Dec 24 JDN 2460304

When this post goes live, it will be Christmas Eve, one of the most important holidays around the world.

Ostensibly it celebrates the birth of Jesus, but it doesn’t really.

For one thing, Jesus almost certainly wasn’t born in December. The date of Christmas was largely set by the Council of Tours in AD 567; it was set to coincide with existing celebrations—not only other Christian celebrations such as the Feast of the Epiphany, but also many non-Christian celebrations such as Yuletide, Saturnalia, and others around the Winter Solstice. (People today often say “Yuletide” when they actually mean Christmas, because the syncretization was so absolute.)

For another, an awful lot of the people celebrating Christmas don’t particularly care about Jesus. Countries like Sweden, Belgium, the UK, Australia, Norway, and Denmark are majority atheist but still very serious about Christmas. Maybe we should try to secularize and ecumenize the celebration and call it Solstice or something, but that’s a tall order. For now, it’s Christmas.

Compassion, love, and generosity are central themes of Christmas—and, by all accounts, Jesus did exemplify those traits. Christianity has a very complicated history, much of it quite dark; but this part of it at least seems worth preserving and even cherishing.

It is truly remarkable that we have compassion at all.

Most of this universe has no compassion. Many would like to believe otherwise, and they invent gods and other “higher beings” or attribute some sort of benevolent “universal consciousness” to the cosmos. (Really, most people copy the prior inventions of others.)

This is all wrong.

The universe is mostly empty, and what is here is mostly pitilessly indifferent.

The vast majority of the universe is comprised of cold, dark, empty space—or perhaps of “dark energy“, a phenomenon we really don’t understand at all, which many physicists believe is actually a shockingly powerful form of energy contained within empty space.

Most of the rest is made up of “dark matter“, a substance we still don’t really understand either, but believe to be basically a dense sea of particles that have mass but not much else, which cluster around other mass by gravity but otherwise rarely interact with other matter or even with each other.

Most of the “ordinary matter”, or more properly baryonic matter, (which we think of as ordinary, but actually by far the minority) is contained within stars and nebulae. It is mostly hydrogen and helium. Some of the other lighter elements—like lithium, sodium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and all the way up to iron—can be made within ordinary stars, but still form a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe. Anything heavier than that—silver, gold, beryllium, uranium—can only be made in exotic, catastrophic cosmic events, mainly supernovae, and as a result these elements are even rarer still.

Most of the universe is mind-bendingly cold: about 3 Kelvin, just barely above absolute zero.

Most of the baryonic matter is mind-bendingly hot, contained within stars that burn with nuclear fires at thousands or even millions of Kelvin.

From a cosmic perspective, we are bizarre.

We live at a weird intermediate temperature and pressure, where matter can take on such exotic states as liquid and solid, rather than the far more common gas and plasma. We do contain a lot of hydrogen—that, at least, is normal by the standards of baryonic matter. But then we’re also made up of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and even little bits of all sorts of other elements that can only be made in supernovae? What kind of nonsense lifeform depends upon something as exotic as iodine to survive?

Most of the universe does not care at all about you.

Most of the universe does not care about anything.

Stars don’t burn because they want to. They burn because that’s what happens when hydrogen slams into other hydrogen hard enough.

Planets don’t orbit because they want to. They orbit because if they didn’t, they’d fly away or crash into their suns—and those that did are long gone now.

Even most living things, which are already nearly as bizarre as we are, don’t actually care much.

Maybe there is a sense in which a C. elegans or an oak tree or even a cyanobacterium wants to live. It certainly seems to try to live; it has behaviors that seem purposeful, which evolved to promote its ability to survive and pass on offspring. Rocks don’t behave. Stars don’t seek. But living things—even tiny, microscopic living things—do.

But we are something very special indeed.

We are animals. Lifeforms with complex, integrated nervous systems—in a word, brains—that allow us to not simply live, but to feel. To hunger. To fear. To think. To choose.

Animals—and to the best of our knowledge, only animals, though I’m having some doubts about AI lately—are capable of making choices and experiencing pleasure and pain, and thereby becoming something more than living beings: moral beings.

Because we alone can choose, we alone have the duty to choose rightly.

Because we alone can be hurt, we alone have the right to demand not to be.

Humans are even very special among animals. We are not just animals but chordates; not just chordates but mammals; not just mammals but primates. And even then, not just primates. We’re special even by those very high standards.

When you count up all the ways that we are strange compared to the rest of the universe, it seems incredibly unlikely that beings like us would come into existence at all.

Yet here we are. And however improbable it may have been for us to emerge as intelligent beings, we had to do so in order to wonder how improbable it was—and so in some sense we shouldn’t be too surprised.

It is a mistake to say that we are “more evolved” than any other lifeform; turtles and cockroaches had just as much time to evolve as we did, and if anything their relative stasis for hundreds of millions of years suggests a more perfected design: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But we are different than other lifeforms in a very profound way. And I dare say, we are better.

All animals feel pleasure, pain and hunger. (Some believe that even some plants and microscopic lifeforms may too.) Pain when something damages you; hunger when you need something; pleasure when you get what you needed.

But somewhere along the way, new emotions were added: Fear. Lust. Anger. Sadness. Disgust. Pride. To the best of our knowledge, these are largely chordate emotions, often believed to have emerged around the same time as reptiles. (Does this mean that cephalopods never get angry? Or did they evolve anger independently? Surely worms don’t get angry, right? Our common ancestor with cephalopods was probably something like a worm, perhaps a nematode. Does C. elegans get angry?)

And then, much later, still newer emotions evolved. These ones seem to be largely limited to mammals. They emerged from the need for mothers to care for their few and helpless young. (Consider how a bear or a cat fiercely protects her babies from harm—versus how a turtle leaves her many, many offspring to fend for themselves.)

One emotion formed the core of this constellation:

Love.

Caring, trust, affection, and compassion—and also rejection, betrayal, hatred, and bigotry—all came from this one fundamental capacity to love. To care about the well-being of others as well as our own. To see our purpose in the world as extending beyond the borders of our own bodies.

This is what makes humans different, most of all. We are the beings most capable of love.

We are of course by no means perfect at it. Some would say that we are not even very good at loving.

Certainly there are some humans, such as psychopaths, who seem virtually incapable of love. But they are rare.

We often wish that we were better at love. We wish that there were more compassion in the world, and fear that humanity will destroy itself because we cannot find enough compassion to compensate for our increasing destructive power.

Yet if we are bad at love, compared to what?

Compared to the unthinking emptiness of space, the hellish nuclear fires of stars, or even the pitiless selfishness of a worm or a turtle, we are absolute paragons of love.

We somehow find a way to love millions of others who we have never even met—maybe just a tiny bit, and maybe even in a way that becomes harmful, as solidarity fades into nationalism fades into bigotry—but we do find a way. Through institutions of culture and government, we find a way to trust and cooperate on a scale that would be utterly unfathomable even to the most wise and open-minded bonobo, let alone a nematode.

There are no other experts on compassion here. It’s just us.

Maybe that’s why so many people long for the existence of gods. They feel as ignorant as children, and crave the knowledge and support of a wise adult. But there aren’t any. We’re the adults. For all the vast expanses of what we do not know, we actually know more than anyone else. And most of the universe doesn’t know a thing.

If we are not as good at loving as we’d like, the answer is for us to learn to get better at it.

And we know that we can get better at it, because we have. Humanity is more peaceful and cooperative now than we have ever been in our history. The process is slow, and sometimes there is backsliding, but overall, life is getting better for most people in most of the world most of the time.

As a species, as a civilization, we are slowly learning how to love ourselves, one another, and the rest of the world around us.

No one else will learn to love for us. We must do it ourselves.

But we can.

And I believe we will.