The new cosmology in tragedy’s wake

The new cosmology in tragedy’s wake

Photo by Jesse Mills on Unsplash

Originally published 18 September 2001

All human thought and action is guid­ed by a cos­mol­o­gy, a col­lec­tive­ly accept­ed sto­ry for where the world came from and how it works.

Dur­ing the past 400 years, a new cos­mol­o­gy has emerged, with its first expres­sion in Europe’s Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion and Enlight­en­ment, and roots in the ancient world of the East­ern Mediter­ranean. Today, the new cos­mol­o­gy is embraced by sci­en­tists around the world, irre­spec­tive of race, creed, or nationality.

The new sto­ry sug­gests that the uni­verse began about 15 bil­lion years ago in an inex­plic­a­ble explo­sion from a seed of infi­nite ener­gy. Space and time expand­ed from noth­ing. Stars and galax­ies evolved to fill the uni­verse with light, guid­ed by a mys­te­ri­ous capac­i­ty of mat­ter to gath­er into com­bi­na­tions of ever greater com­plex­i­ty. On at least one tiny plan­et in a typ­i­cal galaxy, and per­haps through­out the uni­verse, life appeared, then consciousness.

In none of this is there evi­dence of arbi­trari­ness or mir­a­cle, although, as Augus­tine of Hip­po said, it might all be con­sid­ered a mir­a­cle, wor­thy of reli­gious feel­ing and awe.

The Human Genome Project con­firms what the new cos­mol­o­gy has long assert­ed — that we are all one under the skin, all part of an inter­breed­ing species, all capa­ble of love and laugh­ter, all prey to the same viral and bac­te­r­i­al pathogens, super­fi­cial­ly dif­fer­ent only because of the acci­den­tal iso­la­tion of pop­u­la­tions dur­ing our long dis­per­sal out of Africa, the appar­ent land of our origin.

Although the new cos­mol­o­gy is the basis for our glob­al sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal civ­i­liza­tion, it has not yet tak­en hold of our con­scious­ness. Psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly, we still pret­ty much live in a world per­me­at­ed by mir­a­cles and spirits.

We still imag­ine that our indi­vid­ual lives are the rea­son for exis­tence, rather than rev­el­ing in the col­lec­tive won­der of all life in a uni­verse of evolv­ing splen­dor. Like our pre­sci­en­tif­ic ances­tors, we think of our tribe as the favored peo­ple of a God who approves our actions and con­founds our enemies.

And so we speak of those who are not of our tribe as The Great Satan or The Evil Empire.

Some­times we com­mit acts of unspeak­able vio­lence against oth­er tribes in the con­vic­tion that God con­dones our actions, and that we will be reward­ed in an eter­nal place of milk and honey.

We say “Allah will smite the enemy.”

Or “Amer­i­ca is God’s country.”

The old cos­mol­o­gy with its trib­al gods gave humans com­fort in tribu­la­tion, a sense of belong­ing, and a way to under­stand events — dis­ease, nat­ur­al cat­a­stro­phe, will­ful vio­lence — that hap­pened with no appar­ent reason.

The old cos­mol­o­gy also inspired pogrom, war, jihad, slav­ery, the exter­mi­na­tion of indige­nous peo­ples, and unend­ing strife between Protes­tants and Catholics, Pales­tini­ans and Israelis, whites and blacks.

There is a bet­ter way.

The Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca is not a per­fect human exper­i­ment, but it is a great human exper­i­ment, found­ed on Enlight­en­ment prin­ci­ples, and one could sense the new cos­mol­o­gy at work in the after­math of last Tues­day’s tragedy: Peo­ple of all races and creeds respond­ing with amaz­ing courage and mutu­al tol­er­ance, under­stand­ing intu­itive­ly, if not con­scious­ly, that we are one frag­ile peo­ple afloat on a speck of dust in a cos­mos that has the pow­er to con­found our most earnest expec­ta­tions of favored status.

Although the evil per­pe­tra­tors of last week’s vio­lence embrace the tech­no­log­i­cal prod­ucts of the new cos­mol­o­gy, they have no inter­est in the sto­ry itself, and, to a large extent, nei­ther do Amer­i­cans. And yet the new sto­ry is worth embrac­ing for the same rea­son that Amer­i­ca works so envi­ably well: It is a human sto­ry, not a trib­al sto­ry. It is a sto­ry that focus­es our atten­tion on cre­ativ­i­ty, not destruction.

In the world’s obser­va­to­ries, hos­pi­tals, and research insti­tu­tions, sci­en­tists of all nation­al­i­ties, creeds, and races work side by side to find a ratio­nal under­stand­ing of the world that tran­scends trib­al dif­fer­ences, and which makes no ref­er­ence to trib­al gods. Protes­tants and Catholics may hurl epi­thets at each oth­er in the streets of West Belfast, but in the lab­o­ra­to­ries of Belfast’s Queen’s Uni­ver­si­ty they get along fine.

They get along fine, too, in the neigh­bor­hoods of New York City, by and large. The entire world saw them stand­ing shoul­der to shoul­der, cov­ered with the dust of the col­lapsed tow­ers. Our genomes are essen­tial­ly the same. We all live in a uni­verse gov­erned by the same mag­nif­i­cent­ly cre­ative but relent­less­ly inex­orable laws. We have much in com­mon to hymn and praise togeth­er, if only we can extract our­selves from the divi­sive cos­molo­gies of the past.

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