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.
