When it’s hell on the surface, it’s time to go deep

I am studying the evolution of the universe in an online course that started this week.  At Tuesday’s opening session and over the weeks to come, three dozen of us are exploring scientific discoveries about the origins and development of the universe and the epic story they tell.

Why would a responsible citizen take his eyes off the devastating headlines to study something so distant in time and space?  Exploring the emergence and meaning of life is well and good, but isn’t that an unaffordable luxury when those in charge of our federal government are breaking the world? Doesn’t the perilous moment require a laser focus on the here and now?

Not completely. When everything is going to hell on the surface and at the moment, it's also time to go deep. Not to escape. Not to abdicate the responsibility to stay informed, engaged, and ready to act. But to gain perspective, understand why things are falling apart, and question the "givens" and parameters of the toxic moment—contributing, hopefully, to the creation of better givens and parameters.

Our origin in the stars

In truth, this is an incredibly opportune time to study the “journey of the universe,” to quote the title of the course I‘m taking and the film and book from which it emerged.  Over recent decades, science has achieved dramatic breakthroughs in understanding the birth of the universe almost 14 billion years ago and the emergence of galaxies, planets, and life on Earth.

More than interesting information, this body of knowledge yields insights on the how and what-for of human existence. It can teach us how to steer our species in a saner, healthier direction in this crossroads time that could determine whether we have a long and flourishing future or the opposite.

I have long been familiar with Carl Sagan’s famous line “we are made of star stuff.” Cool idea, I always thought. So what? How does it change anything?

As I’ve come to know more recently, it changes pretty much everything. More than a cool idea, our origin story and the cosmic understanding it evokes are keystones we can build our lives around, individually and collectively: our philosophies, our ethics, our efforts to find purpose and meaning.

And our engagement with politics.

The galling developments out of Washington exhaust our ability to keep up and carry on. Face-palming, eye-rolling, and handwringing are natural responses, along with the compartmentalizing that gets us through the day (unless we are among the unlucky ones directly injured by the administration’s chain-saw destruction campaign).

Necessary though they are, our daily survival tactics get us only so far. We must dig a little and ask why politics in this country have descended to such an ugly place. What is it about human needs, fears, and desires and our cultural context that have produced a political moment that reads like a dystopian-future novel?

What the exploration reveals is a played-out paradigm in dire need of replacement. It reveals modes of living out step with the ways and workings of the natural world and the profusion of biological life it birthed—out of step with the healthy lifeways conducive to flourishing.

Extraction, exploitation, extravagant consumption—these are the modes of late-stage capitalism. As “late-stage” implies, this way of life cannot go on much longer. The collateral damage is imposing costs too great to abide. Especially damage to the atmosphere, which is throwing off the finely balanced climate that has supported human civilization so exquisitely for ten millennia.

What must come next

Taking a step back from the headlines, social media feeds, and text alerts—looking deeper—we get a glimpse of what’s going on and how it poisons politics: an unease among the people; insecurities about our status, our ability to pay our bills and finance our retirements; bewilderment over the technological and social changes that seem too fast to keep up with; resentment of people who seem to be jumping the line and grabbing what’s ours.

All ripe for the taking by a unique political figure with an evil-genius talent for stoking and exploiting fear and resentment to satiate his lust for power.

Whether it’s a trumped-up charge about vaccines being dangerous, immigrants eating pets, USAID providing condoms for Hamas fighters, or climate change as hoax, it’s as if a collective psychosis has settled over the land, an epistemological crisis in which facts aren’t factual anymore and real’s not real. Given human foibles and susceptibilities, perhaps it was inevitable that the world would respond to an ever-worsening climate crisis not by organizing for effective collective action but by can-kicking, obfuscation, and out-and-out denial.

Were there no dis-ease among the population, there would be no MAGA.

How to quell the craziness? By giving people something better. Very much including a new story that better explains who we are as a species and what we’re here for.

Religion, mostly Christianity, provided that to the Western world for centuries (often problematically). A central cause of our current dislocation is that traditional religion is losing its ability to orient and comfort people the way it once did. It’s obvious what has to come next if we’re to have a future worth living: worldviews, philosophies, spiritualities, and religions that are informed by science and in harmony with the natural world, coupled with deep appreciation for the amazingness and precariousness of biological life and a commitment to its health and preservation.

We have a way to go before the new paradigm takes hold. The in-between time is a fresh hell that the younger me never imagined he’d experience.

“The old world is dying,” to quote the famous Antonio Gramsci line, “and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

To see these monsters for what they are and cope with them effectively, we do well to keep an eye on the cosmic picture. It can quell our anxiety, strengthen our resilience, and shield us from daily cuts too many to bear.

As Bulgarian writer Maria Popova puts it, “I don’t think it is possible to contribute to the present moment in any meaningful way while being wholly engulfed by it. It is only by stepping out of it, by taking a telescopic perspective, that we can then dip back in and do the work which our time asks of us.”

We don’t just endure the monsters and wait for their departure. Life-lovers of all sorts have roles to play. In addition to engaging the most important frontline political fights, we must cultivate the shifts in consciousness that the times require and push toward the better world we imagine.

So, I’m going to virtual class again next Tuesday, despite the political and social turmoil outside my apartment, to focus for 90 minutes on the cosmic unfolding of the past 13.8 billion years and the ways humans fit into it. It’s remarkable what a way-back trip like that can do for a person’s relationship with the present.