Can You Make a Difference?

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, concluded from his experience that humanity’s deepest hunger is for meaning. We desperately want to make a difference, to leave an indelible footprint in eternal sands. There’s a little Ozymandias in all of us: “Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.”

Unfortunately, the world we live in does not easily accommodate these aspirations. To grasp the extent of the disconnect, we need to step back and understand who we are in context. We need to shed any illusions about the world and our place in it. We are not ‘little less than angels’… we are ‘little more than bacteria’. In fact, we are ‘nothing more than bacteria’… and we may even be a little less!

U R a meta-organism emerging out of the cooperating behavior of 30 trillion independent unicellular organisms (cells), each containing the primordial DNA code characteristic of all terrestrial life along with a coded IKEA instruction manual (in Swedish) for the assembly of those cells into the meta-organism we lovingly know as you. Ain’t miniaturization grand!

Each of these 30 trillion cells is directly descended from the single cell that housed the primordial DNA molecule, a clone of which is now present in every organism on Planet Earth. But you are not even that: you are an epiphenomenal derivative of those cells! A 2^nd order epiphenomenon of cells that are themselves epiphenomena of DNA.

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Your cells thrive in their self-created community (your body)…until they don’t. The meta-organism has remarkable powers of self-censorship and auto-repair but once dysfunction reaches a certain level, these homeostatic forces are overwhelmed and their meta-organic ecosystem collapses.

For you, being is derivative of doing. Your being is agency. I act therefore I am. And once I no longer interact holistically with my symbiotic environment, I cease to be. However, not all of my cells die as a result; some cells can live outside the body, under proper conditions, for undetermined lengths of time.

There is even evidence that certain groups of cells (tissues) respond to the meta-organic catastrophe by attempting to reorganize into novel, viable structures. Bottom line: you are even more dependent on your constituent cells than they are on you.

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We see reality through an extremely powerful lens. What is proximate to us in spacetime seems huge compared to what is even slightly more distant. Given this distortion, it is almost impossible to grasp the magnitude of the universe and our own relative minuteness. Knowing that there are 25 orders of magnitude separating me from my cosmos doesn’t help. You too? Then try this instead:

Right now I am sitting at my desk typing, a yoga pose I maintain for 10 hours a day. How holy! My spouse and my PCP both tell me I must move more. I borrow a meme from Woody Allen (Annie Hall) and tell them that I’m already moving faster than they can even imagine.

I am spinning around on the Earth’s access, I am revolving around the Sun, I am moving with my Solar System through my galaxy and with that galaxy ‘across the universe’ (Beatles). All in, I travel 500 miles every second (that’s almost 2,000,000 miles/hour), not counting my occasional trips to a store. And I’m not even factoring in the rate of cosmic expansion.

So it’s Boston to LA in 6 seconds. Faster than the Concorde! But to me it feels like standing still. Heck, I’m out of breath if I have to catch a bus. But like Leopold Bloom, “I have traveled”… more than a trillion miles so far and I’m still effortlessly racking up frequent flier points.

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Moving through spacetime at that speed, can I still make a difference? Maybe. Heck, if a butterfly in Borneo can trigger a tornado in Chicago, there’s hope for me. But will the universe cooperate?

The cosmos came to be ex nihilo, suddenly and without explanation, and it will cease to be, albeit more gradually. So if I do leave a permanent mark, I leave it on a temporary world. I am quite literally rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Does that constitute ‘making a difference’? Imagine the Magna Carta written with disappearing ink!

Yet I cling to the illusion that events, local in space and in time, have universal and eternal implications. Some would call this ‘magical thinking’ but I continue to believe that I can leave the world a better place, that I can make a difference.

But I can’t! And neither can you. Of course the things that we do have consequences. In fact, any act, however ill-defined or trivial it may be, permanently affects every quantum of spacetime. But we are trying to make a permanent mark and spacetime is a transitory medium.

Worse, your acts do have consequences, albeit temporary ones, but you have absolutely no idea what those consequences are. However real, consequences cannot be controlled, directed, predicted, or even measured. We fly, but we fly blind! The truth is, everything that happens is a ‘consequence’ of everything that went before it and an ‘anticipation’ of everything that is to come.

The famous butterfly triggered a tornado, but it didn’t mean to, and it doesn’t even know that it happened. In fact, once the butterfly flapped, every nook and cranny of the universe was irreversibly altered. So, did the butterfly leave a mark, and if so, is that sort of mark enough to satisfy our hunger for significance?

You struggle to see even a single act from inception through to completion; then once complete, your act takes on a life of its own. It will be what it will be; it will serve as raw material for other acts with other, often irrelevant or even contrary, aims.

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The search for meaning (or significance) is more complicated than it appears at first glance. For ‘meaning’ to occur, there has to be something that means and something that is meant. And unless we’re content to chase our tails, what is meant must ‘transcend’ what means, i.e. it must be of a different ontological order.

You can say that ‘box’ means ‘container’ et al. but eventually you will have to make reference to something meta-verbal, an abstract three dimensional shape called a ‘cube’ or a physical conveyance for storing and/or shipping concrete items. Cube and Conveyance are of different ontological orders than Box. The concrete object (box) is different in kind from its form (Platonic), its function (tool), or its verbal representation (word).

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Unless you are a psychopath, the difference you wish to make is not random (change for change’s sake); it reveals some notion of ‘value’, however vaguely conceived. I cannot prefer A over B unless A differs from B in a way that, for me at least, is positive.

Sidebar: Even Anarchists demonstrate a concept of Good through their actions. They destroy because they believe that society, once returned to its pre-industrial state of nature, will spontaneously redevelop in ways that are likely to improve on the status quo. Anarchism is often confused with Nihilism: it’s the opposite! The Anarchist’s faith is absolute: she believes that Good is a hard-wired feature of Nature. She is less atheist than pantheist.

That positive difference you’re trying to make is the beginning of a concept of Good. What we call  a ‘value’ is the Good in context. Beauty, for example, is the Good in a certain context; likewise Truth and Justice. They are denotatively synonymous, connotatively distinct.

What is the nature of this Good? Is it objectively real and normative or subjective, imagined and contingent? If ‘Good’ just means ‘pleasing to me’, then it has nothing to do with reality and is merely an expression of my preferences. So we must ask:

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1)    Is anything, anywhere, ever good?

(2)    If so, does ‘good’ refer to anything other than personal preference?

(3)    If so, what is the source of this Good and what gives it its validity?

If you hold that Good is just a matter of subjective preference with no normative significance, then good on you; enjoy life! But if you cling to the notion that Good is objective and prescriptive, then it is incumbent on you, I believe, to explain how it is objective and why it is prescriptive.

Traditionally, ‘objectivists’ have relied on the God Hypothesis: Either Good is good because an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent being says it’s ‘good’…or there exists a transcendent being whose essence is Good per se. But ‘God’ is not a popular concept these days. That said, popularity does not always accompany actuality.

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These analyses place our very existence in question. We need Descartes’ Cogito just to reclaim some confidence in our own actuality. Beyond the homeostatic forces that keep the meta-organism close to equilibrium, ‘you’ are nothing (neant), nothing other than self-awareness, how you experience the organic unity of your constituent cells…or better, how the organic unity of your constituent cells experiences itself.

That self-conscious reflexivity is something you share with every other living entity in the universe. You share it with terrestrial bacteria and with their Martain counterparts; you share it with Space Aliens; you may even share it with descendants of HAL 9000. You are they in every meaningful way.

We need to be clear here: the consciousness that makes ‘you’ you is not merely the same as the consciousness that makes ‘that bacterium’ that bacterium - it is that consciousness! Consciousness has no inherent content, no qualia; it cannot be subdivided, it is impervious to change. It is pure process; it is recursion per se. ‘Consciousness’ has no plural. It exists once and for all, equally and identically, in every living organism.

But you don’t know that! You only experience consciousness as it manifests on one of its nodes (the node we call ‘you’). Presumably, this manifestation also occurs at every other node, but, under normal circumstances at least, you have no access to such trans-nodal experience: you don’t read ‘other minds’. 

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If you were born sometime in the past 100 years, you’ll find this conclusion extremely unsettling. We have demonstrated conclusively that our hunger for meaning can never be satisfied in a flat, self-contained universe, i.e. a universe that lacks a transcendent dimension. The standard model of Universe, spacetime bounded by a beginning and an end, does not include such transcendence.

“There exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Nietzsche

We must give up our notion that being has meaning, that actions have significance beyond themselves, that values have any objective claim on our conduct, that ‘life is worth living’ (Sheen)… unless we are willing to give up our atheism and accept the God Hypothesis (above), distasteful as that may be to our post-Enlightenment mindset. 

This stark conclusion elevates two sentences to the apex of Western theology. The first is at least 2500 years old and comes from the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy: “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life.” (30: 19)

The second is credited to St. Dallan (a Christian Irish poet of the early Middle Ages): “Naught is all else to me save that Thou (God) art.”

Turns out, metaphysics is not as complicated as we thought. We either embrace the idea that something (call it ‘God’ or ‘Higher Power’) transcends our spatiotemporal bubble and gives meaning to events within it… or we accept that beingis accidental and ephemeral, that our lives are meaningless and without significance, that our pain is real and all hope illusory.

On the flip side, if there is something that gives life meaning and significance, it is only reasonable that we make it the focus of our lives, our ‘ultimate concern’ (Paul Tillich).