Earth Looked so Small as to Make me Ashamed of Our Empire
This is more like a guest commentary than a question, so you, dear reader, will experience two opinions for the price of one. Let us hear first from Carl Sagan, then from the reader, then I will offer my own comment, and then, finally, the comment from an Roman ghost seen in a dream.
Unfortunately this is print, so I cannot wow you with my powers of voice impersonation. I do a pretty mean Carl Sagan, as well as an excellent Phil Silvers or Hans Conried. Therefore, readers, I ask you to use your powers of auditory imagination, and to hear in your mind’s ear Mr Sagan pronouncing the following words with his signature explosive b’s and sibilant s’s, and the slight pauses before each adjective, as if Mr Sagan savors the taste on his tongue of the precision of his words. Imagine a voice vibrant with good humor, almost joy, and the ever so slight musical pomposity of tone:
Carl Sagan:
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines…every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
“In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
“It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
One of my readers has this reaction:
“The quote is rather moving, and it can easily bring forth a swirl of emotion as the picture itself did for Sagan. In his rush to indict humanity for fighting for their respective homelands, though, he contradicts himself.
“Note how he dismissively speaks of the Earth as a dot, and all of the great wars fought over its territory as trivial quibbling of insects fighting over a piece of fallen fruit. He says that those humans fighting for their homelands, for their freedoms, for their property, or even for their lives don’t realize that they are fighting over nothing when there is a great big cosmos out there. However, he turns around and says that the pale blue dot is the only home we’ve ever known, and that it needs to be “preserved and cherished,” since there is nothing like it elsewhere. The problem is that far from being insignificant, the Earth is the only known planet to support life, so all those people were fighting over a piece of prime cosmic real estate; it’s not as if we can go out and live in the great big cosmic stage. In fact, that cosmic stage is full of deadly radiation, so it’s a miracle we’re here at all.
“The second issue is even worse. In dismissing humanity as insignificant, then going on about “[dealing] more kindly and compassionately with one another,” we see a totalitarian streak. If humans are not valuable individuals but insignificant ants crawling around on a little sugar cube, then smashing them in the name of global unity is okay. After all, he says that humanity is posturing, self-important, and delusional, and that the picture should remind them of their place — that they and all they care about are nothing. One can assume, then, that they shouldn’t complain when their fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a dot is taken away, and they are casually cast aside to make room for Lord Sagan’s New World Order. Nothing like compassion or respect for your fellow man can survive in such an environment, since compassion is just as meaningless to the cosmos as violence. This is the very opposite of the Christian understanding, which says that individuals are special.
“Besides, go back far enough and the entire Milky Way is a dot. It’s dots all the way back!
“Mr. Sagan meant well when he said what he said, but he is sorely mistaken if he thinks that teaching people of their insignificance will improve their behavior. All it does is embolden tyrants.
“What do you say, Mr. Wright?”
Ah, someone has unwisely asked me to pontificate! Step well back. I use large and windy words.
My comment is this:
I agree in part and disagree in part with this reader’s reaction. I agree the quote is moving, and I salute the sentiment behind it. Being Christian, I applaud the merit of humility. Since Mr. Sagan was an atheist, he had no rational reason to applaud or seek humility.
First, I see nothing necessarily totalitarian or tyrannical in dwelling on the insignificance and loneliness of Earth. I do agree that dwelling on the smallness of the Earth combined with the statement, which I dismiss as false, that ” there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves” is a typical piece of modern postchristian arrogance, and I must admit all modern tyrannies justify themselves as being programs for improving the lot of men through eugenics, social engineering, socialism, aborticide on the grounds that there is no help coming and that all improvement is “up to us”.
Second, Mr. Sagan condemns generals and emperors fighting to become masters of part of the Earth, not partisans struggling to preserve their homes, and this to me sounds like a condemnation of Napoleon and not of Washington. Whether he means to condemn all wars or merely unjust wars is left to the interpretation of the reader.
Third, Mr. Sagan does not say, but when he speaks of imagined self importance and no one coming to help, knowing him to be an atheist, I assume he has a second meaning to those words: since outer space is empty, there are no angels in our heavens, no saints among the stars. I assume he is not speaking of expecting help from Vulcans or Kzinti or the Tharks of the dead sea bottoms of Mars.
If he thinks the smallness of Earth in contrast to the vastness of heaven proves anything about the helplessness of man, and the godlessness of the universe, he has it exactly backward. Back in the days when ships traveled no farther than the coasts of Carthage or the Isles of the Cassarides, and Thule was as far beyond reach as Taprobane or Cathay, the appalling vastness of the universe was visible from your hut’s back window, without any need to pick up a telescope, since the peasant in the Oecumene ruled from distant Byzantium could look at a forest or a fisherman look at a sea which stretched from past continents, past fabled lands and oceans, to lands utterly unknown, zones of the globe the philosophers called Perioeci and Antipodes and Antioeci. In those days, you could walk off the edge of the map in a month or so.
From the quasars to the Big Bang, we modern men have made the universe smaller, not bigger, and so if the smallnesses and comfort of the cosmos encouraged the conceits of faith, we would be a more faithful world than the medieval or the ancient, not less.
Fourth, my overall impression of Mr. Sagan’s meditation on the smallness of the speck called Earth is that I am unfortunately reminded of similar postchristian pieties mouthed by lunatic materialists, who one moment say that the “selfish gene” dictates all our actions and behaviors, and that self-sacrificing altruism is merely a misapplied mechanism for increasing the survival rate of nephews and cousins, and then in the next breath, urge all and sundry to overcome deliberately their innate genetic programming to prefer kin to strangers, and therefore to deal with the strangers and sojourners with justice and kindness.
Logically, if pseudo-Darwinian just-so stories like this are true, then kindness to strangers is a misapplication of a blind genetic mechanism of kin-survival, it is destructive of that mechanism to be deliberately kind to anyone not kin, and will ergo lead to the progressive elimination of the trait of kindness to strangers in any bloodlines which practice it. And again, in a materialist universe, which has neither the God of the Christians nor the Good of the Platonists nor yet the Unmoved Mover of the Aristotelians, the only moral authority claimed in the just-so story for kin-altruism is that such behavior is ultimately selfish, if not for one’s self then for a cluster of accidental molecules replicated throughout one’s cells. If the gene mechanism is something we can deliberately overcome, then the gene mechanism has no moral authority over us. And yet again, if the gene mechanism is something we can deliberately ignore, in a godless and non-Platonic and Non-Aristotelian universe, once we have abandoned kin-altruism, and we no longer care about the survival of our bloodlines, we have no reason whatever to prefer saintly self-sacrifice for the sake of strangers to utterly sociopathic selfishness and the enslavement, rapine and murder of strangers.
The same pattern is repeated by Mr. Sagan, this time using the awesome gigantism of the stars and voids of outerspace rather than the microscopic miniaturism of the genes. The first step of the pattern is to make man humble. We thought our free will determined his knowledge of the good, but, no, man is actually the puppet of a selfish gene. Likewise, we thought we were the center of a Ptolemaic universe, but, no, his world is a small speck in the heliocentric solar system of a dim and minor sun in the arm of a smallish galaxy, and not even the largest or most central cluster of the Virgo Supercluster. The second step is to impose a burden upon man. We must “therefore” overcome our innate nature and be kind to each other. We must “therefore” realize that no help is coming and it is up to us.
I use scare quotes to emphasize that the comment is illogical. It is however, quite poetical. Indeed, the poem is one you might know, namely Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
With all due respect to Matthew Arnold, and to Carl Sagan, (but none to lunatic materialists, who sicken me) the selfsame logic goes just as easily the other way. Since the world is a small speck in a vast wildnerness of void, where there is no peace nor help for pain, and we are nothing puppets of blind and selfish genes, “therefore” let us not be true to one another, but look out for number one, live fast and die young, and commit whatever crimes we can get away with.
You see, humility only leads to obedience to moral authority if we just so happen to live in a universe where we know a moral authority. A humble solider will obey his captain where a proud one might balk, but if and only if the captain exists.
Humility is only the crowning virtue in the Jewish or Christian scheme of things, or among Christian heretics as Mormons or Mohammedans, where pride is the chief of sins. In the classical pagan scheme, aretē , or excellence, is the crowning virtue, and hubris or overweening pride, was to be avoided only as a question of excess or overdoing it. The Imperators with pagan wisdom kept a slave in chariot during triumphant ovations to whisper “and yet you are not a god” only so that the victor would not overstep himself. The slave did not whisper “and yet you are a sinner, full of filth” nor did the Emperors in pagan days walk shoeless, taking one coat but not two, and a hank of rope for a belt and a stone for a pillow.
When Mr. Sagan speaks of needing this photograph to tell us something new, to the tell us that the conceited religions grant man a privileged position in the universe, he simply makes an error, of which I can speak with some authority, for as an atheist I made the same error myself.
The medieval and pagan mind simply did not ascribe importance to Earth despite that it was the center of the Ptolemaic system, nor did the medieval mind, or for that matter the pagan mind, fail to notice the utter insignificance of man’s role in the world compared to the heavens.
I could quote Ptolemy himself, who said that the ratio between the size of the Earth and the distance to the starry sphere was “as a point to the heaven” or I could point at Dante, who made certain that the very center of the cosmos, and the point to which all corrupt and heavy matter fell, was the center of the torso of the weeping fallen archangel Satan, or in other words the dirt of his bowels and intestines; but no, let me instead quote from a loftier perspective, and an author who encapsulates both the ancient and the medieval spirit.
Indulge me, dear reader, if I quote at length from Cicero, his work SOMNIUM SCIPIONIS or ‘Scipio’s Dream’ which contains, in my opinion, an exquisitely clear vision of the appalling magnitude of the immensity of time and space in which the ambitions and vanity of men were lost.
Scipio has a dream in which he is carried to heaven and looking down, sees what a small dim spot the Earth is.
And as I looked on every side I saw other things transcendently glorious and wonderful. There were stars which we never see from the earth, and all were vast beyond what we have ever imagined. The least was that farthest from heaven and nearest the earth which shone with a borrowed light. The starry spheres were much larger than the earth; the earth itself looked so small as to make me ashamed of our empire, which was a mere point on its surface.
Whereupon he is upbraided for looking at earthly things, and seeking earthly fame, by his ancestor Africanus, in these words:
“You perceive that men dwell on but few and scanty portions of the earth, and that amid these spots, as it were, vast solitudes are interposed. As to those who inhabit the earth, not only are they so separated that no communication can circulate among them from the one to the other, but part lie upon one side, part upon another, and part are diametrically opposite to you, from whom you assuredly can expect no glory.
“. . . all that part of the earth which is inhabited by you is no other than a little island surrounded by that sea which on earth you call the Atlantic, sometimes the great sea, and sometimes the ocean; and yet with so grand a name, you see how diminutive it is!
“Now do you think it possible for your renown, or that of any one of us, to move from those cultivated and inhabited spots of ground, and pass beyond that Caucasus, or swim across yonder Ganges? What inhabitant of the other parts of the east, or of the extreme regions of the setting sun, of those tracts that run toward the south or toward the north, shall ever hear of your name? Now supposing them cut off, you see at once within what narrow limits your glory would fain expand itself. As to those who speak of you, how long will they speak?
“Let me even suppose that a future race of men shall be desirous of transmitting to their posterity your renown or mine, as they received it from their fathers; yet when we consider the convulsions and conflagrations that must necessarily happen at some definite period, we are unable to attain not only to an eternal, but even to a lasting fame. “
Let me explain that reference. Certain ancients, particularly the Stoics, believed as the modern Hindu, did that the entire cosmos would be periodically destroyed and recreated in fire and convulsion. Some astronomers believe the Big Bang is the death moment of the previous universe, perhaps one identical to ours in every respect. The immensity of time contemplated by the ancients was similar to this.
“[…] mankind ordinarily measure their year by the revolution of the sun, that is of a single heavenly body. But when all the planets shall return to the same position which they once had, and bring back after a long rotation the same aspect of the entire heavens, then the year may be said to be truly completed; I do not venture to say how many ages of mankind will be contained within such a year.”
The annus platonicus or Great Year is a concept from the TIMAEUS of Plato, and is defined as the return of all planets to their exact spot in the zodiac.
“As of old the sun seemed to be eclipsed and blotted out when the soul of Romulus entered these [i.e. heavenly] regions, so when the sun shall be again eclipsed in the same part of his course and at the same period of the year and day, with all the constellations and stars recalled to the point from which they started on their revolutions, then count the year as brought to a close. But be assured that the twentieth part of such a year has not yet elapsed.
“Consequently, should you renounce hope of returning to this place where eminent and excellent men find their reward, of what worth is that human glory which can scarcely extend to a small part of a single year? If, then, you shall determine to look on high and contemplate this mansion and eternal abode, you will neither give yourself to the gossip of the vulgar nor place your hope of well-being on rewards that man can bestow. Virtue herself, by her own charms, should draw you to true honor.”
Mr. Sagan is not saying anything that Cicero did not say better (and in Latin) centuries before, that the smallness of the world should inject humility into our souls, with this vital difference. Cicero’s Scipio lives in a sane hence supernatural universe where it is a ghost who speaks on behalf of the immortal gods, and he can speak without a blush of the proper object for a noble man, once humbled by the majestic immensity of the cosmos, to seek, that object being virtue. Mr Sagan, being more modern and hence having a cruder and more incoherent conception of the universe, can only speak of self-help (“it is up to us”) and of sentiments as kindness and compassion.
I call it cruder to speak of kindness and compassion rather than virtue and honor on the grounds that love of kindness is a sentiment rather than a virtue, feminine rather than masculine, as compassion does not necessitate self-command, temperance, or moderation, or prudence or justice to practice, merely having a large heart, or perhaps a bleeding one.
Sagan is one of those guys I liked when I was a kid, who now, with adult eyes, I feel about the same way I feel about Robert Heinlein: I have a particular sense of betrayal and disgust for anyone who would lie to a gullible and trusting child. And yet I still like and even admire them for the pleasure and edification they granted my younger years.
Specifically, I was graduated from high school and not yet in college when Carl Sagan’s COSMOS come on the local PBS channel in my youth. I adored the show. What science fiction fan would not? Adoring, I did not with critical skepticism regard Mr. Sagan’s windy assertions about Plato and Democritus and Pre-Socratic philosophers. Comically enough, Mr. Sagan places the origin of modern science in the mystical theory of Democritus, and makes no mention of its real origins in the Middle Ages, Aquinas, Grosseteste, Francis Bacon, and William of Ockham and like thinkers, including his hero Copernicus.
Instead he slandered Christianity by repeating the myth of Hypatia of Alexandria. In the myth her cause of death was not that she meddled in the explosive politics of the times, but because she was a pagan of refined learning; and instead of being a Neoplatonic mystic, in the updated version of the myth, she is killed for being a scientist.
No one mentions that the “science” of the time meant being an astrologer. And added twist to the myth says that the Christians of that day and age, the world’s only force promoting the honor and equality of women (there are no female Buddhist saints or Confucian sages), were misogynists who hated females scientists more than they hated science because she was female.
As I said above, I believed all this garbage, and swallowed it hook line and sinker as gullibly as a large mouth bass, all the while congratulating myself on my skepticism and hardheadedness.
The quote from Mr. Sagan is one of the several examples I have run across in my life of secular attempts at piety, which always strike as tin-eared and tone-deaf: trying to get a sense of wonder about what must be the least wondrous imaginable view of the universe. The secular view holds the universe to be a vast and inanimate machine, a watch thrown together by the blind and idiot watchmaker of directionless natural forces, an appalling void disturbed by specks of meaningless life, purposeless and without design, ergo not a cosmos, not a creation.
It is like trying to make the Azathoth of the Cthulhu Mythos seem lovely.
As with most things, any deep thought you hear a modern intellectual repeating, was probably said better, and in Greek or Latin, long ago.
“Since that which moves of itself is eternal, who can deny that the soul is endowed with this property?
Whatever is moved by external impulse is soulless; whatever possesses soul is moved by an inner impulse of its own, for this is the peculiar nature and property of soul.
And since soul is the only force that moves itself, it surely has no beginning and is immortal. Employ it, therefore, in the noblest of pursuits; the noblest are those undertaken for the safety of your country.
If it is in these that your soul is diligently exercised, it will have a swifter flight to this, its proper home and permanent abode.
Even swifter will be the flight if, while still imprisoned in the body, it shall peer forth, and, contemplating what lies beyond, detach itself as far as possible from the body.
For the souls of those who have surrendered themselves to the pleasures of the body and have become their slaves, who are goaded to obedience by lust and violate the laws of gods and men — such souls, when they pass out of their bodies, hover close to earth, and do not return to this place till they have been tossed about for many ages.”
He departed; I awoke from sleep.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
