The Prospects of Heroism despite the Eventual Cosmic Equilibrium

Against the con of mystical oneness

One of the great confusions in religion arises from the assumption that we should look forward to unifying ourselves with God or with fundamental reality, to the coming together of all things in a state of universal, everlasting peace and harmony.

Monotheistic religions combine the prospect of union with the divine, with the moral and political idea of atonement (at-oneness). Thus, the underlying oneness of all things, which will be revealed in time is distinguished by God’s love and justice, so all wrongs will be righted on Judgment Day with divine rewards and punishments. Perhaps that mystical idea of union with the source of reality was even modeled, in part, after the practice of social atoning, the making of amends with someone you’ve wrong, to be put back into harmony with the community.

In the East, divine oneness is often thought of more negatively as an absence of striving and suffering, as the peace of nirvana or as an escape from the cycle of rebirth and the illusion of change. The real world is already at one with itself, as the unity of Atman and Brahman, for example, but we don’t see it because we’re misled by our ego into accepting narrow-minded conceptions which divine up reality to try to conquer its parts.

The religious notion of absolute union is easily naturalized. In chemistry the state of all-encompassing unity is called “equilibrium,” the cessation of change due to the neutralizing or cancelling-out of the concentrations of elements and their products. In cosmology, the universe may end in such a state when even black holes fizzle out, long after all the stars have expired when “space” and “time” will be meaningless and no further natural events will be possible.

More locally, we can think of the universality of death as a great equalizer. The range of human endeavors is trivialized by the oneness of our shared end point. No matter how beautiful or wealthy or wise we are, whether we’re saintly heroes or murderous villains, our bodies perish and eventually we’ll be forgotten, as will everyone who knew us or who could care to look into who we were. Everything we’ll have accomplished will one day be nullified by the deeds of others, so it will be as if none of us had ever lived.

I trust you appreciate that such natural oneness is hardly a state worth longing for. On the contrary, that negation of any capacity for being or for change is the demonic, anti-divine goal of sci-fi and mythic villains who would negate world-order as such. The Olympian gods protected the cosmos, whereas the Titans wished to return the universe to a state of nothingness, chaos, or anti-order.

The Ruse of Divine Oneness

This is why religions smuggle morality, politics, and psychology into their concept of absolute equilibrium, committing the naturalistic fallacy. Ask yourself, for example, how bliss could be possible in a state of eternal unity with God in Heaven, if this unity entails the inability for changes to occur. What could “bliss” mean if the bliss could never end or be contrasted with an alternative mental state or if there were no difference anymore between you and me and between your bliss and mine, because all such differences would be negated by the equilibrium?

A pleasing state of final oneness would be as simpleminded a conception of absolute rest as would the notion that the supernatural source of the universe has a long grey beard. The folk metaphors and projections here only reflect our parochial experience and are misplaced in light of the transcendent matters under discussion.

The Daoist form of the fallacy is particularly insidious. The Daoist’s analogy is with the beauty of sonic harmony and with the flow of natural rhythms and cycles, so the idea is that we ought to attune ourselves to nature’s ways instead of foolishly resisting how the world works and suffering unnecessarily out of arrogance or stubbornness. Daoist oneness is conceived of as spontaneous, effortless action (wu wei) so that we become part of the cosmic tapestry.

Alas, strip away the arbitrary anthropocentricity of the projection of musical qualities onto nature and you find that Daoist oneness is totalitarian. The Holy Grail of spontaneous, effortless action could be none other than behaviour directed by pure instinct with no hint of artifice. In line with some sentiments of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and with the half-baked practices of hippies, the Daoist Heaven would effectively be a back-to-nature movement in which we relinquish our Faustian pride and train ourselves to act once again like unknowing animals and puppets of natural forces.

The Con of Economic Equilibrium

Religions aren’t the only perpetrators of this confusion, since secular economists also make a hash of the concept of absolute oneness. Economic equilibrium “is a situation in which economic forces such as supply and demand are balanced and in the absence of external influences the (equilibrium) values of economic variables will not change.” For example, this is the state in which “quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal” or in which “a market price is established through competition such that the amount of goods or services sought by buyers is equal to the amount of goods or services produced by sellers.”

Luckily, all of the economists’ obfuscating math can be ignored and we can look at how capitalism tends to work in the real world, to see what economists are actually advocating. By encouraging our selfish nature which is supposed to be regulated only by an invisible (nonexistent) hand, capitalism is evidently self-destructive, since this kind of economy empowers predators to capture the government and other regulatory bodies, allowing monopolies to form and the wealthy few to become ever more corrupt and out-of-touch until the plutocrats take the society down with them or go transnational and flee to a new host country to infect it like parasites.

However, let’s suppose capitalism is sustainable in that the corruption caused by that concentration of power somehow generates techniques for preserving the social systems. What would the “perfection” of these tendencies look like? What would real-world, capitalistic equilibrium amount to? The answer is clear: once again, totalitarian dystopia.

In so far as supply can perfectly meet demand, the demand must be manufactured along with the products permitted by the dwindling resources left by the capitalist’s ravaging of the natural environment. (A striking depiction of that total control is of the “food” available for the poor people on the train in the movie Snowpiercer.) The demand is manufactured because of the “capitalist’s” ownership not just of the means of production but of the government, the mass media, and the myth-makers and thought-leaders that codify much of the culture.

The “balance” of supply and demand would be secured by totalitarian mechanisms of social control. Likewise, the market price would be “perfected” by the replacement of genuine competition with the pseudo kind we see presently in which shadowy oligopolies hide their ownership of brands.

Humanistic Rebels against Nature

Opposing this perverse ideal of absolute unity/nullity are humanists, pragmatists, realists, pessimists, and especially existentialists. At the root of the opposition is the recognition that precisely because mystical oneness is only nature’s ghastly endpoint of universal emptiness, the honourable mission of intelligent creatures is to revolt against nature; hence the implicit goal of scientists and technologists, which is to replace the natural (the wilderness) with the artificial. Short of some far-future trans-human miracle, these humanists are doomed to fail, so their heroism is of the tragic variety.

Existential philosophers have focused on our freedom in relation to the absurdity of living under this sword of Damocles. There are, then, two kinds of people, the authentic and the inauthentic, those who grasp these existential stakes and those who act in bad faith, who retreat to delusions instead of wrestling with the vexing reality.

If we couldn’t understand that the religious depictions of divine oneness are anthropocentric fallacies and fictions, and that this unity is only the real, physical extinction of everything anyone’s ever held dear, there would be no ethical consequence of living out our animal life cycle. But because we do know better, there’s a special judgment against those who pretend otherwise. These traitors against the cause of personhood earn the contempt of a higher class of creature, the spiritual and intellectual elite, and this will have to substitute for the fantasy of divine condemnation.

Notice that the apologists for the atonement with God demonize the enlightened humanists who actively oppose the mindlessness of nature’s creative self-destruction by injecting mentality and intelligent design into the world via their artistry and artifices. Christianity’s Satan, after all, is the symbol of overweening pride and of a wicked rebellion against God’s plan that includes eschatological unification.

This is all twisted around, of course, because the organized religions were able to attain such power and broad appeal only because they inadvertently served nature’s flow to nowhere. For example, theism primes us to accept oligarchy and thus to submit to nature’s mechanisms for distributing social power, those being the instincts that result in the type of dominance hierarchy which is so prevalent in the animal kingdom.

Religious Demonization of Humanists

Far from standing for transcendence or for the supernatural, Christianity and Islam famously condemned freedom of thought as heresy, suppressing scientific breakthroughs as threats to the religions’ dogmas and theocratic propaganda. Real super-naturalism is only the doomed, secular kind, the virtual miracle of anti-nature, otherwise known as technological, artistic, and social progress, the preservation of human anomalies at the expense of natural entropy.

Note the irony of 2 Tim.4:7, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” This was written by a follower of Paul’s who was speaking about the need to evangelize and keep alive the Christian message. In so far as that message is novel and defensible on existential grounds, it’s the humanistic idea that all people, including the have-nots, have rights in virtue of our miraculous/anomalous capacity for transcending/opposing nature.

But as Kierkegaard pointed out, Christendom betrays that Christian message. Christianity grew from a Jesus cult to an organized world religion only because some early Christians accepted a partnership with the Roman Empire, with the very system that had crushed Jesus! The “good fight” became the spreading of Christian dogmas that rationalize theocratic imperialism and thus the natural status quo, the vast power inequalities that the (possibly fictional) Jesus railed against.

The “faith” that had to be “kept” became the faith not in human nature but in the exclusive miracle of Jesus’s divinity. This was so even as early-modern scientists demonstrated the more tangible miracle of technological advancement via human ingenuity, which temporarily reverses the course of nature’s indifference to life, to morality, and to intelligent purposes. The Church associated such progressive humanists with witches and heretics, since by attempting to master the natural world, these rebels were implicitly usurping God’s role as the sovereign designer and sustainer.

For their part, the Eastern mystics are less duplicitous or deluded than the monotheists, since the former advocate merely an unheroic form of escape through asceticism. That is, these mystics agree with the existentialists that natural life is absurd; however, the Easterners defend not humanistic pride and the doomed rebellion against nature with art and techno-science, but the extinction of the ego, of the will, and of the craving for success and progress.

The Heroism of the Humanistic Rebellion

Assuming it’s doomed to failure, is the humanistic rebellion worth it? Is the faith in progress so much arrogance, as religions would have it? What’s the point of rebelling against the joke of natural life, if the tragic nature of this heroism must likewise make even the humanistic virtues foolish?

After all, to rebel against the present universe because of its termination in a state of anti-life and physical nothingness is to rebel against ourselves, since however artificial and in some sense unnatural our refuges may be, we’re still part of nature. Humanists, too, are physical objects, along with their artworks and technologies that are meant to protest nature’s godlessness and lack of inherent value.

Again, barring some Type III civilizational marvel that prevents the universe’s decay into a state of permanent emptiness, humanistic progress can’t be justified by appealing to its ultimate results. Any utilitarian defense of this secular rebellion would have to be short-sighted — which would be problematic, since the philosophy and science that produce the progress are, on the contrary, long-sighted and broad-minded. Thus, a utilitarian defense of humanism would likely be incoherent.

In fact, the very heroism in our tragic heroism seems illusory. Just take any fictional depiction of heroism, such as the classic Western movie that ends with the hero riding off into the sunset with the heroine. Notice that the ending of any such tale of derring-do is necessarily arbitrary. The story ends with the hero triumphant, because the story is only a model, a simplification that leaves the viewer with the impression that everything will work out right.

In reality, of course, the story wouldn’t end with that ride into the sunset. The hero would have to stop somewhere to eat so he could continue to live for another few decades. Perhaps the next time he dines, he gets food poisoning and dies from massive diarrhea. That was the Wild West, after all.

The best-case scenario is that a hero dies peacefully at the end of a long life, having done much more good than harm. In that case, the story might end with the hero expiring in bed, surrounded by loved ones. But that ending, too, would be arbitrary! The real story always keeps going, beyond the confines of our flattering simplifications, to a point that’s comprehended only from the view from nowhere, from which we see that the hero and the heroic deeds will eventually be forgotten or nullified.

The value of heroism can’t, then, be justified by the consequences of the hero’s actions (unless the dark future will somehow be magically prevented, and perhaps all creatures will be resurrected and made immortal — pick your speculative, optimistic sci-fi scenario).

Instead, we should think of heroism as the honorable assertion of will in the present moment. As the sophists argued and as Camus said about Sisyphus’ absurd climb with his boulder, even if the results of our decisions are disastrous or humbling, because of our limited control over the environment, we can still express our virtue or wage real, albeit minuscule rebellion while we can and with our limited resources.

The enlightened act of humanistic resistance to nature’s pointlessness is its own reward, because that act is the stuff of anti-nature; the act itself is the anomaly, the virtual miracle and the true potential for heaven on earth, the intelligent direction of events in a monstrous universe that creates only dumbly, with perhaps astronomical resources spread across billions of galaxies, all to come to naught in the cosmic equilibrium because no one was at the wheel.