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Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of taking those four extra keystrokes to just finish the job— Chaos will get them. Chaos will crack them from the outside—with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet—or unravel them from the inside, with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities,
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“science, generally, hates beliefs.”
but it wouldn’t have been coffee, because he was a lifelong teetotaler (eschewing not just booze and tobacco but even caffeine, for its dangerous ability to alter perception).
I asked my dad, “What’s the meaning of life?” Maybe it had been the expansiveness of the marsh, which ended at the ocean, which ended… I didn’t understand where—I pictured an edge, with sailboats tipping off—that made me suddenly wonder what we were all doing here. My dad paused, raising one black eyebrow behind the binoculars. Then he turned to me grinning and announced, “Nothing!”
You don’t matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please.
While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they
“There is grandeur in this view,”
Perhaps he had cracked something essential about how to have hope in a world of no promises, about how to carry forward on the darkest days. About how to have faith without Faith.
By looking very closely at fish anatomy, he told himself, he was discovering our true creation story, what experiments in life it took to make humans. And he was uncovering the clues—written in the accidental missteps and successes of other creatures—that could potentially help our kind advance even further. It was Agassiz’s same mission, but without a creator at the helm.
His bone to pick in the end, however, was not with the hucksters making a buck off easy targets but with the easy targets themselves. Such loose thinking, such “trying to believe what we know is not true,” he wrote, led to a “vast amount of suffering in our society.”
There’s an idea in philosophy that certain things don’t exist until they get a name. Abstract things like justice, nostalgia, infinity, love, or sin. The thinking goes that these concepts do not sit out there on some ethereal plane waiting to be discovered by humans but instead snap into being when someone invents a name for them. The moment the name is uttered, the concept becomes “real,” in the sense that it can affect reality. We can declare war, truce, bankruptcy, love, innocence, or guilt, and in so doing, change the course of people’s lives. The name itself is a thing of great power,
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One important rule about holotypes. If one is ever lost, you cannot simply swap a new specimen into the holy jar. No, that loss is honored, mourned, marked. The species line is forever tarnished, left without its maker. A new specimen will be chosen to serve as the physical representative of the species, but it is demoted to the lowly rank of “neotype.”
one-off jabs at parapsychologists had blossomed into a full-blown creed that “trying to believe what we know is not true” could be society’s downfall.
“Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.”
You can even find it in his essays on temperance. Why, in the end, was he so opposed to drugs? Because they allow you to feel more powerful than you are! Or, as he puts it, they “forc[e] the nervous system to lie.” Alcohol, for example, lets drinkers “feel warm when they are really cold, to feel good without warrant, to feel emancipated from those restraints and reserves which constitute the essence of character building.” In other words, a rosy view of yourself was anathema to self-development. A way to keep yourself stagnant, stunted, morally inchoate. A fast track to sad-sackery.
In it, David confesses that the trouble with the scientific worldview was that when you pointed it at the meaning of life, it showed you one thing. Futility: “The fires we kindle die away in coals; castles we build vanish before our eyes. The river sinks in the sands of the desert.… Whichever way we turn we may describe the course of life in metaphors of discouragement.” So what were you supposed to do?
he quotes Thoreau—“There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world—in any world”—and then he sends his readers off with a rousing dose of carpe diem. “Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”
“Do these views of life lead to Pessimism?” Toward the end of his lecture, he offers his students a kind of magic spell. A way of diffusing the chill of Chaos. In Courier type, just eight words long: There is grandeur in this view of life.
his will to go on? Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible is a place that has nothing to do with optimism—instead, it’s something far deeper and far less self-conscious than optimism—the Indestructible is the thing we mask with all sorts of other symbols, hopes, and ambitions—that don’t force you to acknowledge what is underneath. Well… if you do (or are forced to) remove all those excesses, you get the Indestructible, and once you acknowledge it, Kafka goes deeper—he doesn’t let you
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And time and time again they found that, indeed, mentally healthy people rated themselves as more attractive than they were, more helpful, more intelligent, more in control of chance events (like rolling dice or picking winning lottery numbers) than they possibly could be. When they looked into their past, they remembered their successes with more ease than their failures. When they looked into their future, they voted themselves as more likely to succeed than their friends and classmates.
Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are. It’s a hard lot being a human, these psychologists explain. You walk around with the knowledge that the world is fundamentally uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success, that you are competing against billions, that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally,
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A few years later, she unearthed a trait she named “grit” that seemed to be the magic ingredient. Grit. A catchier word for persistence. Grit. The robotic plunging at “extremely long-term objectives” without “positive feedback.” Grit. The ability to bang one’s head repeatedly against a wall. She’d seen it in West Point cadets and CEOs and people at the top of their game in every profession. Musicians. Athletes. Chefs. Forget talent, creativity, kindness, IQ. Pure grit seemed to be the thing that would get you ahead.
Duckworth puts it, “maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”
Their pom-poms are droopy. They whisper when they cheer. Be HUMBLE! Be BLUE! Who’s the best?? NOT YOU!
“Aggressors often think very highly of themselves,” Baumeister and Bushman write, “as evidenced by nationalistic imperialism, ‘master race’ ideologies, aristocratic dueling, playground bullies, and street gang rhetoric.”
“Wow, it seems a lot like a strychnine poisoning.” She told me that strychnine is known as “the poison of Hollywood films. Because it’s that poison that does what you see in the movies: where somebody’s eyes are rolling back in their heads and they can’t control their body, and they’re having seizures—these, like, very dramatic contortions where their body’s twisting this way and that. That’s what this poison does.”
sterilization. In 1907, a few of his friends from Bloomington successfully legalized forced eugenic sterilization in Indiana—the first such law not just in the country but in the world.
The ruling that made this all possible, by the way, is still on the books. That’s right. The Supreme Court ruling has never been overturned. At our highest level, it is still written into law that if the government deems you “unfit,” officials have the authority to pull you from your home, stick a knife through your abdomen, and terminate your bloodline.
‘I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ, consider that thee might be mistaken.’ ”
Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. There are crows that have better memories than us, chimps with better pattern-recognition skills, ants that rescue their wounded, and blood flukes with higher rates of monogamy. When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top. We don’t have the biggest brain or the best memory. We’re not the fastest or the strongest or the most prolific. We’re not the only ones that mate for life, that show altruism, use
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No, to be clear-eyed and Good was to concede with every breath, with every step, our insignificance. To say otherwise was to sin, to lie, to march oneself off toward delusion, madness, or worse.
It was the dandelion principle! To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas. And so it must be with humans, with us. From the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenic dream of perfection, sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might
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This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.
it would reveal some very surprising relationships. Like, for example, as much as a bat might look like a winged rodent, it’s actually more closely related to camels. Or that whales are actually ungulates (the family to which deer belong)!
It makes my skin prickle with the most forbidden atheist fantasies. That somehow, out there, encoded in the cold math of Chaos, there is a sort of cosmic justice after all.
For some, the letting go of the stars was horrifying. It made them feel too small, too pointless, too out of control. They would not believe it. They shot the messengers. When Copernicus gave up the stars, he was condemned as a heretic. When Giordano Bruno gave up the stars, he was burned at the stake. When Galileo gave up the stars, he was placed under house arrest.
That we have been wrong before and we will be wrong again. That the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.”
How they see more colors than us, how they can outperform us on certain memory tasks, use tools, differentiate between Bach and the blues. How some species appear to experience pain. I asked Balcombe, jokingly, what everyone was supposed to do, ha, stop eating fish, ha? He quietly said, “Yeah.”
this is something humans do all the time—downplay similarities between us and other animals, as a way of maintaining our spot at the top of our imaginary ladder. Scientists, de Waal points out, can be some of the worst offenders—employing technical language to distance ourselves from the rest of the animals. They call “kissing” in chimps “mouth-to-mouth contact”; they call “friends” between primates “favorite affiliation partners”; they interpret evidence showing that crows and chimps can make tools as being somehow qualitatively different from the kind of toolmaking said to define humanity.
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“Growing up,” she told me, “is learning to stop believing people’s words about you.”
“There is another world, but it is in this one,” says a quote attributed to W. B. Yeats
On Neptune, it rains diamonds; it really does. Scientists figured that out just a few years ago.
I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot.
Scientists have discovered, it’s true, that employing positive illusions will help you achieve your goals. But I have slowly come to believe that far better things await outside of the tunnel vision of your goals.
