Running with the Pack (16 page)

Our consciousness, or awareness, is inevitably going to be far more concerned with things that are going wrong in our lives rather than things that are going right. That my heart is beating efficiently as I run is not something that needs to be addressed. As long as things don't change, it will continue beating efficiently, and so there is nothing I need do about it. But the vociferous Achilles tendon does need to be addressed, even if addressing here means nothing more than turning my attention to it and making a judgement about what to do — continue with the run, stretch it out or maybe even stop. If it is not addressed, then it might rupture and that will be curtains for my life of running. Bad things need to be addressed, but good things do not. That is why consciousness will tend to focus on the bad.

For humans, Schopenhauer argues, the situation is further exacerbated by our relatively sophisticated cognitive abilities, especially the ability to remember past events and anticipate future ones:

The chief source of all this passion is that thought for what is absent and future, which, with man, exercises such a powerful influence upon all he does. It is this that is the real origin of his cares, his hopes, his fears — emotions which affect him much more deeply than could ever be the case with those present joys and sufferings to which the brute is confined. In his powers of reflection, memory and foresight, man possesses, as it were, a machine for condensing and storing up his pleasures and sorrows.

Schopenhauer is, here, building on his argument concerning more basic forms of consciousness. Suppose we accept that consciousness will tend to focus heavily on things going badly rather than things going well. Memory and anticipation are just relatively sophisticated forms of consciousness. Therefore it would make sense for them, too, to be concerned predominantly with the bad rather than the good. Our memory and anticipation would tend to favour the malign rather than the benign so that we can prevent these occurrences from happening again (memory) or prevent them from happening at all (anticipation). When consciousness becomes progressively more sophisticated, the imbalance of suffering and enjoyment becomes progressively more accentuated. Life is bad for all living things, but it is — all other things being equal, which humans will go out of their way to ensure they never are — worst of all for humans.

Schopenhauer claimed that the story of The Fall is the one thing that reconciled him to the Old Testament because it was the ‘sole metaphysical truth' contained in that book. He did not believe in the literal truth of this story. Neither do I. Schopenhauer, perhaps more keenly than anyone, understood that the most important truths always appear clothed in allegory and that the most important part of the story is not what it appears to be about, but rather what you find reluctantly crawling out from between each line. In these stories — of Creation and Fall — we need to distinguish the literal truth or falsity of the story from what, following Schopenhauer, we can call its ‘metaphysical' truth: ‘For they lead us to the insight that, like the children of libertine fathers, we come into the world already encumbered with guilt and that it is only because we have to atone for this guilt that our existence
is so wretched and its end is death … For our existence resembles nothing so much as the consequence of a misdeed, punishment for a forbidden desire.'

If God is all-good, all-powerful and all-knowing, He can do whatever He wants to do, and doesn't make mistakes. So why would He have created a universe designed in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics? These laws guarantee that the resulting universe will be a zero-sum panorama of destruction and death. They guarantee that, should consciousness ever arise in this universe, suffering will always have the upper hand on happiness. They guarantee that while life is bad for all living things, it will be worst of all for the, self-styled, ‘highest specimens'. If this is all the work of the Father, then why would He do this to his creation? The most obvious explanation — and it seems difficult to imagine another explanation — is that He is punishing us for our misdeeds. If there were a God, and He created us, then we could be pretty sure that He has pulled up the ladder and sealed shut the gates of heaven. The Father, it seems, does not like his children very much at all.

This is monstrously sad. There is a good reason why Schopenhauer became known as the philosopher of pessimism. But what I find most interesting and instructive about Schopenhauer is not his description of the human predicament — in which I think he is largely correct. It is his response. This is, to say the least, unexpected. When people think of Schopenhauer, they won't think of this response at all. But I've come to think it is the most important thing Schopenhauer ever said.

Imagine you are on a seriously unpleasant bus ride. The road is little more than a dirt track, sprinkled with potholes, and you are constantly bounced around in your seat. This
seat is nothing more than a wooden plank, and your backside is getting more and more bruised as the journey continues. There is no air-conditioning and you are uncomfortably hot, sweat is dripping down your back and you are starting to smell. But this is nothing compared to the people around you: a reeking, belching, farting, pestilential quorum of humanity. Many of them have brought livestock and other animals along with them on the journey. Kids are screaming, nappies are being changed in front of your eyes. The toilet is blocked and overflowing, and people and animals are pissing and defecating in the aisle. It is clear that no one on the bus, including you, has any idea where you're going and only the haziest idea of where you are coming from. Nevertheless, all around you people are making up ridiculous stories, lacking any sort of grounding in logic, evidence or even satisfying narrative theme, of where it is they are going to alight and their prospects once they have done so.

Then, out of the corner of your eye, you catch someone looking at you and you look back. In their eyes, you see the same anguish; the same recognition of hopelessness and futility, the same disgust, the same fear. And, at that moment, you realize that you are both in this together. And this realization quickly extends to all of your fellow passengers. They are perhaps not as lucid or aware as the person who caught your eye, but it is all a matter of degree. You realize that to some extent or other — some more, some less — everyone on the bus understands his or her wretchedness. The silly stories they tell each other are fuelled by confusion and terror. The realization is like a bolt between the eyes. And so you realize you can forgive your fellow passengers for what you have regarded as their flaws. They are scared and bewildered, shocked and disgusted, just like you. The only reasonable
attitude to your fellow passengers is tolerance, patience and solicitude. It is what they both need and deserve.

This, in effect, was the conclusion Schopenhauer reached from his reflections on the nature of the world:

In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not
Monsieur, Sir, Mein Herr
, but
my fellow-sufferer, Soci malorum, compagnon de misères
. This may sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in the right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life — the tolerance, patience, regard and love of neighbour, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes his fellow.

The crucial question, however, is one that Schopenhauer didn't appear to even consider: in a world that is a zero-sum competition for energy, how are things like tolerance, patience, compassion and love even possible?

I have returned home from my run with Hugo and my metaphysical speculations are interrupted by more earthly and immediate concerns. So here I am, a new daddy, staring down the barrel of fifty: tired, sweaty, back from the run and with duties to perform. Brenin is nearly two years old. Macsen is two weeks old. Both of them have nappies that need changing. The energy goes in, the energy comes out. For the last two years and for the next two at least, my earthly existence has been crushing testament to this consequence of the two laws of thermodynamics, the fundamental design principles of life.

I love my sons in a way that is difficult to put into words; or even into thoughts — at the moment I just don't have the distance to do this. The love started at a few weeks of age. I would like to say that it was love at first sight — that I loved my sons and wanted to hold on to them tight and never let them go from the moment I first saw them — but that wouldn't be entirely true. After my first son was born I spent the next couple of weeks or so in shock; and the prospect of having to hold on to him, tight or otherwise, occasioned fear and trembling rather than love. But then he did something to me, something unkind and, I can't help but think, ruthlessly calculating. In fact, they each did the same thing around the same time — when they were a few weeks old. They smiled at me. They smiled at me — and I've been their bitch ever since.

But that is just an expression I use to denote my inability to write and think about what I do feel. That's just my way of saying — and this is just another crude, overtly macho, metaphor — I love them so much I'd gladly take a bullet for them if there was one around that needed taking. But where does love fit into the view of the universe sketched by Schopenhauer? In a zero-sum competition for energy, what place is there for love?

Love is a funny little puzzle. First of all, love is clearly compatible with the two laws of thermodynamics. After all, love came into existence in a universe built around those laws. Love is therefore compatible with the laws in the sense that they clearly do not rule it out. But sometimes in a sporting event, when someone does something that is, by the rules of the game, legal but questionable, people say that what he or she did was not in the spirit of the game. Love might have stuck to the letter of the law, but there is something about it that seems to have ridden roughshod
over the spirit of the great game of life. The most obvious consequence of the two laws of thermodynamics is that life will be a zero-sum competition for energy. And then somehow, with stunning improbability, love insinuated its way in too. How can something so brazenly opposed to the spirit of a zero-sum competition for energy have emerged from that competition?

To protect themselves and the energy that was the currency of the great game of life, some of the children of the worm developed a hardened carapace. Those who would steal their energy developed teeth. Others developed methods of locomotion to escape those who would steal their energy. Those who would take their energy developed legs to chase and claws to catch. Then, at some point, some of the children formed groups; either to more effectively protect themselves from those who would take their energy or to more effectively hunt those whose energy they would take. This turned out to be an effective and stable evolutionary strategy.

These groups began small: a circle of parents and children, no more. In some of the children of worms, the groups became larger. But, whatever their size, we must remember why they happened in the first place. An individual creature was more likely to survive, and so pass on its genes, if it was a member of the group. The group benefited the individuals that made it up — the individuals and their genes. That was the sole evolutionary justification of the group.

This leads to a problem. Suppose you have a group of individuals, all of whom, ultimately, are in the group to benefit themselves. On the face of it, the group is likely to be an unstable enterprise, scarred by rifts, quarrels and conflicts of interest. How do you hold the group together? In some creatures — ants, termites and bees are good examples — even
wondrously large social groups are held together by subtle chemical signals. But some of the children of worms became entirely different sorts of creature. They became sentient, capable of feeling. And these creatures were fertile ground for an entirely different evolutionary strategy. These creatures, through random mutation and natural selection, became fond of each other.

There was more to it than that. Even if some of the children became fond of each other, and acted accordingly, evolution still had to deal with those who, for whatever reason, did not always feel what they were supposed to feel and so did not always toe the line. The role of sanction — of penalties of increasing orders of severity up to and including expulsion from the group or death — plays a significant part in holding the group together. But when we look at some of the more recently developed children of worms, mammalian social groups — coyotes, wolves, monkeys and apes, even human apes — then it is simply false to say that these groups are held together only by the threat of sanction. A human society held together only by this threat would be a society of sociopaths. Perhaps certain criminal fraternities approximate this condition, though I suspect that most do not. But it is clear that this provides a wildly erroneous model of human societies in general. For most of us non-sociopaths, it is natural — biologically natural — for us to like each other: to feel affection and concern for each other, to enjoy the presence of the others, to feel pleasure in their company and sorrow in their absence. All this is natural: the absence of these feelings is an indication that something has gone wrong on a basic biological level. These feelings — these social instincts, as Darwin put it — are the glue that holds together groups of social mammals. These feelings of affection, therefore, make
an animal better equipped to compete in the zero-sum competition for energy.

While these feelings — affection, compassion, love — might adhere to the letter of the laws of thermodynamics, there is something in them that is just so inimical to their spirit. The love I feel for my sons is, from an evolutionary point of view, the easiest to explain: I love my sons because they carry my genes. My resulting behaviour biologists call ‘kin altruism'. Evolution equipped me with these feelings because they made it more likely that my genes would continue: it is the propagation of my genes that provides the selection pressure that explains both the origin of this kind of love and also what keeps this kind of love in existence. This claim is true, but has led many people to draw illegitimate inferences. Understanding this is crucial to understanding the way in which love can outstrip the laws that made it.