30 September 2023
This blog picks up with the third and fourth points, from the list below. That list is an analysis of a single paragraph provided by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the nature of the ends (telos or ultimate pursuits) of Stoicism. You can read that here, if that background is of interest.
3. The universe is as Zeus willed it to be.
Last week I argued that life on Earth or, if consistent, life anywhere in the universe, is more likely a happy accident than a designed intention. That stance is premised on over a half-century living on Earth and reading what time permits. Structurally, that stance comes, in no small part, from a challenge leveled by the late great George Steiner (1929-2020) who asked every generation—after the Holocaust—to account for that event simply because “we come after” (Steiner, 1958/1977 p. ix).
Being an Aristotelian, it seems inarguable that that which differentiates humans from other creatures is our astonishing capacity for creative, constructive reason. Equally inarguable is the fact that that same reason was used to design, build, equip, staff, and maintain “…44,000 camps or incarceration sites (including ghettos)” (USHMM, Holocaust Encyclopedia, Nazi Camps). And those death camps were not— and are not—a one-time event. They are a constant threat from those who value power over freedom. Much of what is happening in Ukraine, China et cetera can be equated with National Socialism as practiced by that party in the 1930s-1940s. But the point is not to focus on these particulars, the point is to see that our human capacity is directed by intent.
If Zeus’ (or G-d’s) intent is to foster this latitude of behaviour, what is the role of humanity? How can one accept a deity who sanctions that breadth of abject evil? More humanely, how does a marginally sensitive human being come to terms with our own history? If this (Holocaust et cetera) is by design, I want out. And that statement may be what is driving the perception that so much of this is the product of chaos or entropy, but not design or intent. Let’s look at an example which is closer to home for many readers of this blog.
There’s a troubled kid living in your basement. You don’t know what to do with him. On one hand, everything in you says you built your own life by taking chances, working hard, and sucking up the pain. The kid in the basement is smoking dope, drinking beer, and playing games all day. He’s 24 years old and still has no direction. You think of your own father (or mother) who would probably have put you out on the street by that age, telling you there are some hard lessons that need learning.
Trouble is, your background and that kid’s background, despite the genetic-familial links, happened in entirely different cultures. That kid was born in 1999 and hit adolescence in 2012, the year cell phones and social media moved from a trend to the norm (Twenge, 2023). Moreover, at 21, when that kid was completing his university or college work, we went into a pandemic that locked down Canadians for most of three successive years, putting a significant roadblock in that kid’s trajectory—during probably the least secure decade of most people’s lives.
When you were 13, 8-track tapes came along, and you could listen to what you wanted while you drove. Or you could listen with cassette tapes and, if really lucky, air-conditioning in the summer. The effects of a sense of constant surveillance by peers—and the glaringly public exposure that goes with that—is a different order of magnitude from listening to Zeppelin in mobile, air-conditioned comfort. One changes your entire social architecture, the other changes how much you enjoy your limited driving time. And maybe the scope and breadth of your imagination.
Back to Zeus or G-d, or what you will. Were those changes (cell phones, social media, pandemic), provoked by macroscopic (big picture) intent or design? Did the culture of these young people change monolithically or through a nasty, unforeseeable collision of technology, commerce, social change, viral infection, and two-working-parent families? If I buy into the Stoic metaphysics, this universe, our lives, are as Zeus willed them to be. Like—No. Way. If you wish—and it is a conscious choice—to be an evidence-based thinker, the evidence in favour of life being a chaos of choice and chance seems to me overwhelming. That’s why my money is on the internal and external battles between order and entropy.
4. All events within the universe fit within a well-structured system.
In the same vein as the last point, let’s confine our examples to those of the last and the current centuries, for ease of access. It might be argued that the deaths of millions of people fit into a larger system of natural selection than most of us can see or apprehend. And if those millions of deaths were caused by viruses, famines, plagues, locusts, hurricanes…that could be empirically demonstrated to be the by-product of human occupancy of the Earth—maybe. But I haven’t seen that empirical demonstration. In fact, what I’m reading is that despite the world population rising from 2,970,292,188 to 8,045,311,447 (in my lifetime), our increased agricultural efficiency is capable of feeding today’s population—if we could clear the political (i.e., philosophical) roadblocks.
Yet, also within our two selected centuries, I have read, in multiple sources, of the deaths of millions and tens of millions of people in Germany, Russia, and China, respectively. As above, German National Socialism (Nazism) was responsible for racially, religiously, and culturally motivated mass murder. In Russia, and her often involuntary satellites, people were selected by Lenin, Stalin (and now Putin) … based on entrepreneurial history i.e., if you are of the small or large business-owning populations or, if you were, G-d help you, an aristocrat, “…off with their heads.” In Mao Tse Tung’s China, Wikipedia cites estimates of deaths ranging from 40,000,000 to 80,000,000 resulting from “…Mao’s policies…due to starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions…” (Underlining added).
Enough of this horror. The overriding point is that if these are intentional acts of a well-fitted universe, bring on the entropy. I’m not buying the design spiel. Nor am I telling you what to buy (or not). I’m presenting the evidence that helped me decide why some Stoic values don’t jibe with my more Aristotelian ways of knowing (epistemology). Further, a weakness of my argument might be found in its humanistic criterion—that is, I am judging the goodness of life on Earth as it bears on human beings seeking peaceful, free, rational lives. And well-spirited human life may not be the design criterion. As always, your choices are your choices and I encourage you to make them as wisely as you’re able to.
Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Steiner, G. (1977). Language and silence: Essays on language, literature, and the inhuman. Atheneum.
Stephens, W. O. (2023, September 1). Stoic Ethics. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/stoiceth/#:~:text=All%20other%20things%20were%20judged,be%20used%20well%20and%20badly.
Twenge, J. M. (2023, March 15). Academic pressure cannot explain the mental illness epidemic: It’s not the homework. It’s the phones. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
Wikipedia, Mao Zedong, https://www.google.com/search?q=deaths+under+chairman+mao&rlz=1C1RXQR_enCA1005CA1005&oq=deaths+under+Mao&aqs=chrome.1.0i512j0i22i30l2j0i390i650l2.41338j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
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