Some thoughts on Poletti and purpose

Posted by John Clarke on 19 February 2009 | 2 Comments

Tags: Cosmology

"In the past 150 years since Darwin, we've discovered amazing things. We've discovered the big bang. We've discovered DNA. We've discovered that we live in a 14-billion-year evolutionary event that has formed massive galaxies, including our own Milky Way. We've discovered that our Earth is about 5 billion years old and that bacteria have lived on the Earth for 2 billion years. We've discovered that hominids are about 5 million years old, that Homo sapiens are about 150,000 years old, and that civilization is about 5,000 years old. We've discovered that who we are is the product of an immense evolutionary journey...

The cosmology of modern science says that the big bang is an accident, that the origin of life is a fluke, and that human existence is a lucky break. Stephen J. Gould, the great evolutionary paleontologist, always said that we're just being anthropocentric when we say that the evolution of the universe has a purpose and is headed towards us. But that is corrosive. It is corrosive to meaning. It is corrosive to purpose. And we've got to build a viable, enchanted, meaningful view of our role in the universe if we want to create a sustainable global civilisation."

The above quote came through the post, ultimately from Prof Frank Poletti of the Esalen Inst. I have some sympathy with the view expressed here, but I think that talk of 'accidents', 'flukes' and 'lucky breaks' is unhelpful. It derives from old-paradigm thinking and fails to take account of new thinking in the fields of cosmology, self-organising systems and complexity theory. These developments, and so much else in science, enable us to see that value and meaning, as well as beauty and wonder, emerge from nature itself, which is not a dead machine but a living creative source. I see nothing ‘corrosive’ about building “a viable, enchanted, meaningful view of our role in the universe [and] a sustainable global civilization” out of nature’s own resources.

The implication of Poletti’s remarks, as I read them, is that without some overall purpose, life, the universe and everything human have themselves no meaning, and that to have our own purpose in all this involves discovering our ‘role’ in this overall purpose. What I find corrosive is always to look elsewhere for our meaning. I find it more inspiring to think that humans, whether as individuals or as collectives, create their own roles, and that in so doing they manifest the inherently creative potential of the universe. To borrow from the poet O’Shaughnessy, “We are the music-makers”, spontaneously composing our own parts in the wider composition of nature.

To put this into an historical narrative, we once out-sourced creativity onto the eternal beyond, the divine; the Romantics rescued it and brought it back into the productive activity of the artist; with Marx and the existentialists this creative spontaneity was brought even further home into the democratic context of human society and every human individual; finally the new sciences have given back to nature its rightful ownership of the power to make things new. Science has also taught us not to expect this historical process to continue indefinitely, nor to presume that it is leading us towards an apotheosis of final perfection.

Prof John Clarke