Almost everybody asks this question at some point in their life. The world is so complex, so confusing. It makes no sense; the universe seems so capricious in its causes and effects. Good people suffer while bad people prosper. It’s all so crazy!
All humans have struggled with these realities; they have devised many solutions. The first solution was to suppose that the world was actually controlled by powerful hidden people. They made things happen. If you antagonized them, they would make you suffer; if you pleased them, they would bestow bounty upon you. But these powerful, secret people were so hard to figure out. It was obvious that, if you praised them loudly, they would favor you, but it was apparent that you could all too easily offend them without realizing your error. Some people claimed to have an inside track with these powerful people who lived in the sky, and offered to help guide others in the proper handling of those powerful gods.
The single most powerful means of influencing these gods was to sacrifice something you valued. If you “gave” them something important to you, you proved your devotion. Unfortunately, since they lived in the sky, there wasn’t any obvious way to give anything to them. So people settled on destroying things as a way to “give” it to the gods. After all, if I give you a jewel, I no longer have it. Similarly, if I kill my son, as Abraham almost did with his son Isaac, then I no longer have that son, which is at least half of an act of giving. Besides, if the gods are all-powerful, a dead son becomes their property, right? Well… it was the best idea people could come up with.
The best way to give something to the gods was to burn it. That way, the smoke flew up into the air, where the gods were supposed to live, so that was sort of like giving it to them. The more valuable your sacrifice, the more pleased the gods were. So people sacrificed cows, sheep, pigs, children, and nubile virgins.
This religion stuff was adequate to answer many of the questions of life. “God works in mysterious ways” answered every possible question about the world, good and evil, and why strange things sometimes happened.
As religion matured, it expanded its explanatory powers. Two problems in particular vexed people. First, why did we have to die? Why couldn’t we live forever? I remember at a quite young age being terribly upset at the inevitability of death. I didn’t want to die; why did I have to die? It seemed so wrong, so unfair. Many people have great difficulty coming to terms with death. So religion came up with a handy-dandy answer: the soul. You possessed two selves: a body and a soul. Your body would die someday, but your soul would live forever. Voila! Death conquered! If you’re upset about death, just grab some religion and you’ll be feeling better soon!
Then religion added a new feature: the triumph of good over evil. Sure, the world was full of evil people doing evil things to good people, but if you had religion, you knew that the good people would go to heaven and the bad people would go to hell, and so the world really was a just place. So religion provides you with an explanation for everything that happens in the world, it allays your fear of death, and reassures you that the world truly is a just place. That’s a really good deal, which is why billions of people all over the world have bought into many different brands of religion.
Mysticism
The development of rationalism in the West threw a wrench into this cozy deal between customers and religion. Religion is profoundly irrational. After all, why do these sky-people gods (or god) care about stupid, silly human beings. Would you lord it over an ant colony in the say way that God lords it over humanity? What possible satisfaction could that provide?
I was raised as a Catholic, and went to parochial schools. The breaking point for me came from the tale about Jesus departing from the apostles by rising up into the air and disappearing into the clouds. So why didn’t we all just get into some rocket ships and go where-ever Jesus went? Who needs to be good when you just travel directly to heaven? That propelled me to atheism.
But many people in Western countries have resolved the conflict between rationalism and religion by resorting to mysticism. This really got started in earnest with the counterculture revolution in the 1960s and has been going strong ever since. Sure, there aren’t any powerful people living in the sky — that belief is irrational. But certain crystals possess special powers — not magical powers, mind you, just SPECIAL powers — that, if properly harnessed and utilized, can enhance one’s life. Or perhaps psychedelic drugs can give you deep insights to the true nature of reality. Aligning one’s life in the proper directions (as determined by differing schools of thought) can be beneficial. There are all sorts of things in the world that, if properly used, can give us greater control over our lives.
My own case
I took a different route. At first, like every convert to a new spiritual brand, I was contemptuous of others (religion and mysticism). “Silly fools!” I thought. “Reason, logic, and knowledge is the only path to true knowledge.” So I pursued science, studying with the intensity with which I do everything. I studied physics, because it is the foundation of all science. But I wasn’t learning anything about the mysteries of the universe; instead, I was instead learning how to calculate the speed with which balls roll down inclined planes, or how an imperfect conductor alters an electric field, or lots of similarly silly problems the understanding of which would permit me to understand even more complicated, and sillier problems. I felt as if I was being trained to be a glorified engineer; I wasn’t learning the answers to the important questions. My professors, I realized were not sages; they were desperate men (yes, they were all men back then) concentrating their entire intellects upon ever tinier and tinier aspects of reality, while all around them unseen flowers bloomed.
My curiousity could not abide such a crabbed intellectual life; I left physics and sought truth where-ever I could find it. I learned digital electronics: TTL, flip-flops, RS-232, and countless other stuff. I taught myself how to program the new microcomputers. At the same time, I studied energy issues: power sources like nuclear, coal, solar, and wind. Having endured the Vietnam era, I was intensely curious about why people go to war in the first place; I studied military history and then expanded to explore all of history, starting with Will Durant’s magnificent 12-volume series The Story of Civilization. As the years passed, my curiousity expanded to, well, just about everything. I studied economic history, then economics. My work on interactive storytelling convinced me that the challenge required the creation of dedicated “toy languages”, so I studied linguistics. Biology was interesting; when I stumbled upon the excellent books by Stephen Gould, I gobbled them up. Mr. Gould’s work led me to study evolution. Then I advanced to human evolution, which led me to cognitive evolution: how did the human mind develop into such a powerful system? That led me to explore the history of human cognition; not just the huge leap taking place between 35,000 and 50,000 years ago (which I attribute to the flowering of language as a fully developed medium of communication). From there I moved into early civilizations, studying how they developed such studies as mathematics, astronomy, and law, all of which required some degree of rigorous thinking. From there to the rise of religion, the Greek invention of rationalism, and the revolutionary developments of church thinkers reacting to Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Thelogica, which in turn led to the application of mathematics to physical reasoning, setting the stage for Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of modern technology. I wrote my findings in a hyperbook on this website: The History of Thinking
My research for Balance of Power led me to read the works of Henry Kissinger; whatever you think of his policies, you have to admit that his knowledge of diplomatic history is deep. My work on interactive storytelling led me to read books about stories, most of which are crap, but there are some nuggets of gold embedded in the fecal masses of such books. I found books about folklore to be the most useful. And I occasionally read biographies.
Oh, I failed to mention Erasmus. I awoke in the middle of a night with the word “Erasmus” in my mind. Then and there I went to my library and poked around until I found a short description of his work in one of my history books. The next morning I drove to a good bookstore and found a book containing some of his most important works. It didn’t take me long to complete that book; I was hungry for more. I went on quite an Erasmus jag. Of all the historical figures I have read about, Erasmus is the only one for whom I feel kinship. Of course, he differed from me in many traits: his religious fervor, his thin skin, and his verbose style. I collected everything by or about Erasmus that I could find; my Erasmus library is probably better than anything west of the Mississippi River. I’m pretty confident of my extravagent claim, as I have managed to acquire some truly obscure books about Erasmus.
Somehow I had hoped that Erasmus might provide me with some answers to the question “What is it all about?” Alas, it didn’t work out. He offered many worthy insights, but ultimately his point of view was too anchored in 16th century culture. I learned a lot from Erasmus, but my questions remained unanswered.
Only after I moved to Oregon did the answers begin to gel. The triggering factor, I think, was the long walks I took in the woods. Those walks got me away from computers and politics and money and all the other distractions of modern life. I had read Thoreau while still in college; this paragraph glances upon some of my own experiences in the woods:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”
I did not go as far as Thoreau, but long walks in the woods clarified my thinking.
Connections
The most important realization I gained from those walks was the mass of connections in our reality. Having spent decades studying reality from dozens of different angles, I realized that they were all connected together. An ecosystem is much like a financial system, with a plethora of competing agents struggling to gain advantage. In business, you are well advised to “concentrate your efforts on your basis of competitive advantage”; in military science, you should “fight on the ground of your own choosing”. The two advices say the same thing. Audience tastes evolve in response to artistic innovations, just as species evolve in response to environmental challenges. The war of the sexes is fought in most species, not just humans. I used a technique from Mayan mathematics to solve a graphics problem in a videogame. I share DNA with every tree, every weed, every bug, and every germ on this planet. I share more DNA with chimpanzees than with sagebrush, but even a sagebrush has something similar to something inside me.
Everything in reality is connected with everything else. Some of the connections are long and convoluted, and some are short and direct. Most people acknowledge this truth, but I KNOW it, because all those decades of study have allowed me to see so many of those connections.
Of course, I am not omniscient, and my image of reality is a patchwork. But it is complete enough that I can now see the Big Picture. I see how things fit together; I know my place in it; I accept the harsh truths of reality while I revel in its beauties. I sense that I am one with everything.
