Stories We Tell Ourselves

Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe

Richard Holloway

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786899941
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

Throughout history we have told ourselves stories to try and make sense of our place in the universe. Richard Holloway takes us on a personal, scientific and philosophical journey to explore what he believes the answers to the biggest of questions are. He examines what we know about the universe into which we are propelled at birth and from which we are expelled at death, the stories we have told about where we come from, and the stories we tell to get through this muddling experience of life.Thought-provoking, revelatory, compassionate and playful, Stories We Tell Ourselves is a personal reckoning with life's mysteries by one of the most important and beloved thinkers of our time.

PART I

IT OR THE UNIVERSE OR EVERYTHING THAT IS

I

STORIES ABOUT THE UNIVERSE

To return to Auden’s phrase, what is the nature of the haunted wood we are lost in? And where did it come from? Or, to continue his metaphor, who planted it? These are the questions scientists try to answer; but even their stories keep changing. This was something a young physicist at Harvard started thinking about in the 1960s. While trying to account for the differences between the geocentric astronomy of Aristotle around 300 BCE and the heliocentric account offered by Isaac Newton 2,000 years later, it occurred to Thomas Kuhn that Aristotle’s theories were not ‘bad Newton’, but different ways of looking at the same thing. He realised that we can’t help seeing the world through the spectacles we wear: the circumstances that have conditioned us and the attitudes that have formed us; and we are largely unconscious of their presence or their effect. We don’t realise that where we stand when we look at something affects not only how but what we see.

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1970, Kuhn suggested that what we think of as ‘true’ at any one time is always related to where we stand in history. He noticed how the history of science was characterised by periods of peaceful and normal research punctuated by epochs of crisis and transformation. When the going view had been stretched to its limits, it caused what Kuhn called a scientific revolution. Once the revolution had been established, what he called a new ‘paradigm’ rapidly evolved. And for the generation of scientists that followed, it became the inevitable way of seeing things and doing research – till the next revolution displaced it. ‘Paradigms’ were scientific theories or ways of looking at the world that fulfilled two requirements: they had to be ‘sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’, and they had to be ‘sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve’.¹ The history of science was the record of these contests and resolutions. He also mischievously observed that one of the factors in the advance of science into the new paradigm was the death of the scientists who had clung to the old one.

So: what is today’s paradigm or science’s current way of seeing the world? Since I am more at home with poetry than science, let me give the first word to a man who was both poet and scientist, Primo Levi:

Fellow humans, to whom a year is a long time,

A century a venerable goal,

Struggling for your bread,

Tired, fretful, tricked, sick, lost;

Listen, and may it be mockery and consolation.

Twenty billion years before now,

Brilliant, soaring in space and time,

There was a ball of flame, solitary, eternal,

Our common father and our executioner.

It exploded, and every change began.

Even now the thin echo of this one reverse catastrophe

Resounds from the farthest reaches.

From that one spasm everything was born:

The same abyss that enfolds and challenges us,

The same time that spawns and defeats us,

Everything anyone has ever thought,

The eyes of every woman we have loved,

Suns by the thousands

And this hand that writes.²

I am told that Primo Levi exaggerated the age of the universe in his poem, but his exaggeration is understandable. The numbers are so huge as to be almost meaningless to creatures for whom living to a hundred ‘is a venerable goal’. The current scientific paradigm tells us that the originating event happened over thirteen billion years ago. Here I have to be careful. I have promised myself that I will only put into words what I think I know or at least partly understand, so I am at a grave disadvantage here. Because I do not understand some of the things that scientists tell me about this originating event.

Though it stuns me, I think I can understand the vastness of the universe, which may contain as many as 140 billion galaxies. Bill Bryson helped me get my head round that unimaginable number when he suggested that if galaxies were frozen peas there would be enough of them to fill the Royal Albert Hall.³ And that’s only in the visible universe! I am told that there may be an infinite number of universes beyond our knowing, and that we have been lucky to arrive in the one whose particular chemistry enables us to exist.

The elements of which our bodies were formed, which made our evolution possible, were a consequence of all that grinding violence. They did not exist until the universe had reached a particular point in its expansion when the clouds of hydrogen and helium it released were cool enough to condense into the galaxies that formed the first stars. Stars are the great nuclear furnaces in which all these complex elements are made. Their metals and minerals and gases are released into space in colossal explosions that happen when the balance between the internal pressure of the star and its own force of gravity breaks down and the star explodes. All these processes – the forming of stars, the slow cooking of the elements, and their explosive release into space – took over ten billion years to complete.

Our earth is a fragment of stardust about five billion years old formed from the reverberations of one of these explosions. It orbits in the suburbs of one small galaxy in a universe of billions of galaxies. And it has remained hospitable to life for at least three-and-a-half billion years. This is a consequence of the stability of the sun, which has been burning long enough to allow life to evolve and flourish on our little planet.

The sun appears to us to be the largest and brightest of the stars, but it is actually one of the smallest and faintest. The illusion arises because of its comparative nearness to us – it is only ninety-three million miles away, while the next nearest star is nearly 300,000 times as far away, more than four light years. But without the heat from that violent, burning star we would not be here. And violent it certainly is. Scientists catch occasional glimpses of shock-waves and great tornadoes whipping round it at more than 100,000 miles per hour. As well as the sun’s heat giving us life, it may be its heat that finally finishes us off. One theory offered to explain how our planet will die is that billions of years from now chemical activity within the sun will expand it to 250 times its present size, and fry us to a crisp in the process – though it now looks as if our own excesses may finish us off much sooner.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about a hundred billion stars, ranging in mass from a tiny proportion of the mass of the sun to a hundred times its mass. That’s only our galaxy. There are billions of galaxies in the observable universe. But here’s the twist in the story. Though we are a microscopic dot in a tiny corner of a small galaxy in a universe containing billions of galaxies, it is on this dot that the universe has become conscious and has started asking itself questions about its own existence. That’s the mystery captured in the final phrase of Primo Levi’s poem: ‘and this hand that writes’. Very late in the day, we have appeared and started wondering about where it all came from and what it all means. Maybe there are other creatures out there in the universe who are also wondering about it. Some scientists believe that this is possible, maybe even likely. So far, we haven’t found the evidence. Not that this has stopped artists imagining the existence of other forms of life on galaxies ‘far, far away’, to quote the opening sequence of the movie Star Wars.

What I can’t fathom is where it all came from. That’s because I can’t follow the answers of those who know more about these things than I do. And it’s because, as Kuhn has already warned me, their answers keep changing. I can remember when some of them thought the universe never had a beginning because there had never been a time when it wasn’t here. This was called the ‘steady state’ theory. But it did not answer my naive question either: supposing it had always been here, how did it happen always to have been here? I know this is considered a silly question. Stephen Hawking said it was like asking what was north of the north pole. Even so, I can’t help asking it. Where did it come from and how did it get here?

The answer on offer today seems to suggest that the universe did indeed have a beginning, which they call the Big Bang, though some claim the originating event was more like a Big Exhalation than a Big Bang. It was a puff that in a trillionth of a trillionth of a second expanded the primordial balloon into a universe of unimaginable extent. And we are told that billions of years after that initial expulsion of energy it continues to expand. Some scientists offer an even softer analogy than the Big Puff. They prefer to think of the blooming of a flower, something that gives rise to beauty and order.

I’m not sure about the puffing or blooming analogies. The history of the universe has always involved explosions and collisions and destruction, though there is undoubtedly a pitiless, flowering beauty in the spectacle. Maybe we should think of it as the Big Fuse or the spark that blew up the munitions dump. Whatever analogies we use, my question still stands: how come? To which they now offer a different answer, which they call a ‘singularity’, a point of infinite density and gravity (infinitely smaller than the dot above the i ) in which there was neither time nor space – that blew up

. . . and every change began.

Even now the thin echo of this one reverse catastrophe

Resounds from the farthest reaches.

From that one spasm everything was born . . .

. . . to quote Primo Levi again.⁴ Maybe it’s my confusion speaking, but that sounds as question-begging as the answer theologians give to my question ‘How come?’ The alternative to ‘We Don’t and May Never Know’ is the infinite regress of proposing causes that beg the question of their own causality: OK, we reply, but what caused this cause? Theism tries to put a ledge on this infinite regress by asserting the necessary existence of an Uncaused Cause or a Self-Existent Something from which everything else flowed. This is sometimes called aseity from the Latin a/ from and se/self, which we might translate as in-itself-ness, a reality that contains within itself the cause of its own existence. I’ll come back to that story several times in this book, but at this moment it feels more like therapy than causality to me. Or as much therapy as causality: the need to say something rather than admit there is nothing to say. It works if you can will yourself to believe that it actually provides an answer to the problem of existence rather than postponing one. Let me hasten to add that I don’t fault anyone for choosing it. It is one of the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to our lives and stop us going mad. It’s just that, for some of us, it no longer serves that purpose. Emily Dickinson got it when she said that for some of us,

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul.⁵

Let me say again that I am not trying to prove or disprove anything in this book, or to grade the theories we keep arriving at to explain ourselves. I am tired of the persuasion game, the dominant-story story and the loud shouting that goes with it. If you are so sure of your story why do you have to make so much noise about it? Why not cleave to it quietly and possess your soul in peace and leave others to their own stories? Haven’t you heard that ‘Supreme conviction is a self-cure for an infestation of doubts’?⁶ Not that I am wanting you to abandon your story or ditch your paradigm. If it works for you, good: live by it. Remember that none of us sees things cleanly as they are; only as we are; from where we stand; our particular perspective. And that includes much we don’t and probably can never know about ourselves and the unconscious forces that drive us.

Anyway, at the moment I am just looking around, trying to figure out where I am and how I see things so that I can find the story I want to live by. Whether it happened with a bang, a spark, or a sigh, what I see is a universe that may exist in its own right, uncaused. Or it may have been caused by another reality that was itself uncaused. Either way I am stuck with some version of in-itself-ness, aseity. It makes me uncomfortable. But who says my comfort has anything to do with it? Let’s move on to look at some of the stories we’ve told ourselves about where we came from and how we got here.

II

WHERE WE CAME FROM

I’m told that a number of factors – directed or undirected, intended or fortuitous – combined to form the ingredients that started our long journey to where we are today. I have already mentioned the role the sun played in bringing our little planet to life. A tiny shift in the orbit of the earth round the sun and life would never have emerged. A little closer to the sun, it would have been too hot. A little further away, it would have been too cold. Given the precision of that orbital positioning, chemistry seems to have done the rest. Early in our planet’s life, the atmosphere was composed of gases in concentrations that would poison most organisms today. Poured from erupting volcanoes, the atmosphere was a mix of methane, ammonia, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases. Earth was dark with clouds that poured down rain to feed the shallow, emerging seas.

Some scientists speculate that what happened next was that a combination of powerful natural forces, such as sunlight, geothermal heat, radioactivity and lighting, provided the critical jolts of energy that made the chemical reactions possible – a bit like the jolt that brought the monster to life in the Frankenstein story. Over billions of years these ingredients formed and reformed into countless random combinations. And the primal gene was a product of this roulette.

A gene is life’s way of remembering how to perpetuate itself. Genes are sections of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that are contained in the chromosomes that are passed on from our parents at conception. The geneticist Marcus Pembrey offered a helpful analogy to explain the relationship between genes, DNA and chromosomes. He compared a chromosome to one of those old audio cassettes we used before new technologies banished them to the museum, with DNA the tape inside the cassette and genes the songs on the tape. Genes are not separate from DNA; they are a part of it in the same wa...

Table of contents

• Prologue
• Part I: It or The Universe or Everything that is
• Part II: Stories We Told Ourselves Before We Knew the Stories Science Told us About Ourselves
• Part III: Stories the Mystics Tell
• Part IV: Suffering: Why It’s a Problem for Some But Not for Others
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Permission Credits
• Index