Cosmophobia

Rejecting the Real in this Most Beautiful Moment

Is the world real?

As American culture continues to fragment and polarize, there seems to be increasing numbers of people who question the reality of reality. Just today, a disturbing episode of On Point aired in which researchers Alex Newhouse and Emily Connelly detailed the way that various extremist online communities cultivate vitriolic hate and nihilism, leading many to the conviction that nothing matters and that nothing is real. There is even a word for social media posts that display this disordered nihilism: schizoposting

These dark online spaces lead some to acts of nihilistic violence, like the Highland Park shooter in Chicago earlier this month. Newhouse and Connelly describe how various nihilists create various fictional narratives that become alternate realities in which they become the legends of their own story–and seek revenge on the world that they believe has wronged them so deeply.

I am sure that these kinds of nihilists are very few–but one violent nihilist is one too many, and it seems like their numbers are increasing rather than decreasing.

Something else remarkable happened today that I think can help the nihilists. Today we all saw something that evokes wonder, reminding us all that the world is indeed real and beyond our ability to fully grasp. I am referring of course to the photo released by NASA giving us our deepest look yet into the cosmos. 

The James Webber telescope has been contemplating one tiny grain with the universe and found a universe within it. The infrared photo reveals that within that tiny grain are thousands of galaxies showing us the cosmos as it appeared some 13 billion years ago. Astronomers everywhere are downright giddy.

Why is there something instead of nothing? And why is that something–the cosmos–so incomprehensibly big? And why is it so beautiful?

You will note that practically everyone viewing and then describing the photo uses words like “beautiful,” “stunning,” and “gorgeous.” Even the scientists writing at NASA use phrases like “cosmic dance,” “sparkling clusters” and “glittering landscapes.” What we are seeing is indeed stunning, beautiful, and real.

This newsletter is about the renewal of classical education. Astronomy, as you likely know, is one of the seven liberal arts. The classical tradition and classical education, from the time of Plato onward, has been in, well, the realist tradition. The tradition regards the heavens as real even if heavenly. The world, for all its mystery, is a real world and we are not, in fact, brains in a vat, or being deceived at every moment by a deceptive demon. Chesterton called the world “my cozy cosmos” because he loved it as a home, even when the next moment he was bewildered by its infinite beauty. How is it possible for any of us to fear this world and declare it nil? Yet we do.

Plato believed that not only mountains were real but morals too. Justice is real and not a mere convenient trope that we have evolved for the survival of the species, and thus capable of change. Justice confronts us like a mountain, we cannot wish it away and we all lack the faith to call upon it to be uprooted and thrown into the sea. We must face the mountain and climb it just as we must face the reality of justice and seek to give each man his due. We might say with Plato that the cosmos reveals not only her beauty but her goodness too.

The mountains of our reality–whether material or moral, prompt us to ask, how do I live best here in this cozy yet vast cosmos? Should I try to bring the mountain to my feet or should I learn to live on the mountain and even love it?

This is not a new question but rather a question we must raise and answer in every generation. C. S. Lewis asked it poignantly in The Abolition of Man, in 1943. Is the world “raw material”--a resource that I use to craft my own reality? Or does the cosmos have some call upon me that I should obey and love? Do I form my reality from the stuff of the world I find or do I conform myself to the cosmos into which I am born?

The word cosmos gives us a clue to what the classical tradition confesses as true. The world is an ordered beauty, a harmony, a cosmos. We are born into it, it is our host, a mother of sorts. When we wake up and see it, taste it, hear it, we know in some sense we are of it and from it. In the Christian tradition, we say we were made for it and it for us. We seek, therefore, not to use the cosmos but bring ourselves into harmony with it–to make music with it, to sing with it.

In this conception, the world is very real, and the world while beautiful and mysterious, has its definitive qualities. The mountains are heavy and fire is hot. Water–lovely and shape-shifting as it is–always consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. While we have many choices about what we may do on this wide earth (what an adventure!) we have some limitations. For example, while we can choose what direction we walk, we must choose a direction (some aspect of time and space). No one can claim to be adirectional and object to the illegitimate constraints of north, south, east, and west. So far, there is no anti-compass publication or adirectionals anonymous societies (but just wait). 

Not one of us asked to be here, to be born, but here we are. Is it not a gift despite the suffering we all encounter? If it is a gift, aren’t we obliged to some sort of gratitude? And if we are grateful, should we not gratefully accept both the limitations and the freedom that comes with being a child of the cosmos?

Those breaking with reality, they break too. The nihilists on the dark places on the web should be pitied, loved, and helped. More than a call to “be good” I think they need a call to gaze upon that which is beautiful–and they could do much worse than to contemplate the marvelous photos being released by NASA. With that gazing may come a call. The call we all need to hear is the harmony of the cosmos itself, what we used to call the music of the spheres. Nature gives us ourselves, gives us gravity, gives us mountains, gives us the speed of light, the birth of stars (in star nurseries), gives us our own birth. Plato (certainly Aristotle) would say that if we hear music, there is a Musician. That Musician calls us to intellectual and moral harmony, a harmony of the soul, and a harmony with one another as we heed those realities formerly called justice, prudence, temperance and courage.

To the moral realities of justice, prudence, temperance and courage, the Christians that followed Plato added three more–faith, hope, and love. And the Musician they called Christ the Logos, the cosmic creator and conductor.

One may abandon the harmonious call of the cosmos, for we are all endowed as well with a free will. We are asked to dance, we are asked to conform to justice, we are asked to conform with beautiful form, to love ourselves as we are made. To reject this cosmic call, it seems to me, is to reject oneself, to lose beauty, and with it, goodness. This sad rejection one can call nihilism, but it goes by another name: cosmophobia.