to say not that nature is ugly as a matter of some provincial taste, but that the universe’s mindless, blind and dumb creativity—which is now as palpable as anything could be, given the triumph of science’s mechanistic mode of explanation—is an abomination with terrifically subversive implications. The scientific replacement of the traditional God with nature—and specifically with Time—threatens to equate our personal plans with so many clueless pretensions, human enlightenment with a form of insanity. There is no ideal blueprint copied by the products of atomic interactions, contrary to the Platonism beloved by mathematicians, nor is there any idea of how things should be, subsisting in a cosmic Mind; rather, according to Smolin, there’s just the reality of change, of emergence and complexification and evolution. Even the laws of nature are modified over time, and while these cosmic transformations are constructive as well as destructive, they’re alien in their aimlessness and indifference. At least, that’s the conclusion warranted by the scientific evidence of how nature is replete with mechanisms that operate regardless of what anyone thinks of them.  

Anti-Natural Artificiality is the Highest Good

If natural transitions happen for no reason, might life still have a purpose in a universe that is itself as divine as anything could be? We prefer to think that life’s advent isn’t accidental, that the hardships we face and the injustices we witness are for a greater good; otherwise, anomalous, sentient creatures may not belong in the universe and the cost of our remaining here would be the tragic one that we should suffer pangs of alienation. This is in fact the underlying message of Eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism as well as of Gnosticism which influenced Christianity: the universe is flawed and noble creatures should seek moksha, liberation from the natural cycle of rebirth or from the original sin of being greedy mammals. Other religions such as Judaism and Taoism are, in effect, more apologetic for the true god’s monstrousness in that they proclaim we should make our peace with how the world works. Perhaps the world needs healing, as in the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, but the faith is that God’s creation is fundamentally good and thus the attempt to transcend it is blasphemous, even satanic. Surprisingly, modern, technoscience-driven societies side with the former, anti-nature religions. Lacking any rational plan, we unsustainably consume the planet’s resources, like tumors, and we obsessively uproot the world’s wild places, preferring artificial habitats that we devise. This is the secular form of moksha. Instead of meditating and practicing asceticism to free our consciousness, we free our bodies by using scientific knowledge to drastically alter our environments.

Whether this confluence counts as a clue to our life’s meaning depends, again, on what we want when we pose the question. The naïve wish is the theistic one according to which we should feel at home in the world, comforted by the faith that a higher power has our back. In the modern context, that faith is anachronistic and the true god is discovered to be omnipresent indeed, hiding in plain sight as monstrous nature, as our primordial nemesis. What we should do, then, must begin as a response to this dire position of ours in the inhuman cosmos. H. P. Lovecraft worried that the noble response—to learn how nature works—is nevertheless counterproductive since the scientific discoveries lead to disasters, including the scientist’s madness. Like Nietzsche, though, he implicitly trusted in the utility of his cosmicist message, since he published stories to popularize the sense of nature’s horrific weirdness. Nietzsche himself argued, in effect, for neo-Taoism combined with a Romantic faith in the power of art to enchant by way of a postmodern myth of our potential greatness. Monstrous nature evinces a savage, hideous will to power, and some of us can overcome our disgust and embrace our role as avatars of the cosmic will.

Whatever the particular meaning of life might be, the best way of life depends on our real position in the world. Nature at large is absurd, but the character of that absurdity inspires us to seek meaning in transcendence. Return to the teleological analogy of artifacts. The shovel has a function because it’s built to achieve the designer’s goal. This relation of a match between what something does and what someone intends is the basis for teleological value. The artifact’s purpose is to be like its ideal type, to strive, as it were, to be nearer to the mark. There’s no such basis for a post-scientific purpose of life, because scientists discover that living things are marginal in the universe’s evolution. Instead of approximating Platonic Forms or God’s intentions, sentient creatures are at odds with the rest of the world. Instead of being at home on Mother Earth, as in the ancient mythopoeic vision, living things are like the proverbial child who’s lost in the woods. While our purpose can’t, then, be handed to us, since natural forces have no hands, the world’s indifference imposes a great ambition upon us so that the atheistic, hypermodern meaning of life isn’t arbitrarily subjective after all. Our task is plainly to oppose nature with the alternative worlds we create, and we should do this because of nature’s monstrous absurdity which would otherwise pass uncontested.

This idea of existential revolt, popularized by the likes of Albert Camus, might seem juvenile. Indeed, the stereotype of existential philosophy construes it as so much whining that was hitherto tolerated only because the majority of it transpired as a way of lamenting the Second World War. But as I said, the revolt in question long predates that modern context, originating in the West with the progressive myth of Prometheus and the Gnostic one of the fallen, rebel angels, and having been practiced globally by world-weary asceticsfor thousands of years. Indeed, life’s antagonistic relation to the environment is rooted in biology, as shown by Schrodinger’s What is Life?, which posits that an organism resists entropic decay through homeostasis, by maintaining information within the body that’s kept from the external noise. Life’s revolt begins, then, with the formation of the first membrane or barrier against the world’s indifference. The evolution of consciousness and intelligence adds to the body’s interior a mental alternative to nature’s mindlessness. Indeed, the kernel of truth in Plato’s speculation about ideal Forms is that every concept has a normative aspect, meaning that when a thinker maps part of the world, she inevitably simplifies and idealizes, ignoring some details and focusing on those of interest such as the factors that could be used to achieve her goals.

Thus, it’s not just the jaded, pipe-smoking, beret-wearing aesthete who scoffs at the world, but each one of us who prefers to think of alternatives to reality—which we do whenever we entertain a thought of how things should be, instead of deferring to what’s actually before us. Not even the simplest, most robotic animals defer in that respect, since they invariably treat phenomena as being ready-to-hand, in Heidegger’s sense, meaning that they interpret them in practical, life-centric terms. The brain is structured not to digest every iota of information it receives through the senses, but to translate and to filter that information to provide us with a useful map. That mental map isn’t itself an alternative to hideously-complex nature, but it enables us to displace the natural world with our machines, cities, ideologies, and other artifacts. That displacement is the existential revolt, the hypermodern moksha, the science-centered meaning of life.

When we wonder about the point of life in general and we realize that science’s deflationary view of the world renders the question itself nostalgic, we should look closer at what the technoscientific enterprise is both demonstrating and accomplishing. Nature is palpably divine, albeit freakishly mindless in its staggering creativity, and our counter-creations continue the work done by the anomalous, organic processes in our bodies, namely the production of precious bastions that breathe life and purpose and value into our true god’s sprawling, undying carcass. We want our purpose in life to derive from the nature of reality, not to be a matter of mere taste. That derivation happens with or without the traditional God. If the premier twenty-first century religion is bound to be pantheistic, that is, atheistic and scientifically informed, its practitioners will trust in the sacredness of the technoscientific project to replace the inhuman wilderness that’s forced on them, with an alternative world that embodies their uncanny ideals. We ought to attempt to slay the cosmic dragon so that its strangely gratuitous and impersonal system will stand opposed somewhere for at least some fleeting moment in the unfathomable vastness of space and time.

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The Wistful Quest for Honour

As in The Walking Dead, the protagonists in the wonderful postapocalyptic movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, wrestle with the question of whether to hold on to ethical principles and fight for something greater than themselves or to regress along with the world and act as narrow-minded animals. A quotation at the end of Mad Max reads, “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves.” The heroes search, then, for honour despite the futility of that effort. Their honour is at best tragic, although perhaps the world’s indifference to our struggles is a precondition of moral value. There would be a worse sort of absurdity to the lack of impediments in heaven, since in that deathly state of bliss there would be no need for improvements nor any desire at all since a desire entails a lack of fulfillment.

In our hypermodern culture, though, honour itself is outmoded.

What is Honour?

Honour isn’t just about moral reputation or respect for someone’s high moral standing; it’s not just a matter of performing deeds of renown. An honourable person has integrity and so honour is opposed to hypocrisy. This means that an honourable person has no inner conflict, so that he doesn’t wear different faces, as it were, in different companies. He’s discovered his deepest self and honours that self in his actions and beliefs, regardless of the circumstances. So honour is a virtue, not just a matter of obeying moral laws.

Still, honour is a masculine preoccupation, which is odd because the interest in morality is universal. Moreover, honour is a mainstay of tribal societies as opposed to those ruled by law. A society that can’t afford the governmental institutions to guarantee a monopoly on the use of force within its borders relies on a code of honour so that its members don’t descend into anarchy when an opportunity arises to take advantage of each other. Desert tribespeople, for example, feel honour-bound to shelter travellers, and lords of medieval Europe would back up their word by pledging their estates “on their honour.” These prescriptions, that strangers in need should be assisted and that oaths should be kept are implicit rather than codified, because there’s no institution that could enforce such prescriptions in pre-industrialized societies. Honour works by an appeal to prestige that depends on how the rest of a population feels about each of its members. If you have honour, you enjoy society’s goodwill towards you, if not necessarily any protection by an all-powerful government. If you’ve committed some dishonor and your shameful act is discovered, you’ll be shunned, at a minimum, rather than automatically punished in some regulated fashion.

I’d submit, then, that honour arose prehistorically as a modification of the power dynamics that stabilize groups of social animals. Alpha wolves are more respected than betas in their packs, but that respect is little more than fear, because wolves lack the self-control to be interested in questions of what they should do as opposed to what they must do. Human societies are still defined by their dominance hierarchies, and there’s a sense of “honour” that captures the animalistic origin of this only-slightly-more-sophisticated form of social interaction. After all, honour can apply to rank rather than merit, so that an unscrupulous aristocrat, for example, can have more honour than a Christ-like peasant, because the aristocrat has access to more privileges in his society. The “respect” shown to such a high-ranking individual is akin to both fear and jealousy, whereas that shown on moral grounds is a kind of awe that something as virtually unnatural as morality could break into dismal nature. When the morally-compromised masses bow before a monk who always obeys a stringent moral code rather than succumbing to the natural course forced on creatures that lack autonomy, their reverence indicates that they recognize that the monk stands apart from nature and has even miraculously reversed its flow, like Moses parting the Red Sea.

In any case, the hypothesis is that moral hierarchies function like dominance ones or crude, power-based pecking orders, in that they stabilize a social group by dividing it into classes whose members feel obligated to maintain their place rather than upset the social order. When animals first became people, they acquired self-control through language, reason, introversion (self-reflection), curiosity, and creativity, and so they sought to set themselves apart from the “lower” animals, by making their societies meritorious rather than necessary or naturally compelled. Beta animals rally to their alphas for protection from the elements, and fear of the alpha’s wrath is the mechanism that solidifies their social arrangement. Again, human groups are still largely shaped by the same mechanism, but we’ve supplemented it with another hierarchy befitting our freedom and the emergent choice we face, of what we ought to do now that we needn’t necessarily do anything (because we have sufficient control over our actions). In the interim between animalistic dominance hierarchies and lawful civilizations, we used morality and the mechanisms of ostracism and fame to maintain a social order. 

At least, this explains the peculiar fact that men care more about honour than do women. Males tend to rule animalistic dominance hierarchies, because the subordinates’ fear is needed to cement the group for the sake of the hunt, which is carried out mostly by males. Thus, if honour is to substitute for naked force as a device for social control, males will nevertheless prefer a hierarchy that approximates the older form of society. Women have fallen under the honour code as well, as when maidens were honour-bound to maintain their virginity until they married, but the moral value of their chastity was dubious because their feudal society was palpably patriarchal. Women were regarded as possessions rather than moral agents, so when a maiden was despoiled, the disgrace was suffered not so much by her but by her family and particularly by her father or male guardian who was perceived to have neglected his duty to protect her “honour.”

Likewise, honour is more important to tribal than to civilized societies, because the former forage for food and use honour as a supplement to fear in the animalistic hunt. Even in medieval societies in which the peasants farmed and raised livestock to feed themselves, they did so thanks to their lord’s largesse, since the lord owned all the land; moreover, the lord typically engaged in ritualistic hunting for sport, almost as if to reveal the primitive source of the honour corresponding to his formal rank.

Elements of the Hypermodern Disgrace

    

Whatever the origin of honour may be, clearly both the interest in honour and honour itself are in decline in postindustrial societies. Rule of law replaces the code of honour, so that if you ask a lawyer or a legal scholar whether legal disputes are about discovering the moral course of action, she’ll likely laugh and dismiss the question. Morality is the ideological waste over which mere philosophers squabble, whereas those in the legal profession are charged to solve real-world problems of how power is distributed. Thus, when the legal system is shown to be rigged, as when O. J. Simpson could afford a team of super-lawyers to get away with murder, the question of whether the unsettling outcome is immoral is irrelevant to those operating within the system. As long as no law is broken, all actions are permitted in a liberal society, which is the society ruled by law rather than by, say, a dictator’s whim. The law is part of the social contract in which we forfeit our primitive inclinations to do whatever we want, in exchange for equal protection by the government. The law is supposed to be impartial in that it maximizes liberty and thus the freedom to sin, while preventing a collapse into the anarchic state of nature. We’re equal under the law because we’re each sovereign in our liberal society, and so (theoretically) the law has no favourites, but merely averts chaos like any other social convention such as a rule about which side of the road to drive on. The moral issue of what people ought to be is thus left to each free individual to figure out, and the more complex the society, the more an explicit, not to mention Kafkaesque legal framework is needed to replace the unsystematic code of honour.

There are numerous other reasons why honour has little place in technologically-advanced societies. The value of liberty derives from the rationalism that drove technoscientific progress over the last several centuries in the West, and so that value entails liberty for all rationally-autonomous persons, including women and minorities that can think for themselves and decide how to act based on their judgments. The feminist revolutions in the last century, however, had the unintended consequence that men lost their respect—both from women and increasingly from themselves. Women’s empowerment has befuddled men, because it’s forced a gender-neutral standard of personhood on everyone, casting doubt on all sexual instincts and traditions so that men no longer know whether to serve the rational ideals of the Enlightenment or the biological imperative to attract a mate. Those two goals are at loggerheads, because logic dictates that we attend to each other’s minds and ignore our bodily distinctions and degrading, beastly impulses, whereas the latter come to the fore in all mating rituals. Thus, feminism settles into a politically-correct form of transhumanism which condemns heterosexuality itself as oppressive. The upshot is that masculinity becomes a sin and so men and women are equally deprived of the happiness engineered for them by the genes that build our bodies. Men can no longer be virile without being accused of belittling the equal personhood of those who are inevitably harmed by his displays of manliness, be they women, children, or weaker nations. Men are deprived of the ideal that defines their gender, since that ideal becomes another dubious metanarrative, a mask concealing an amoral power advantage. In so far as honour is part of that ideal, honour is likewise “problematized,” to use the postmodern jargon. 

Likewise, technological progress and globalization undermine the masculine ideal, by forcing manual labourers who are disproportionately men to compete with machines and thus to lose their economic security, their self-respect, and hence the respect of their peers. This trend threatens women as well, as software become more sophisticated so that white-collar and service sector jobs are threatened by artificially-intelligent machines. But men are on the front lines of this class war, because they have traditionally performed the bulk of manual labour which is more easily and efficiently performed by robots.  The result isn’t just a squeezing of the middle classes in fattened nations like the US and parts of Europe, which had hitherto dominated the capitalistic games of exploitation. As large companies require fewer and fewer human employees, whole parts of the globe become economic dead zones. This largely explains why the Muslim world has so many angry, unemployed males, for example.

Paradoxically, the ideal of honour is paramount in precisely that latter part of the world which has less and less reason to be proud. The desert cultures of the Middle East are tribal, as shown by the Sunni and Shiite split, and thus they’re heirs to codes of honour, so that Muslims are horrified by violations of their right to be respected as servants of Allah. To overcompensate for the fact that Americans and the Chinese are eating the lunches of beleaguered Muslims in the Middle East, an astonishing number of Muslims denounce even the most trivial perceived stain on their honour, as when Western cartoonists mock the Muslim faith. Some Muslims even take up arms in a cult of terroristic jihad against the forces of secular individualism, joining cults like al Qaeda and Islamic State which boast the traditional values of camaraderie, including the manly ideals of honour and adventure. Moreover, honour hasn’t disappeared from the United States itself. You can find a code of honour in the US military, in inner city “gangsta” culture, and in the growing sport of mixed martial arts—all of which are dominated by men. The military is, of course, a rigid dominance hierarchy in which the hunting of humans replaces the foraging for food. Gangster culture is explicitly tribal and American MMA is dominated by the UFC which explicitly ranks fighters in a hierarchy of skill levels, as in the Ultimate Fighter tournaments.

But these latter bastions of honour are under siege. Like their blue-collar brethren, soldiers compete with machines so that their weapons accomplish their objectives more and more without human intervention, which means the soldiers require less martial skill and so earn less honour in combat. This development is depicted in the movie A Good Kill, in which a drone pilot longs to fly a jet again so he can at least pretend to be face to face with his enemies before dropping bombs on them, and so that he needn’t feel like a coward killing from a position of absolute safety. Indeed, the increasing use of machines in the US military (drones and satellites rather than conventional aircraft and human intelligence) stems not from a need to trim the military budget, since that budget is practically limitless. Instead, it’s another consequence of feminism, filtered through Obama’s neoliberalism: feminine values, which are ever more socially influential in technologically developed nations, require that war be as bloodless as possible since war is perceived as a savage affront to our dignity as rational individuals. As for the honour of gangland squabbles over street corners in drug-infested, crumbling American inner cities, the classic television show Wired makes the crucial point: as brave and desperate as many of those youths may be, they’re pawns in a corrupt system that includes the police force, the media, the educators, and the government. Moreover, while the impoverished gangster or “thug” wants primarily just to survive another day, he has dubious, materialistic values that trickle down from the prevailing Wall Street ideology and end up in infamous rap music: the dream is hardly to be ethical or to stoically live with dignity in a horrific world; instead, it’s to fulfill the cliché of conspicuous consumption, buying “fast cars and fast women,” fur coats and flashy jewelry. Finally, American MMA is more capitalistic than spiritual, because the operative American religion isn’t Christianity but individualism, and so the vast majority of UFC combatants fight for slave wages and are thereby dishonoured as well as discouraged about the value of cage fighting.

Materialistic consumerism is yet another nail in the coffin of honour in the most “civilized” parts of the world. To care about honour, first you must care about the quality of the inner self, since that’s the source of the self-control needed for moral action which deserves respect. But in a materialistic culture, what you own is more important than who you are, and so the whole question of morality is increasingly archaic. The goal now isn’t to fulfill your inner potential, but to measure your objective pleasure by your amassed money and possessions.  

Ethics without Honour?

You might be wondering whether any of this matters since we can just dispense with talk of honour and support our morality in some other way, such as by turning to religion, reason, or our conscience. Needless to say, though, old-time religion is as outmoded as honour, since the ascent of reason that’s been sustained by an elite modern faith in the individual roused the Western world and discredited the old noble lies—popularly called myths—so that now Judaism and Christianity are practiced either purely for the social benefits, as forms of cultish enslavement, or as vehicles for cathartic release of fears. The Western social norm has become secular, egoistic, and materialistic, owing to the tide of rationalism from the Scientific to the Industrial Revolutions, and so theistic religious ideology has been epistemically marginalized. To be sure, monotheism is still culturally influential, but because the traditional metaphors are plainly anachronistic, the myths don’t inspire their alleged devotees to carry on a religious way of life. True, a tiny minority of Jews studiously upholds the formalisms of its religious covenant with the desert God Yahweh, bowing and praying at just the right times, as though attempting to thereby relate to a creator of galaxies would be anything other than palpably ridiculous. But the majority of Christians don’t know what to do with their resurrection myth, since the Gnostics are mostly long gone, and so their faith doesn’t lead them to fulfill their potential.

Thus, Christianity doesn’t promote honour, the search for your true character so that you can earn respect for practicing the virtues of honesty and integrity. In the Catholic Church, for example, which is the most hierarchical form of Christianity, the priests are mocked rather than respected for their involvement in the Catholic rape culture or cover-up; the Church’s notorious hypocrisy demonstrates the vacuity of Christian myths in hypermodern societies. In a nutshell, the Christian narrative isn’t psychologically compelling, not even as pure fiction, given our contemporary background assumptions, and so it has no ethical impact on us. It doesn’t effectively teach us to be kind, to respect each other as equal children of a loving God. Of course, the scriptures say that’s how we should behave, but because the narrative can no longer be taken seriously, as Bishop John Spong pointed out, the moral lesson doesn’t take hold. Indeed, what the New Testament actually says is that morality is impossible for humans because of our original sin, so we should surrender ourselves to Jesus and let him “take the wheel,” as it were; once the resurrected Jesus lives in us, our works will match our faith. Again, though, the meaning of the old Eleusinian and Gnostic metaphor of redemption through rebirth is long since lost, and we see Christian leaders, from televangelists to Catholic priests and bishops disgraced by their frauds and rape sprees. Contemporary Christianity is therefore ethically irrelevant in the informed West. Our ethics are determined by secular institutions, from Hollywood to associative advertising to humanistic schools.

As for reason as a basis of honour, there’s a different problem: reason has only instrumental value, meaning that it can tell us what the facts are, such as the facts of how best to achieve a goal, but it can’t decide our ultimate values for us. Thus, reason can’t tell us the nature of our deepest self and so it can’t define our highest potential. Reason can inform us as to what we tend to desire, but it can’t evaluate which desires are more important or which figure into the character we should choose to build for ourselves. Reason can show us the pieces of the puzzle that add up to a self, but it can’t motivate us to discard some or to assemble new ones, in service to a vision of our ideal self. The naturalistic fallacy precludes logic or science alone from having normative implications. Honour requires a leap of faith, a choice of who we want to be, an aesthetic inspiration which motivates the creative act of forging a unified self. In short, honour requires something akin to a religious impetus: faith in oneself, nonrational belief in the self we should be, which guides our actions so we don’t stray from that ideal and so we remain true to our convictions.

And as for conscience, of course we can consult our feelings about how to live and whom to respect, rendering our best private judgment, but whether the promptings of our conscience have any merit or are themselves corrupt is the very question at issue. If we lack a sense of honour, for the above reasons, we lack also an ideal of a unified self, which means we have no idea what we really are. We don’t understand our potential and so we have little defense against our inclination to be hypocritical. We lack principles and so we think nothing of straying from them. We are indeed corrupted by self-serving, materialistic propaganda and we welcome replacement myths about the magic of the free marketplace and the virtue of selfishness. We worship celebrities not because we respect their moral standing, but just because we’re jealous of their fame and fortune. Our private ethical assessments are thus untrustworthy. We can’t guide ourselves to be better persons and to respect that which deserves to be respected, because we’ve been infantilized. To compensate for this downfall, we content ourselves with feel-good postmodern rationalizations, pretending that moral judgments are as arbitrary as taste in fashion, that moral values are unreal and that talk of human potential is insidious since it presupposes some patriarchal or other hegemonic agenda.

Morality is indeed subjective. That’s because it’s a system of rules for subjects, for people who differ from material objects due to our (limited) self-control. Just because something is created by people doesn’t make it arbitrary or unreal; for example, we create all our technology and those creations are all-too real. Even if moral principles were fictions, they would be subject to aesthetic standards of judgment, and fictions too can have real consequences: witness the Bible’s undeniable historical impact. The question, then, is whether hypermodern culture provides for social as well as scientific enlightenment. Does our abundance of information pertaining to the natural facts suffice for a worthy vision of which sort of character deserves respect? If we tend to behave differently depending on the circumstances, adapting like a multitasking computer, do we become internally fragmented, divided against ourselves so that we’re more easily conquered by power elites? We think in terms of isolated problems which can each be solved by consuming the appropriate product or by conducting a rational analysis. But we lack the big picture because myths are anathema to jaded hypermodernists like us. We’re soulless just to the extent we’re mythless. We lack honour or any sense of where honour might be found because the transient contents of our minds aren’t united by a viable myth, vision, or philosophical worldview. The idolizing of reason leads to juvenile scientism, sanctimonious new atheism, or rank Philistinism which exacerbates big business’s mass infantilization of consumers.

Our technological power, too, corrupts us, as is apparent from how social media degrade the quality of communication as much as they promote a higher output of messages. There’s an old saying that if something’s easy to obtain, it’s not worth having. If technology empowers us so that certain goals are much more easily achieved, those goals may no longer be worthy even of our attention. Instead of rushing to communicate on the web, we might reflect on whether we have anything worth saying. But that would require soul-searching, which would involve introversion and a foundational leap of faith in one direction or another, an artistic choice of which sort of self we should create with our thought patterns and actions.  

Honour in the Undead God

On my blog I’ve called for a viable postmodern religion, one that’s naturalistic and consistent with existential authenticity, that is, with distaste for delusions. Any such religion would provide for a sense of honour, by inspiring us to create worthwhile unified selves. These selves would consist of patterns of higher-order thoughts that would further liberate us from our animalistic neural modules. Those thoughts in turn would amount to contemplations of a staggering vision of the universe and of our place in it.

I’ve set out my personal vision in my rants within the undead god. Mind you, I regard those philosophical speculations as fictions, as artistic renderings or models of the world. They’re attempts to answer the big question of what we should do, given what and where we are on the cosmic scale. To wit, we’re effectively at war with nature because nature is monstrous whereas sentient creatures have the potential to redeem the undead god. Pride in our intelligence isn’t the original sin; that sin, rather, is the universe’s inherent pointlessness, its demonic simulation and thus mocking of intelligence and creativity. Our mission as fully awakened outsiders is to remake the world in our image, to learn about natural processes so that we can undo them, replacing them with our artifices so that the childlike, mythopoeic vision of our ancestors might ironically be vindicated and the world might be enchanted, if only for a tragically limited period. This aesthetic, pantheistic myth implies that a certain sort of character is honourable: not the extroverted social insider, but the introverted outsider; not the unenlightened beta but the detached omega or the sociopathic alpha and avatar of monstrous nature; not the ultrarational atheist or the crazed religious fundamentalist, and not the deluded liberal humanist or the straightforwardly evil, so-called conservative, but the alienated and blackly-comedic observer of cultural and political conflicts from a great distance who beholds the underlying, esoteric dynamics; not the happiness-seeker but the science- and art-centered ascetic.

This calling of mine is little more than a howl at the moon in the outer wilderness. We should be self-conscious about the aesthetic nature of philosophy. Intellectual models are artworks made of ideas. Indeed, everything in nature can be interpreted as a product of some forces, initial conditions, and materials, so this detached perspective on my philosophical output flows from the message itself. The point is that if you’re stuck in a decaying, undead god that most people can’t call by name for fear of losing hope in the merit of any of their plans, all you can do, in the end, is rant to inspire the existential rebellion. Science corroborates the Gnostic suspicion that we are in fact trapped in an inhuman monster. Contrary to Gnosticism, though, there is no transcendent salvation nor any redeemer sent to enlighten us and show us how to escape. There is no permanent escape. All prophets are, at best, mad geniuses, but their ideas are artworks created by their alienation and imagination, not revelations from any extraterrestrial intelligence.

Not all diatribes are equally meritorious, though. Some are merely insane, while others testify to the artist’s honour, to what Nietzsche called the overman’s nobility. Existentially authentic honour isn’t anything to brag about, because in this neo-Christian outlook, those with honour are social outsiders, those with the least rather than the most happiness and material success—as long as the losses are cultivated in the war between the enlightened individual and the monstrous world. 

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