Voltaire satirized Leibniz’s “best-of-all-possible-worlds” in Candide. His character Pangloss’s argument for optimism in the face of one tragic event after another is that “everything is for the best.” The philosophy of optimism derived from Leibniz and other eighteenth century thinkers was eventually reduced to abstraction: A worldview that assumed an underlying purpose for a greater “good” that excused travesty and tragedy, injustice and cruelty, corruption and greed. If the world, Leibniz argued, had been created by a perfect God, then that world had to be perfect—even if humans could not perceive the nature of that perfection.
Off and on over a period of 170 million years Earth was a giant snowball. That period of glacial extremes began about 750 million years ago, long before multicellular life began to leave a fossil record. A group of researchers* interested in finding a cause for the rise of multicellular life in the Cambrian Period, recently published their research indicating that “Snowball Earth” glaciation led to an increase in ocean phosphorus, one of the six elements essential for life (The others are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur; think HOCNSP). With more phosphorus available, plants (many cells unified) proliferated, increasing photosynthesis with a resultant rise in oxygen. A mere 30 million years later: TA DA! The Cambrian Explosion (of life) occurred because a key nutrient was weathered from Earth’s rocks by glaciers and their melt waters and sent to the oceans. Noah Planavsky and his colleagues report, “Our work provides a mechanistic link between extensive Neoproterozic glaciations and early animal evolution.”
What would Pangloss say? “The planet was covered by ice for millions of years so that life could eventually rise. See! There is a purpose for everything. Everything is for the best, and everything has a reason for being and happening: Some greater good in a world that is ultimately 'perfect,' the 'best of all possible worlds.' A world too cold to live on became the comfortable world of today.”
Hard to argue that the rise of life was a negative thing: If it were, we wouldn’t be here to discuss it, would we? After
750 million years that ice world led to you. Is this not the kind of thinking that also gets us into specific trouble? Is this not where abstraction runs into the wall of reality?
Thinking that any event serves a larger purpose is not unusual. Our justice system is based on that principle. Incarcerate an individual to protect the society. Our military and clandestine operations also stem from such thinking. Probably, but I have no way of demonstrating this, most people would accept the principle that an underlying general “good” can be served by a specific “bad”: Dropping Little Boy did, in killing tens of thousands, hasten the end of World War II, a war that killed tens of millions. What were tens of thousands of lives by comparison?
So, we waver between two kinds of thought. When it is convenient for us to do so, we think an injurious action is only a temporary event that can support a greater benefit. One suffers. Many profit. You can search your own memories for examples. They abound, and in some of those examples, you’ll find yourself justifying something specific on the grounds it supports something general. The other kind of thinking is that a specific bad is a phenomenon in itself. It serves no greater purpose, no far reaching goal or perfect world. The specific “bad” doesn’t infuse an ocean with an important nutrient, and, even if it does so, there’s no controlling the unseen outcome in a world of so many cross purposes. It’s hard to get a big picture when all we really have is the little one, the moment before us, and the action or behavior of the present.
Just thinking.
*University of California -- Riverside. "New evidence supports 'Snowball Earth' as trigger for early animal evolution." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 27 October 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101027133146.htm>. See the October 28, 2015 issue of Nature (Noah Planavsky, et. al.)
Off and on over a period of 170 million years Earth was a giant snowball. That period of glacial extremes began about 750 million years ago, long before multicellular life began to leave a fossil record. A group of researchers* interested in finding a cause for the rise of multicellular life in the Cambrian Period, recently published their research indicating that “Snowball Earth” glaciation led to an increase in ocean phosphorus, one of the six elements essential for life (The others are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur; think HOCNSP). With more phosphorus available, plants (many cells unified) proliferated, increasing photosynthesis with a resultant rise in oxygen. A mere 30 million years later: TA DA! The Cambrian Explosion (of life) occurred because a key nutrient was weathered from Earth’s rocks by glaciers and their melt waters and sent to the oceans. Noah Planavsky and his colleagues report, “Our work provides a mechanistic link between extensive Neoproterozic glaciations and early animal evolution.”
What would Pangloss say? “The planet was covered by ice for millions of years so that life could eventually rise. See! There is a purpose for everything. Everything is for the best, and everything has a reason for being and happening: Some greater good in a world that is ultimately 'perfect,' the 'best of all possible worlds.' A world too cold to live on became the comfortable world of today.”
Hard to argue that the rise of life was a negative thing: If it were, we wouldn’t be here to discuss it, would we? After
750 million years that ice world led to you. Is this not the kind of thinking that also gets us into specific trouble? Is this not where abstraction runs into the wall of reality?
Thinking that any event serves a larger purpose is not unusual. Our justice system is based on that principle. Incarcerate an individual to protect the society. Our military and clandestine operations also stem from such thinking. Probably, but I have no way of demonstrating this, most people would accept the principle that an underlying general “good” can be served by a specific “bad”: Dropping Little Boy did, in killing tens of thousands, hasten the end of World War II, a war that killed tens of millions. What were tens of thousands of lives by comparison?
So, we waver between two kinds of thought. When it is convenient for us to do so, we think an injurious action is only a temporary event that can support a greater benefit. One suffers. Many profit. You can search your own memories for examples. They abound, and in some of those examples, you’ll find yourself justifying something specific on the grounds it supports something general. The other kind of thinking is that a specific bad is a phenomenon in itself. It serves no greater purpose, no far reaching goal or perfect world. The specific “bad” doesn’t infuse an ocean with an important nutrient, and, even if it does so, there’s no controlling the unseen outcome in a world of so many cross purposes. It’s hard to get a big picture when all we really have is the little one, the moment before us, and the action or behavior of the present.
Just thinking.
*University of California -- Riverside. "New evidence supports 'Snowball Earth' as trigger for early animal evolution." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 27 October 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101027133146.htm>. See the October 28, 2015 issue of Nature (Noah Planavsky, et. al.)
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