In Praise of Relativity
Are we the good guys? We leave in the XXI century and consider ourselves highly civilised now, elevated above the barbaric past of humanity. As if there is a certain benchmark set by invisible someone that has been reached once, and ever since that point we can no longer be considered unsophisticated wild animals. Who set that benchmark? Does it require having general education, a degree in something, taste for wine or knowing the release year of each Jarmusch movie? How is that relevant anyway?
The biggest fallacy of human existence is the fallacy of scope. We live “here and now” and therefore we measure everything by “here and now.” There is a painful mental effort required to even imagine oneself at a different point of history, past or future, and even then there is no guarantee your imagination would not produce a totally biased result, tainted by your current condition.
We are glued to our tiny time and space scope like insects to amber. You know, even when I was still a kid one of the most fascinating monologues I’ve ever read was about love, beauty and what would happen if you and your object of love were born in slightly different times: 10 years of difference is acceptable, 20 is weird by modern moral standards, 50 is unthinkable. But doesn’t that mean that “true love” temporal constraints are stricter than any other constraint imposed by society? Imagine Romeo and Juliet drama, but instead of artificial clan differences they are separated by 20 or 50 years…
And this is just the most obvious example of how much we undervalue the importance of time and space. All our moral values and principles we hold in such a high esteem are a reflection of our particular culture. Do you know what else fascinated me throughout my life? Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which in layman’s terms can be described as “your language defines your perception, not the other way around.” It is a highly controversial topic, but think of it this way: the way your parents teach you the world through their language gives you the tools to structuralize it, the words to pin down certain ideas and things. Imagine you had a different set of words, wouldn’t your inner model of the outside world be different?
This is why theory of relativity holds such a special place in my heart. To me it means more than just a mechanical relation between time and space, to me it blooms into a wild garden of ideas of everything being relative and the absence of fundamental values. Every moral boundary you draw is artificial and will change in time, every axiom you believe to be true will at some point in the future be proven wrong (like all the axioms of the past have been proven wrong or incomplete throughout the course of history). Every rightful decision you make is inherently unjust. Every correct opinion is stupid.
This revelation is hard to digest, as it devoids life of value even more than existentialism ever stole from us. This is a complete and utter G?tterd?mmerung for everyone trying to justify anything they do based on meaning.
The only passable attempt to escape this paradox I found in the acceptance of life as a process. Every tiny speck of life carries meaning from the evolutionary point of view in its biological aspect. But the human mind also adds another aspect of thought-as-a-process on top of it. All ideas right or wrong lead to progress as long as they don’t lead into the dead end. And if that distant future is infinitely different (not better or worse) from our current state, isn’t that the very meaning of existence? This leads to some very interesting ideas about the relative value of life and application of infinitesimal calculus to philosophy, but I’m honestly too feeble to confidently reason about topics like that. I just start from the basics, reach this massive wall of unimaginable unreasonableness and stand there staring at it dumbfounded.
But once again like a sharper in a poker game I smile, because I have a joker up my sleeve. I’ve done my job by writing down these ideas, and they will inevitably in some improbable way reach their audience and give birth to more ideas. And some other giant will stand on the shoulders of giants.