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The Cosmic Horror of HP Lovecraft and Sgr A*

telescopic image of black hole

Astronomers at the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration recently released the first picture of Sagittarius A*, the monstrous black hole residing at our galaxy’s core. Given that the distance between the Earth and this cosmological object is roughly 26,000 light-years (or 152,844,259,702,773,792 miles), the image’s production is a remarkable scientific and technological achievement. While Sgr A*, as it is affectionately known, weighs 4 million times the mass of our sun, it is only 17 times its size. This combination of mass and size results in gravitational forces strong enough to shape the entire Milky Way galaxy and warp existence itself – bending space, altering the flow of time, and preventing even light from escaping.

This isn’t the first time the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has produced such an awesome image.

In 2019, the array captured the very first image of a black hole. This one, named M87*, resides in the center of another galaxy roughly 500 million light-years away (or 2,939,312,686,591,800,000,000 miles). With a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun and measuring over 23 billion miles across, M87* dwarfs Sgr A*. For a sense of scale, the distance from the Sun to Neptune, the most distant planet in our solar system, is 3 billion miles. Indeed, this M87* is thought to be one of the largest black holes in existence.

These objects’ sheer scale and weight, alongside their distance from us, defy comprehension. And while black holes are undoubtedly unique celestial objects, much of the universe plays out on an equally impressive scale. Planets, galaxies, stars, and quasars, amongst numerous other cosmological objects, exist on geographical and temporal scales far beyond anything on Earth. Asking someone to comprehend a single object vastly larger than our entire solar system is to ask them to conceive of the inconceivable.

We’re just not evolved to think about reality in such grand terms. As corporeal beings, limited to a single planet and a single lifetime, we think in human terms; we’re geared to understand the universe on our scale.

But regardless of this predisposition, the universe is beyond vast. The cosmic scale on which existence plays out makes everything that’s occurred here on Earth, from the first hints of life to you reading this sentence, seem infinitesimally small in comparison. Existence’s sheer unassailability can fill the heart with dread as it means that the universe is, by its nature, incomprehensible. That is, as limited, mortal beings, the overwhelming majority of existence will forever be home to the unknowable and the unknown, and nothing stokes fear like the unknown.

This fear, and specifically its emergence from the universe’s vast and uncaring nature, was a central theme in the fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, AKA HP Lovecraft. Indeed, many of his most famous stories – The Shadow over Innsmouth, At the Mountains of Madness, and Colour out of Space – concern a small group of persons wrestling with their insignificance in the face of a vastly uncaring universe. While his fiction features creatures literally beyond comprehension (just seeing some of them drives characters into insanity), these beings always function as embodiments of the irrefutable fact that our fleeting lives mean less than nothing in the grand terms of space and time.

As Lovecraft writes in the opening to arguably his most famous work, The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Many philosophies and religions focus on humanity. They ascribe to us some vital place in God’s design, use rationality to construct a coherent worldview, or provide frameworks according to which we can understand right and wrong. But Lovecraft sought to set the scope of his philosophy, known as Cosmicism, beyond our limited mortal perspective. For him, there is simply so much out there in the universe that has nothing to do with us. For humanity to try and come to grips with reality in its entirety is to attempt an impossible task, one that would shatter our minds if even partially achieved. Cosmicism highlights that while things may matter to us on a human scale, this scale is meaningless compared to reality’s vastness. In other words, while things matter to us, ultimately, we don’t matter.

This realization may strike readers, even atheistic ones, as inherently bleak.

While one can grapple with the idea that existence is godless and that meaning is self-created, that is a very different thing from saying the universe, by its very constitution, is geared against our continued existence due to its utter indifference; much like how a boot is geared against the existence of an ant.

But such an upsetting outcome need not be the only takeaway from Cosmicism. One can read Lovecraft’s works, contemplate existence’s vast and uncaring nature, and be even more thankful for the beauty in our lives. If contradictions and comparisons enhance qualities and characteristics – if good is only good when compared to bad, if hot is only hot when compared to cold – then the earthly things that bring meaning to people’s lives might be even more meaningful when we acknowledge how much of a miracle it is that they exist in the first place. When objects exist, like black holes, that could tear apart the planet in less than a moment, the fact that our meager mortal lives occur as they do seems even more miraculous.

The fact that there is a single, small, blue ball floating in the blackness of space and time, where beauty and meaning (even if that is only according to human standards) can be found amongst existence’s indifferent gaze, should temper our fear of the endless well of the universe… if only a little.

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Reflections on Communal Annihilation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

photograph of overgrown buildings in Chernobyl exclusion zone

It appears that we are at the moment living under the greatest threat of nuclear war the world has seen in decades.

If you live in a city, or if you (like me) live next to a military base of strategic importance, there is a non-zero chance that you and your community will be annihilated by nuclear weapons in the near future.

I, at least, find this to be unsettling. For me, there’s also something strangely fascinating about the prospect of death by the Bomb. The countless books, movies, and video games that depict nuclear apocalypse – often in vaguely glamorous terms – suggest that I’m not alone.

If ever there was one, this is surely an appropriate time to reflect on the specter that haunts us. That’s what I’d like to do here. In particular, I’d like to ask: How should we think about the prospect of death by the Bomb? And why do we find it fascinating?

***

Let’s start with fascination.

Our fascination with the Bomb is no doubt partly rooted in the technology itself. It wasn’t too long ago that human beings warred with clubs and pointy bits of metal. The Bomb is an awful symbol of humanity’s precipitous technological advancement; to be threatened by it is an awful symbol of our folly.

Even more important, in my view, is that the Bomb has the power to transmute one’s own personal ending into a small part of a thoroughly communal event, the calamitous ending of a community’s life. In this way, the Bomb threatens us with a fascinating death.

To appreciate this point, consider that one of the peculiar things about the prospect of a quotidian death is that the world – my world – should carry on without me. I (you, we) spend my whole life carving out a unique place in a broad network of relations and enterprises. My place in my world is part of what makes me who I am, and I naturally view my world from the perspective of my place in it. Contemplating the prospect of my world going on without me produces an uncanny parallax. I see that I am but a small, inessential part of my world, a world which will not be permanently dimmer after the spotlight of my consciousness is extinguished.

This peculiarity sometimes strikes us as absurd, an indignity even. Wittgenstein, for example, expressed this when he said that “at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” It can also be a source of consolation and meaning. Many people are comforted by the belief that their loved ones will live on after they die, or, optimistically, that they have made a positive impact on others that will extend beyond the confines of their life. We are told that death can even be noble and good when one lays down one’s life for one’s friends.

The Bomb is different from run-of-the-mill existential threats in that it brings the prospect of a death that isn’t characterized by this peculiarity. If the Bomb were to strike my (your) city, my world would not carry on without me. Humanity and the Earth might survive. But my world – my family, friends, colleagues, students, acquaintances, the whole stage on which I strut and fret – would for the most part disappear along with me in one totalizing conflagration. At death, my world really would come to an end.

From an impartial point of view, this is clearly worse than my suffering a fatal heart attack or dying in some other quotidian way. But this is not the point of view that usually dominates when we think about the prospect of our own deaths. What sort of difference does it make from a self-interested point of view if our world dies with us?

A tempting thought is that the extent to which this would make a difference to a person is directly proportional to how much they care about others. If I don’t care about anyone besides myself, then I will be indifferent to whether my world dies with me. The more I care about others, the more I will care about who dies with me.

While I think there’s truth in this, it strikes me as an oversimplification. A thought experiment may help us along.

Imagine a people much like us except that they are naturally organized into more or less socially discrete cohorts with highly synchronized life cycles, like periodical cicadas. Every twenty years or so, a new cohort spontaneously springs up from the dust. The people in any given cohort mostly socialize with one another, befriending, talking, trading, fighting, and loving among themselves. They live out their lives together for some not entirely predictable period, somewhere between ten and one hundred years. Then they all die simultaneously.

It seems to me that death would have a recognizable but nevertheless rather distinct significance for periodical people. On the one hand, as it is for us, death would be bad for periodical people when it thwarts their desires, curtails their projects, and deprives them of good things. On the other hand, there would be no cause to worry about leaving dependents or grieving intimates behind. There would be little reason to fear missing out. Death might seem less absurd to them, but at the unfortunate expense of the powerful sources of consolation and meaning available to us.

Perhaps most importantly, that most decisive of personal misfortunes, individual annihilation, would invariably be associated with a much greater shared misfortune. In this way, death would be a profoundly communal event for periodical people. And this would reasonably make a difference in how a periodical person thinks about their own death. It’s not that the communality would necessarily make an individual’s death less bad. It’s more that assessments of the personal significance of events are generally affected by the broader contexts in which those events occur. When a personal misfortune is overshadowed by more terrible things, when it is shared – especially when it is shared universally among one’s fellows – that personal misfortune does not dominate one’s field of vision as it normally would. Perversely, this can make it seem more bearable.

When we contemplate the Bomb, we are in something like the position of periodical people. The usual other-related cares, the usual absurdity, the usual sources of consolation and meaning do not apply. The prospect of collective annihilation includes my death, of course. But weirdly that detail almost fades into the background as it is almost insignificant in relation to the destruction of my world. This is a strange way of viewing the prospect of my own annihilation, one that produces a different sort of uncanny parallax. I think this is key to our fascination.

There may be something else, too. We live in a highly individualistic and competitive society where the bonds of community and fellow feeling have grown perilously thin. The philosopher Rick Roderick has suggested that in a situation like ours, there’s something attractive, even “utopian,” about the possibility that in its final hour our fragmented community might congeal into one absolutely communal cry. Of course, if this suggestion is even remotely plausible, it is doubly bleak, as it points not only to the prospect of our communal death but also to the decadence of our fragmented life.

***

I’ve tried to gesture at an explanation as to why the Bomb can be a source of fascination as well as trepidation. Along the way, some tentative insights have emerged, which relate to how we ought to think about this unique existential threat.

Then again, I recently had a conversation with my much wiser and more experienced nonagenarian grandparents, which makes me question whether I didn’t start this circuitous path on the wrong foot. To my surprise, when I asked them of these things my grandparents told me that during the Cold War they didn’t really think about the Bomb at all. My grandfather, Don, gave me a pointed piece of advice:

“There’s not a darn thing we can do about it. You know, if it’s going to happen, you better go ahead and live your life.”

Perhaps, then, I (and you, reader, since you made it this far) have made a mistake. Perhaps the best thing to do is simply not to think about the Bomb at all.

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The Virtuous Life and the Certainty of Death

painting of sailboat at sea with darkening clouds

In the winter of 2019-2020, people in the United States and around the world watched the events unfolding in Wuhan, and, later, across China more broadly, with disbelief. News coverage showed hauntingly empty streets occasionally populated by isolated figures wearing hazmat suits and facemasks. The mystery illness unfolding there was horrifying, but it seemed to many of us to be a distant threat, something that could affect others, but not us, not here.

The human tendency to think of illness and death as misfortunes that happen only to other people is a form of bad faith that is discussed at length in existential literature.

Tolstoy explores these themes in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The titular character suffers a minor accident which leads to his unexpected and untimely demise. He discovers with horror that he must die alone — no one around him is having his set of experiences, so no one can empathize with what he is going through. His friends and family can’t relate because they live their lives in denial of the possibility of their own respective deaths. Tolstoy describes the reaction of one of Ilych’s friends and colleagues on the occasion of his funeral,

“Three days of frightful suffering and then death! Why, that might suddenly, at any time, happen to me,” he thought, and for a moment he felt terrified. But—he did not himself know how—the customary reflection at once occurred to him that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich and not to him, and that it should not and could not happen to him, and that to think it could would be yielding to depression which he ought not to do…After which reflection Peter Ivanovich felt reassured, and began to ask with interest about the details of Ivan Ilych’s death, as though death was an accident natural to Ivan Ilyich but certainly not to himself.

There is something relatable about Ivanovich’s response to his friend’s death, but when Tolstoy presents it to us in the third-person we can’t help but to recognize the absurdity of it. Of course death will come for Ivanovich — as it will for us all. Denial doesn’t change anything. Yet, denial is a common response when death and devastation surround us.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a tragic example of this. At the time of this writing, it has killed a (conservative) estimate of over 4 million people. Despite this fact, many refuse to recognize the severity of the threat and resist safety measures and vaccination. Throughout the pandemic, news agencies have reported the stories of families who deeply regret that they did not take COVID-19 seriously, often because they contracted a debilitating case themselves, or they have lost a friend, family member, or significant other to the virus. Missouri resident David Long commented, after losing his wife to the virus, “If you love your loved ones, take care of them.”

In times like this (and in all times, really) the attitude that senseless death won’t or can’t affect you or those you love is the very thing that hastens it.

Unsurprisingly, many schools of philosophy have focused on adopting a healthy and virtuous perspective toward death. The ancient Stoics taught that we ought not to live in denial of it; living virtuously involves accepting the inevitable features of existence over which we have no control. This approach to death emphasizes coming to terms with that which we cannot change rather than denying our powerlessness.

Some schools of Buddhism offer similar guidance. Mindfulness of death (maaranasati) is an important aspect of right living. Diligent Buddhists frequently engage in the practice of focusing on the image of a corpse during meditation. Doing so reminds the practitioner of the inevitability of death, but at the same time reduces anxiety related to it through a process of familiarization and acceptance.

The senseless ways in which pandemics maim and kill threaten our sense of control over our circumstances. They reveal to us the absurdity of the human condition. This is something that many people would rather not think about, and the result is that many refuse to do so. As Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus,

Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion … is hope. Hope of another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live, not for life itself, but for some great idea that will transcend it, refute it, give it a meaning, and betray it.

Escapism has the potential to do much harm, not just to the self, but to others. When we think of death and disease as experiences that happen not to us, but only to others, we create in-groups and out-groups, as humans predictably do. When we see another living being as a member of an out-group, we have less compassion and empathy for their suffering.

We all die alone, and COVID-19 reminds us of that more starkly than other ways of dying. Often, the victims are quite literally alone when they experience their last moments. When we see suffering and death as a universal experience for sentient beings and that we are no different, the barriers that keep us from understanding one another fall away. We all are in a position to relate to the suffering and death of another regardless of the identity categories to which that other belongs.

As Camus puts it in The Plague,

One can have fellow-feelings toward people who are haunted by the idea that when they least expect it plague may lay its cold hand on their shoulders, and is, perhaps, about to do so at the very moment when one is congratulating oneself on being safe and sound.

And as his character Tarrou says of another character, Cattard, while in lockdown due to plague,

like all of us who have not yet died of plague he fully realizes that his freedom and his life may be snatched from him at any moment. But since he, personally, has learned what it is to live in a state of constant fear, he finds it normal that others should come to know this state. Or perhaps it should be put like this: fear seems to him more bearable under these conditions than it was when he had to bear its burden alone.

All of these considerations provide us with compelling reasons to think of the COVID-19 pandemic as relevant to each of us, regardless of whether we are young or old, or suffer from health ailments or are temporarily healthy. We should treat the frailty of human life as seriously in the case of others as we would want it treated in our own case.

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Can You Be a Different Person After the Pandemic?

photograph of woman in masking looking at reflection in the window

An opinion piece in The New York Times recently made the rounds on social media, and makes what looks like a pretty big claim: “you can be a different person after the pandemic.” While the title of the article quickly became a meme, the article itself emphasizes the possibility of a “post-pandemic dispositional makeover.” For example, if you were the kind of person who was chronically late before the pandemic, you can work on developing your conscientiousness so that once you’re able to meet people in the real world again you’ll be on time. Or, if you’re an introverted person, you can work on becoming more sociable; if you’re easily annoyed you can work on being more agreeable, etc. The important takeaway is that your personality is not set in stone, and that changes to major aspects of your personality are achievable, in “just a few months.”

Can you be a different person after the pandemic? That, of course, depends on what you mean by “different person.” The kinds of changes depicted in the memes – e.g. changing from human to eagle, or Stars Wars force-ghost, etc. – are likely not achievable. But what about changes to my personality? Are those achievable, and if so, will I be a “different person” as a result?

Questions about personal identity – i.e., questions about what makes you you – have been mulled over by philosophers for a very long time. There are big questions here about whether you are anything over and above the physical stuff that makes up your body, whether you have a soul (and if you do, what it’s like), whether you have any kind of “essence” (and if you do, what it’s like), and whether you can really be a different thing at different points in time. Plato, for instance, argued that you have an immortal soul that is composed of different parts, and that the way these parts are in balance with one another determine the way you are and the things you do. Other philosophers don’t put much stock in the idea of things like souls. Jean Paul Sartre, for instance, took a look at a view like Plato’s and flipped it on its head: instead of having some kind of essence that determines what you do, Sartre said that the things that you do determine what we think of as your essence. While someone like Plato thinks that essence comes before existence, Sartre argued that existence comes before essence.

It is this latter, broadly Sartrean view that seems to be underlying the opinion from The New York Times that you can, in fact, be a different person after the pandemic: if you change your habits, if you start doing different things, then you will be a different person as a result. Instead of appealing to philosophy, it appeals to work in psychology, specifically the “Big Five” personality test. The test – which you can take online for free, if you’re so inclined – gives you a score on five different characteristics: extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Scoring “high” or “low” on any of these measures is not meant to be necessarily good or bad, and does not differentiate between different people’s reasons that they might have for answering any given way on any given question. While many, many personality tests have failed to be endorsed by the scientific community (perhaps the most infamous being the Myers-Briggs personality test) the Big Five ostensibly has empirical support. 

In taking the test myself, I was not surprised at the results. I am neither high- nor low-scoring on extraversion or conscientiousness, I’m pretty agreeable and not super emotionally stable, and I maxed-out open-mindedness. Is this the personality profile of the kind of person I would like to be? In some sense, sure; in others, not so much. I wish I got less stressed out by things, I can be overly negative and complain a lot, and being a bit more sociable certainly wouldn’t hurt. Maybe coming out of the pandemic I can be this new and better person. “Changing a trait requires acting in ways that embody that trait,” The New York Times article says, “you can behave ‘as if’ you are the person you want to be. Pretty soon, you might find that it is you.”

How are you supposed to do this? Therapy is one option: “a month of therapy — any kind of therapy — reduced neuroticism by about half the amount you might expect to see it naturally decline over the course of your entire life.” No time for therapy? Maybe you could download an app to remind you to “perform small tasks to help tweak [your] personalities, like ‘talk to a stranger when you go grocery shopping.’” Small changes in behavior over time may stick, and after a while you might find yourself a more gregarious shopper, assuming that’s the kind of person you want to be.

There are clearly scientific questions we can ask here, about whether such apps are effective in changing behavior, how long-lasting such changes are, and what that means in terms of changing aspects of one’s personality. I’ve raised one philosophical question, about what these kinds of changes might mean for our identity, and what it might mean to say that one becomes a “different person” as a result. But we might also consider an ethical question. My personality test told me that I’m not a super high-scorer in terms of extroversion or agreeableness. I might then reflect on these results and think that maybe being a grumpy introvert is not my ideal form of being. If it’s the case that I can change aspects of my personality, maybe it’s not only the case that I can be a different person after the pandemic, but that I ought to be, as well.

Of course, a complication of pandemic life has been that many people, I suspect, have not really felt “like themselves” over the past year-and-a-bit. The pandemic has made people more stressed and anxious for many reasons, and that’s no doubt going to show up in the results of personality tests. As I’ve written here before, while the pandemic has offered some the opportunity for self-improvement, it is perhaps better to focus on self-maintenance. When thinking about the kind of person we want to be after the pandemic, I think we should say something similar: while it may be a worthwhile goal to become a better person, it is also worthwhile to aim for getting back to normal. Instead of being a different person after the pandemic, perhaps we should focus on being the people we were before it started.

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Graduation: A Moment of Upheaval

photograph of graudation programs on rows of empty chairs

Even in normal circumstances May represents a moment of disruption and distress as seniors transition out of college into the post-grad life. At this time last year, some would go straight into their careers, some prepared for graduate school, some planned to move out of the country to teach English, and some yet took a break and tried to figure out their next move.

The Class of 2020 will see their college career end in an unexpected and abrupt way. And while they will be robbed of the many meaningful farewell moments of the final weeks, the Class of 2020 will experience what every preceding graduating class has experienced: the end.

Despite the variance in circumstance, our feelings before we set off are likely the same: sadness about the end. Seemingly just as the seeds of relationships and daily routines took root, watered by the unique sense of community and stability only offered by a university campus, the hoe of finality came down and tore those roots out. We will never live that life again.

In the waning weeks of any usual last semester, seniors conduct final run-throughs of their favorite social rituals, staples of their college lives that would soon no longer be. There is a mad scramble to fit in as much as possible into those waning weeks and days, as if four years had not been enough time. Then names are called and diplomas were given.

Once the moment is over, it is over. No member of the Class of 2020 can ever retrieve it, revisit it, or relive it outside of their individual memory. Realizing that, of course, is what anchors you in the feeling of sadness and longing.

Be it the loss of a relative, the severing of a relationship, or the end of a fun vacation; big or small, tragic or happy—some things stay with us and encumber our progress forward through time. After an experience such as that, we jostle with some variation of the question: How do I find satisfaction in the present again? The answer, obviously, does not lie in longing for the past. Yet we do.

Certainly, we do ourselves a disservice by not moving forward. But what role should the past play in our present life? What relationship with our past to we owe ourselves?

Envying the Forgetful Cattle

In his On the Uses & Disadvantages of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that humans are jealous of animals’ happiness:

“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see… he cannot help envying them their happiness.” 

Of course, sometimes we would all prefer to eat, rest, digest, and leap about but what Nietzsche is asserting is that the cow is happy because it retains nothing of the past and anticipates nothing of the future.

Nietzsche expounds: “In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness […] it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget.” The ability to forget is the key to happiness, or so the German Existentialist would argue. But Nietzsche notes that is impossible for people to do. He observes a human “cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past.” A person’s fixation with the past ends up defining the present moment, preventing the person from enjoying it and thus ensuring that it is wasted.

And so are we destined to be like the man he describes in his passage?

“Then the man says, ‘I remember’ and envies the animal, who at once forgets and for whom every moment really dies, sinks back into night and fog and is extinguished for ever…”

Perhaps some would argue that we should strive to be more like the forgetful cattle and simply, however contrary to our human nature, live in the present at all moments; thus, never longing for the past and never being anxious about the future. Perhaps then we can be happy again. But however appealing the happy life of leaping about and grazing may sound, it is absent of many qualities that characterize a good life.

Remembering a “Moment”

Noted screenwriter Aaron Sorkin delivered a commencement address from Syracuse University’s graduating class of 2012. Among many insightful anecdotes and useful pieces of advice, he said the following, contradicting Nietzsche’s prescription:

“Baseball players say they don’t have to look to see if they hit a home run, they can feel it. So I wish for you a moment—a moment soon—when you really put the bat on the ball, when you really get a hold of one and drive it into the upper deck, when you feel it. When you aim high and hit your target, when just for a moment all else disappears, and you soar with wings as eagles. The moment will end as quickly as it came, and so you’ll have to have it back, and so you’ll get it back no matter what the obstacles.”

The past plays a central role in Sorkin’s prescription. There will be a moment that will end as quickly as it came. It will die, sink back into the night and fog, extinguished forever. But you will have to have it back. And it is in pursuit of reliving that fleeting moment when you hit your target that will give your life purpose. Sometimes it is those fleeting moments, which exist longer in the past than they ever could in the present that drive an individual, motivating them to move through time.

Indeed, the past plays an important role in our lives. Yes, the beast may lead a life of happiness but it will never remember what made it happy. It will never know ambition because it will never remember what it wants. It will never remember the moment that it realized its passion. It will never remember the moment it fell in love. It will never remember the long-standing joke between friends. In short, it will never long for anything because it will never remember what it would long for.

Happiness may arrive when the past is forgotten. But it entails the loss of meaning, purpose, passion, desire, and sustained relationships. We owe ourselves those things, too.

Moving On

Our relationship with our own past is one of the most important relationships we will have in our lives. Understanding how to forge a good one and tend to it properly is key. We should not aspire to be like the forgetful cattle because they know no motivation for today or tomorrow. But we should not allow the past to shackle us either. Temporally, there is no going back. Time moves forward, and the longer it takes us to realize that the longer we will have wasted the present moment. It is good to move on. It is right to move on. You should move on.

But you should not forget the moments that make it hard to move on. It is those moments that are often worth contemplating but not seeking out to relive exactly. It is those moments that can provide a standard for what we desire from the future, even if it cannot be a carbon-copy of those moments. Indeed, it is only because of past experience that you know what you like and what you don’t like.

Whether its a traumatic experience, like the passing of a friend; or a good experience, like a fun weekend too short; or a bad experience, like a poor performance on the ACT; or a memorable experience, like the laugh produced by a joke, which soon becomes recurring between friends: past moments inform what we seek in the present and future. But moving on can overcome the often crippling longing for the past.

Yes, it is time to move on. And that means acknowledging a moment has gone and will never come again. But it also means striving to find another moment like the one that makes it so difficult to move on and being grateful you had such an experience.

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Homesickness in a Time of Global Sickness

photograph of woman staring off out window

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic I have received three emails from my apartment building in Toronto telling me that something was broken. First, there was a problem with the “electrical conduits.” Then, a follow-up email reported that while fixing said conduits, a technician noticed that the “step down transformer (low voltage)” was overheating (this is presumably a bad thing). Finally, a week later a section of pipes had to be replaced, and there would be no hot or cold water for the day, possibly longer. Please prepare yourselves by storing additional water in buckets or bathtub, the email read. After service has returned, water may show discoloration.

Thankfully I haven’t had to drink any brown bathtub water, as six months ago I moved to Denmark. In many ways, this is an ideal place to ride out the storm: Denmark has generally been recognized as being proactive and responsible in response to the pandemic, and people here seem to be taking social distancing seriously (for the most part). Like most people though, staying at home so much has started to take a bit of a mental toll, and recently I’ve found myself missing that tiny, broken apartment.

Of course, what I’m really feeling is a kind of homesickness. I’m certainly not alone in feeling this way: coronavirus is keeping people apart from each other, and away from home. As we all know, keeping our distance at a time like this is, ultimately, a good thing. And it’s not like I haven’t been homesick before. But homesickness in a time of global sickness feels different, somehow.

I always find that when feeling lonely and confused there’s nothing quite like a dose of good old philosophical conceptual analysis. Unfortunately, there are not many philosophical treatises on the concept of homesickness, let alone any discussion of the concept at all. In my research I expected to find vigorous debates about the necessary and sufficient conditions for being homesick, but the most I could find was that Heidegger liked to quote the 18th century poet Novalis, who said that “All philosophy is a form of homesickness.” While that sounds profound, I don’t really know what it’s supposed to mean, and I never liked Heidegger anyway.

So maybe there are better places to look for guidance. Psychologists who study homesickness tend to get right to the point. For example:

“Homesickness refers to the commonly experienced state of distress among those who have left their house and home and find themselves in a new and unfamiliar environment.”

While that seems right, it’s not terribly insightful. And while this definition will probably not help you understand your experience any better, at least the potential health risks of homesickness psychologists describe will make you feel a lot worse:

“For example, there are data indicating that [homesickness] is associated with the onset of depression, deficiencies in the immune system, diabetes mellitus, and leukaemia.”

From the point of view of the psychologist, homesickness is one malady among many, one that can be studied empirically, rife with comorbidities. And while the relevant experiments may be well-designed with their p-values significant, the psychologist’s description doesn’t really speak to my personal experience.

Perhaps it might be best to turn to the literary world, instead. One of my favorite descriptions of homesickness comes from Roald Dahl’s memoir Boy, in which he describes his feelings while off at boarding school:

“I was homesick during the whole of my first term at St Peter’s. Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don’t know how awful it is till you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.”

For Dahl, home was still there, the problem just was that he wasn’t. So what’s the solution?

“The only comfort is that both homesickness and seasickness are instantly curable. The first goes away the moment you walk out of the school grounds and the second is forgotten as soon as the ship enters port.”

While Dahl’s feelings are brought about by being far away from something he could, in theory, return to, there’s another sense of homesickness where the home one misses is completely out of reach. For instance, you might feel homesick for your childhood home that is no longer yours or no longer exists, or for a place that you know has changed so significantly in your absence that returning wouldn’t really be the same. Thomas Wolfe, in the aptly titled You Can’t Go Home Again, describes the feeling in the following way:

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Of course, while Wolfe’s character could never go home again, Dahl could (and indeed he did, by faking an appendicitis so he would be sent home to recover). But neither of these descriptions is quite right for the specific kind of homesickness people like me are feeling now. Those who are homesick during the current pandemic aren’t missing a place that no longer exists, but at the same time they also can’t get some temporary relief by getting the next ship back to their home port.

Instead, homesickness at this current moment in time seems to be distinguished by a special kind of anxiety, one that involves knowing what the cure is, but without the knowledge of how long you’ll have to wait to get it. While a lot of discussions of homesickness seem to focus on a feeling of longing, this kind seems to revolve much more around worry.

Does working through the concepts make me feel any better? Hard to say. There is, of course, no shortage of self-care advice available online that might help if you’re in the same position as me, and a lot of it isn’t bad: try to stay connected with friends and family via Skype/Zoom/Whatever, cut yourself some slack if you’re not being super productive at all times, take a stab at making your own bread, etc. And while I’ve tried all of those things, and while they certainly do help, I still can’t help but worry about my little apartment, and think about how nice it will be to set foot inside it again; assuming, of course, that it’s not full of brown water when I get there.

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A Boulder Rolls Downhill

photograph of silhoutted man leaning against boulder at dawn

On occasion a philosopher will be asked, sometimes seriously but often tongue-in-cheek, “What’s the meaning of life?” Stereotypically this conversation happens at a bar or party—somewhere that involves a mind-altering substance. A few weeks ago I had such a conversation at a bar. The novel coronavirus was not yet being taken seriously across the US (though it should have been). Nonetheless the theme is applicable—what should we do, and how should we feel, when things are bad? Does it matter? It’s easy to get to a negative answer: there is no meaning, and it doesn’t matter what we do. We can pick out at least two philosophical viewpoints from these sentiments.

If we think what we do doesn’t matter we might be affirming fatalism. This the view that future events are fixed and immutable, not susceptible to alteration by even our greatest efforts. This may be because, in some sense, the future has already happened. (Or more accurately, is continuously “happening,” just as the past is.) Several arguments for fatalism hinge on the premise that the future has, in some sense, happened. In order for statements about the future to be true (Aristotle), or for it to be possible that God has perfect knowledge about the future (Nelson Pike), some philosophers have argued that the future must be fixed and immutable.

To envision how fatalism plays out, consider Chinese engineer and author Liu Cixin’s short story “Moonlight.” An unnamed man receives a call from himself, far in the future. The Earth has suffered a climate disaster and the only way to avert it is to change how the world’s power needs are met. The future-caller offers advanced technology, and tells his past self to get it implemented. Immediately after the man resolves to get the technology built, he receives another call from the future. Though the plan worked, a different ecological disaster occurred instead. A new technology is offered, but another call but minutes later reveals that Earth is still doomed. The man and his future self resolve to destroy any plans sent from the future and have no further contact. The world will suffer an ecological catastrophe no matter what, in the world of “Moonlight.” It is fated.

What about nihilism? Nihilism is the view that there is neither negative nor positive moral value to anything we do. That is, there is nothing that we must or mustn’t do, morally speaking. To be clear, this isn’t a form of moral subjectivism claiming that what is good or bad—right or wrong—is different for each person depending on their beliefs and desires. Instead it is the view that nothing is good, bad, right, or wrong. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s character Dmitri Karamozov opines that atheism leads to nihilism when he says in The Brothers Karamozov, “But … how will man be … without God? It means everything is permitted …”

A pandemic disease like coronavirus, with its attendant economic and social disruption, can provide fodder for fatalism and nihilism. When there is so much suffering and when years of work can be undone in a matter of weeks it can appear that everything is meaningless and pointless. In this situation arguments like the famed Problem of Evil ring plausible. This argument asserts that, if God exists it must be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. If God has these qualities then it would know about all evil (omniscience), be able to prevent all evil (omnipotence), and desire to prevent all evil (omnibenevolent). However pandemics, wars, natural disasters, and their like happen consistently. These are evils. Therefore no omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being exists. Therefore no God exists. If Dmitri Karamozov is right, this means that everything is permitted. That is, nihilism is true.

Whether arguments like the Problem of Evil are valid, they have an emotional appeal when things are bad. There is a reason for this in the view of phenomenologists (i.e., philosophers whose method is to focus on the structure of lived experience) like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. As humans we experience this disruption as anxiety. We are accustomed to a seamless experience of actions, objects, and interactions being jointly conducive to a clear end. In anxiety we feel as if all of these things are separated from each other by an untraversable space. When thinking in this disengaged fashion we can’t see any essential, objective (i.e., perspective independent) connections between anything. There is a reason for this, too, according to Heidegger and Sartre. It’s because there are no essential, objective connections. Life has no meaning of its own.

So are nihilism and fatalism true? No—or, maybe yes, but so what? For Sartre, humans are free and life has meaning because of the lack of any essential or objective connections and purposes. This is the upshot of his famous statement “existence precedes essence.” For Sartre nihilism and fatalism are the conditions of human freedom and meaningful life. Humanity’s quest for some prepackaged meaning and value is an effort to shirk the enormous responsibility of what he calls “radical freedom.”

But what about the futility of it all? After all everyone dies, and in life we may work for years to see all those efforts come to nothing. Albert Camus dramatizes this facet of life with his interpretation of the story of Sisyphus. Punished by the gods, Sisyphus is doomed to roll a great boulder up a long hill only for it to roll back down, over and over again. But Camus does not assume that Sisyphus’ toiling brings only despair. While he pushes the boulder up, Sisyphus is too engrossed in his task. This is the seamless experience of practical engagement described by Heidegger and Sartre. Camus asserts that the interesting thing is to think of Sisyphus as he walks back to the bottom of the hill. He imagines that Sisyphus claims ownership of his “fate.” By claiming ownership he creates a meaningful connection between the endless pushing-up and rolling down. He knows it will never end, but he does not despair. Camus imagines Sisyphus is happy.

Many people have been yanked from the feeling of seamless practical engagement by the coronavirus and its knock-on effects. Feelings of anxiety rise as people doubt the inherent worth and meaning of their lives. In the face of this how can people go on, and why should they? Because that’s what life is like, and there’s nothing else to do. Push the boulder back up the hill. It’ll roll down again, but at least we’ll have something to do.

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Moral and Existential Lessons from “Chernobyl”

Photograph of Pripyat ferris wheel from inside abandoned building

HBO’s five-part mini-series documenting the 1986 nuclear power plant disaster in the Soviet Union is powerful because of the existential and moral messages it conveys—critical messages for our time.

The explosion takes place in the opening moments of the first episode. Right out of the gate, there is a clear juxtaposition between the childlike naiveté demonstrated by the control room operators on one hand, and the microcosm of the universe that is the nuclear explosion on the other. For many of the characters, the magnitude of the event is, quite literally, beyond comprehension. At one point, a disbelieving middle manager orders an employee to climb to the top of the tower and stare directly down at the ruptured core. We are reminded of Nietzsche’s admonition that, “if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” He turns back in a silent report on what he has seen—his face like a Munch painting, signs of deadly radiation damage already clear.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes the absurdity of the human experience. There are moments when this absurdity hits us with full force—the universe is not the kind of thing that cares about the desires of human beings. Camus describes these moments of recognition, “At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for rationality. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” At Chernobyl, rather than silence, the indifference is signaled by a ceaseless, pulsating hum.

Camus also describes absurd heroes—people who, in full recognition of the absurdity of their situation, respond to that absurdity authentically. The miniseries tells the true stories of the truly stunning number of people who were willing to charge into situations in which completion of the required task was unlikely and death was seemingly certain. In this way, it is an inspiring tale of human resilience and spirit.

In fact, despite the existential premise, much of the story motivates the intuition that, despite our insignificance from the perspective of the universe, the choices we make now really do matter now, and that virtue should be pursued and vice avoided. Chernobyl was a disaster of unimaginable proportions, but were it not for the actions of those who gave their health and even their lives in the service of others, it could have been much worse. The series highlights the value of courage as a virtue. It also explores the perils of blind ambition as a vice. The accident happened as a result of decisions that had foreseeable bad consequences, but those involved in the bad decision-making valued their own promotion over the safety of others.

Some of the most significant lessons from Chernobyl are epistemic—they have to do with how we form our beliefs and what we regard as knowledge. The tragedy of Chernobyl highlights the consequences of confusing power with expertise. This message is always important and is especially salient today. Chernobyl demonstrates how dangerous fallacious appeals to authority can be. Sometimes, powerful figures are presumed to be truth tellers or experts simply because they happen to be in power. Attaining knowledge can be hard work, and we should respect the process. This doesn’t mean that we should blindly accept the pronouncements of anyone with a PhD, but we should recognize that, for example, physicists know more about nuclear reactions than government bureaucrats. Similarly, climate scientists know more about global warming than presidents or the CEOs of oil companies.

Viewers are left with a better understanding of how dangerous it can be when people are put in charge of things that they know very little about. Powerful positions should not be doled out based on nepotism or on past support or level of loyalty, but should instead be based on knowledge base and experience level. Lack of qualification is easily obfuscated when times are good. Perhaps these appointments should always be made with the understanding that times can get very, very bad extremely quickly.

The series also speaks to the peril to which wishful thinking can give rise. Some beliefs are comforting, pleasant, and familiar. These aren’t good reasons for thinking those beliefs are true. When lives are on the line, it is important that we believe and act on what the best evidence supports, rather than believing whatever our strongest desires motivate us to believe.

Finally, the series is about the importance of speaking truth to power. Truth telling is important because lies have consequences—especially when those lies are about the finer details of nuclear power plants. When the government is the body doing the lying, the effects are vast. Speaking truth to power is about more than consequences however; it is also about dignity and authenticity. A person exercises autonomy of a crucial sort when they refuse to abandon their responsiveness to reasons when faced with the coerciveness of power. Such an act makes the statement that facts don’t cease to be facts because they are inconvenient for the powerful. 

We learn from Chernobyl that the consequences of letting lust for power and the fear of looking foolish can be, in the right circumstances, complete global catastrophe. There are forces that dwarf the significance of fragile human egos. Perhaps those forces should properly humble us, as we do our best to understand them.