Perspectives on Eternity
Three Things #88: October 8, 2023
It’s very easy to get caught up in day to day and week to week affairs—so easy, in fact, that it’s sometimes very hard even to think or plan long term. It seems like human nature that whatever is going on immediately around us in both space and time feels absolutely essential, while things that are more distant feel relatively unimportant, even if in reality they’re objectively big, important things. (This, in a nutshell, captures most of what makes politics and democracy so difficult, but that’s a topic for another issue.) It’s really hard to ignore gossip, the market, current events, trivial social goings on, and daily ups and downs, especially in an era of social media and doom scrolling.
But being caught up constantly in the day to day is really unhealthy. It distracts us from the things that matter most, whether big projects that span huge stretches of time and space (like, say, democracy, science, or space exploration), or mundane but important eternal truths. The focus of meditation and many other religious and devotional practices is precisely on leaving the mundane behind in favor of the eternal and of the here and now.
I’ve found that three totally different areas of inquiry and practices have helped me zoom out and stay focused on the eternal.
Thing #1: Sci-Fi
“Chaos is no surprise. It has predictable characteristics. For one thing, it carries away order and strengthens the forces at the extremes.” “Isn't that what radicals are trying to do? Aren't they trying to shake things up so that they can grab control?” “That's what they think they are doing. Actually they're creating new extremists, new radicals, and they are continuing the old process.” - Leto II and Moneo Atreides, God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert
While I don’t write about it often, sci-fi is one of my great passions. I love sci-fi for many reasons, not least of which is my curiosity and love of technology, but really it boils down to two things: I’m obsessed with stories and I love the degrees of freedom that sci-fi affords the storyteller, far more than any other genre. The best sci-fi balances fiction and reality and encodes deep moral lessons, painting plausible alternate futures and considering the desirability of possible future outcomes.
My favorite sub-genre within sci-fi is the space epic (for lack of a better term) that includes the Dune and Foundation series, the two GOATs. These story universes—and they are far more than simple stories, each is in fact a universe that consists of many stories with hundreds of characters—span the long arc of human civilization over tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. (There’s an Asimov novel, loosely connected to the Foundation universe, that alone spans tens of millions of years of humanity.) I love these universes because they relax two of the biggest constraints on storytelling, time and place, and allow their authors to tell stories that span galaxies and millennia. The best stories take time (and space) to develop, and eternal truths are only visible on the broadest possible scale.
There are a few common themes in these epic story universes. One is the end of human evolution and the relative permanence across time and space of humanity. It may be true that humans evolved from apes over several million years, but ongoing evolution requires environmental stress factors. Once humans learned to create their own environment, most of these stresses went away and evolution slowed. Dune deals not at all with evolution (setting aside for the moment God Emperors, Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit and others with super human powers), and in Asimov’s universe, over millions of years the only evolutionary differences in humans are fewer teeth, one less rib, less body hair, and the disappearance of the appendix. In other words, humans are recognizable as humans (and indeed can interbreed) across unimaginable distances of both space and time.
Another common theme is the permanence of human nature, human foibles, and conflict. We develop technology that’s ever more powerful and that gives us abilities that were previously unthinkable—in both universes, technology mostly only advances forward, with periodic setbacks—but this technology doesn’t alter the fundamental social fabric or issues of humanity. As someone working to build powerful, paradigm shifting technology, this helps me stay grounded and remember that technology amplifies existing intentions and tendencies, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter human nature.
Finally, there’s the theme of cyclicality. History doesn’t play out in a straight line. The same things tend to happen again and again, even on galactic and millennial scales. Empires rise and fall, only to be replaced and rise again. The long arc of history, in the very longest scale conceivable, is a spiral, hopefully upward.
Science fiction is of course only fiction, and while I enjoy it I try not to take it too seriously. But it still helps me zoom out from the mundane and the day to day. It reminds me that there’s a larger human project going on, of which I’m a part, and that even the biggest, scariest problems we face today will eventually fade in importance compared to bigger ones. Global warming is real and it’s terrifying today but we will figure it out and ultimately it’ll fade in significance relative to bigger problems (nuclear war? the dying sun?) and bigger opportunities (humans colonizing the galaxy). It reminds me that, no matter how bad things get today, they’ve been this bad (or worse) before and they’ll inevitably be this bad again someday, somewhere.
It’s a reminder that the problems most worth working on are the really, really long term problems, like general AI and robotics, longevity, and space travel. These are exactly the sort of problems that short-lived individual scientists, politicians, and even companies aren’t well equipped to handle. We need to think bigger. We may be mere individuals with lifetimes that are infinitesimal on this grand scale, but we are all part of a project and a story arc much bigger and much more epic than ourselves. It’s fun to think where it all might lead one day—maybe even to a galactic civilization. That’s a powerful, inspiring thought. Ad astra.
Thing #2: Religion
“All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.” - Ecclesiastes 1:8-10
When I think of eternity in the context of religion I think first and foremost of Buddhism. Christians understand eternity in the context of the immutability of God and the afterlife. I’m sure many other religions have notions of eternity. But the Buddhist notion is much more accessible and mundane.
Most people introduced to Buddhism, at least most of us who didn’t grow up in a Buddhist community, don’t get much further than reincarnation, which sounds absurd to a modern, educated person. But the more I’ve studied and understood Buddhism, the more I’ve reflected on the idea, and the more appealing I’ve come to find it.
In Buddhist cosmology all beings are stuck in endless cycles of rebirth and suffering known as saṃsāra, at least until they achieve enlightenment or liberation, nirvāṇa. The vast spans of time over which saṃsāra plays out are truly unfathomable. It’s not the case that beings live for a handful of lifetimes and then achieve enlightenment. On the contrary, all beings alive today have experienced countless cycles of birth, existence, death, and rebirth. The vast majority haven’t achieved enlightenment (which isn’t easy) and most never will.
The Buddha never gives any hard numbers, but he explains in proverbs that in previous cycles of existence you have been in every possible arrangement of relationship with every other being in existence: friend, parent, child, cousin, colleague, adversary, neighbor, lover, you name it. If you do even basic math, considering the trillions of beings even just on Earth (to say nothing of the rest of the universe), you’re talking about a pretty long span of time. (For the math nerds among us that’s around 10^23 years, or nearly a trillion trillion years, give or take.)
Another parable explains that the chance of being born as a human, and thus being at least theoretically capable of attaining enlightenment, is less than the chance that a turtle, swimming blindly and randomly under the sea, which pops its head up to the surface once a century, puts its head directly through a yoke that was randomly tossed into the sea. Buddhism deals in spans of time that are so great that only metaphor can begin to convey their immense duration. And all of this is not yet eternity! Enlightenment is eternal and immutable, but saṃsāra is not.
What appeals to me so much about Buddhist cosmology and metaphysics is that, by its logic, everything is cyclical. Eternity is somehow much more palatable and less frightening to think about when it happens in cycles—or, as in the case of Buddhism, cycles-within-cycles-within-cycles.
In Buddhism there is no beginning or end to creation, and there is no eternal creator. Things are a certain way, and early Buddhists had no reason to believe things were ever any different or would ever be any different: in other words, everything was eternal. My guess is that people thousands of years ago weren’t thinking in terms of trillions of years, or even of eternity.
Buddhas come and go; ages of man come and go; individual existences come and go. Everything is part of the fabric of dharma, the sum total of reality. After reflecting on this for many years I’ve decided that this is just a more natural way of thinking about the world than the modern, Western notion of history as linear, as proceeding like a story from a beginning creation myth to the present to some prophesied end time.
The sun rises, sets, and then rises again. Generations of man come and go in their turn. The seasons cycle endlessly. It’s no surprise that, for most of human history, most societies believed in an endless, cyclical nature of reality rather than in a beginning, middle, and end—a decidedly modern and Western notion. Given this fact, in my opinion the burden of proof is on believers in linearity and a finite nature of time to prove their case, and I remain unconvinced. It may be true that the universe that we know hasn’t existed forever and will eventually collapse into a freezing pile of entropy, but this doesn’t prove anything about what came before the Big Bang or that this isn’t just a very big cycle repeating itself, as Buddhism and other faiths would have it. (Science even gives us reason to believe this may actually be the case.)
In any case, I find comfort in the notion that “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” It somehow helps me zoom out from my day to day concerns; I take comfort in the fact that even the really big, scary stuff—say, climate change or the threat of nuclear war—has happened before, maybe not in precisely the same way but in some sense, and will certainly happen again.
I also find comfort in the Buddhist notion of cycles. The idea of eternity bothers me: obviously the notion of eternal damnation is frightening, but even the notion of eternal bliss in Heaven scares me because it implies stagnation (how does one improve when one is already in Heaven?). By contrast, the idea of endless cycles suggests the promise of gradual, ongoing progress, which is how I prefer to think of my life and of the long arc of human history: the upward spiral.
You could probably interpret this the other way around, that the lack of any novelty to speak of is depressing and fatalistic and a reason for pessimism. But that simply isn’t true because, even if history does repeat itself endlessly, the particular permutation of history at this particular moment, the particular combination of events and actors and outcomes, is unique. It has never happened exactly this way before and it will never happen exactly this way again (hence the spiral and not a perfect circle). Put another way, you only get to experience history once, so make the most of it.
Thing #3: Sociology
“It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.” - Hari Seldon, Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Human society doesn’t play out randomly. There are patterns in the course of events, as human behavior is to some extent predictable, especially over large populations and large spans of time (sort of like a social law of large numbers). There may not be true “laws” of human society (the fictional Hari Seldon’s work notwithstanding), but there are both universal aspects of human society, such as family, fashion, music, dance, courtship and mating, youthhood and coming of age, old age and retirement, sex and gender roles, social status, relative wealth and poverty, use of technology, etc., and universal dynamics, e.g., “the rich get richer,” that rhyme over time and place and cause these patterns. These universal aspects are so ubiquitous that we tend to notice them only in their absence: for instance, the rare matriarchal society, the rare society without marriage, or the rare society where inequality is low.
Some, such as Strauss and Howe, even postulate that these patterns persist over many hundreds of years. In their books, including Generations: The History of America's Future and Fourth Turning, they describe recurring social archetypes and the recurring types of eras that they give rise to: an Idealist generation gives rise to a Reactive generation which leads to a Civic generation which is followed by an Adaptive generation, after which the cycle repeats.
These theories are referred to as “pop sociology,” and to be clear, Strauss and Howe are not trained sociologists. While I think they have a tendency to overgeneralize, I do think there’s a great deal of truth in the picture they paint of recurring social crises and a cycle of different generation types. In the same way that in democracies the political pendulum seems to swing back and forth between the two main political parties and between right and left, I have no trouble believing that a generation that grows up in fear during or following a crisis tends to raise their children more strictly, and that their children subsequently rebel and let their children run free, which leads to another crisis, kicking off another cycle, etc.. This is illustrated by one of my favorite quotes:
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” - G. Michael Hopf
This inevitably brings us back to Hari Seldon and the field he invented, psychohistory. Sociology isn’t usually thought of as an especially exciting or sexy pursuit, but Foundation explores the hypothetical limits of sociology taken to the logical extreme: what if these patterns could be understood and distilled into true laws in the scientific sense that could subsequently be used to forecast future trends with a high degree of accuracy?
Seldon’s original inspiration for the idea came from thermodynamics, where the behavior of individual particles is unpredictable but the behavior of masses of particles is perfectly predictable. Early in his career Seldon theorizes that, if he could just come up with a set of ironclad social rules, he’d be able to forecast the patterns of human society over enormous spans of time and space. At the end of his career he does just that, kicking off the Foundation project. His predictions are so eerily accurate, even hundreds of years later, that people take to calling him a Prophet and accuse him of taking away their free will. I won’t add any spoilers but let’s just say that it doesn’t win him many friends.
The work of Strauss and Howe is the closest thing we have to Hari Seldon in the real world. Seldon predicts a series of events, known as Seldon Crises, that his Foundation (and, eventually, all of humanity) will face over the course of a thousand years. Strauss and Howe forecast when major crises will occur and what the rough social structure will look like at that point in time, although unlike Seldon they make no claims as to the nature of the crises or how they’ll play out.
As fun as it is to consider the idea of a Prophet who, using nothing more than science (math, statistics, history, psychology, sociology), can forecast the action of populations of trillions of people hundreds of years into the future, the example of Seldon is of course totally fictional. But even without Seldon’s superpowers we can actually get pretty far using those same tools. And, as in the examples of real and fictional religions above, knowing this also gives me comfort and helps me zoom out from the day to day.
I feel overwhelmed on a daily basis by the number of crises it seems we’re presently facing: a terrible market and financial situation, a dysfunctional government, a housing shortage, an immigration crisis, supply chain problems, pandemics, war, rising authoritarianism and the unpopularity of democracy and capitalism, energy, obesity and opioids, and climate change, to name but a few. Like many Millennials, I feel like the Boomer generation broke the world and totally screwed things up for us. The mood isn’t much better among Gen Z.
But, as Strauss and Howe point out, this is far from the first time this particular social moment has existed and it’s not the first time this generational cycle has played out. The message of history and of sociology is clear: we will weather this crisis and the long, slow, upward spiral narrative of human civilization will continue. Hari Seldon agrees: this, too, shall pass.