The Crown

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”

 ― Stephen Hawking

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Dear Kate,

Let's just say everything that Hawking, one of the most advanced monkeys among the monkeys that are all of us, has said here is all true, then we must say his conclusive adjective is a complete cop-out.

Special?

Everything he's stated before that particular indifferent conclusion was value-laden, masqueraded as matter-of-facts, to suggest a bitter mockery of anyone who's been taking his/her humanness too seriously.  Like, get over it, all your struggles and considerations are, yes, kind of "special" in a peculiar way, but, look at the mirror, would you?

What he should have said if he was brave (my value-laden conclusive adjective of him) enough is that: That makes us human something truly tragic.

How he should have concluded is what Nobel laureate in Physics Steven Weinberg has lamented:

"It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. As I write this I happen to be in an airplane at 30,000 feet, flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston. Below, the earth looks very soft and comfortable — fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this all is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. … The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

Weinberg was right, again and again, as he was piling on sentence after sentence.  Yet!  Alas, the conclusion is also a cop-out!  If everything he said was true (as in truth that he should himself live by), then, I wonder, what the hell is so "(up)lifting" about our "effort to understand the universe"?  And what absurdity to mention something as unscientific and dubious and sentimental as...grace?  The conclusion, as I see it, of these two brilliant men's wisdom should be: Eat, have sex, and shit wherever you like.  The last thing I'd waste my life on is to "understand" the "universe."  Sigmund Freud would have found me sensible.

Aren't we not the writer of our own tragedy?

Say, if we know nothing "scientific," no viral epidemiology to speak of, then the present pandemic is really "one of those things" that just "happens."  Like, a quarter of some special monkeys got killed off, like, big freaking deal.

Or if we have no "standard of living" to promote, no dignity to maintain and restore, no sense of our past present and future to consider and bewilder over, then...hey, why the long faces, Mankind?  Eat some more (whatever you find edible), sex lots (whatever you see fit or not), and let yourself go anywhere and whenever you want to go.

What's the use of something as useless as the Bible stories, Shakespeare, poetry and prayer?  I don't know.  The brilliant materialists kept stealing from them (just to sample a few incidents from above: understand, special, relation, endless, intolerable, pointless, farce and grace and tragedy), go ask them.  Somehow they found a way to feel it meaningful to speak about the meaninglessness of it all.

We are crowned with glory and honor.  Don't believe this, mock the psalmist, and tell me a reason why we should care about anything at all.

Yours, Alex