Crusade Against the Void

What is the purpose of a civilization?

When we talk about the histories of societies, we tend to talk about them in terms of time. They emerge, they grow, they peak, decline, and collapse. All societies, like all forms of life eventually die. What we judge them on is the same thing we judge the success of a life by – how long it sticks around.

But is longevity really the best criteria to judge societies? Is it even the best criteria to judge life? The alligator has remained the same, ever since the dinosaur age. It’s survived era after era, challenge after challenge. Is it therefore more successful than human beings? Is that all there is to being a successful life form, just sticking around?

This perspective comes from an overwhelming fear of death. Death is the Ultimate Enemy, and must be fought for as long as possible. The longer we hold it at bay, the longer we stay alive, the more successful we are – at least we believe.

But if this is it, if the purpose of life is just to delay the inevitable, it’s a sad purpose altogether. It’s like the puny guy going into fight after fight, knowing he’s going to lose, knowing he’s going to get knocked down, but telling himself, “Oh, this time I have to last just a little longer than I did last time.” Maybe that’s victory for me one day. Actually, it’s not. It’s still losing, just a little more slowly.

Death is a frightening thought, just like collapse is for society, but just for a moment, just for shits & giggles, let’s accept it as inevitable. It’s not the Enemy. It’s just the end of the game. In that case, what is the point of life? Why are we even here?

When I was studying physics as a kid, I learned about the First Law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is a fascinating branch of science that deals with energy. And what the First Law says is that, over time, any concentration of energy ultimately dissipates. Like an ice cube melting in a glass of water, bringing the rest of it to the same cool temperature, and then losing that coolness to the environment, eventually becoming the same temperature as everything around it, the Universe works the same.

What the First Law of Thermodynamics predicts is the entropy death of the Universe. This is a fancy scientist way of saying that, over many, many billions of years, all the stars will eventually go out, all matter will ultimately disappear, and the Universe will be a big, wide expanse of the same humdrum temperature. A perfectly even landscape where nothing exists. The final end.

Fortunately, this is not the Universe we live in yet. There are plenty of concentrations of energy (stars) and mass (planets) that dot the emptiness of open space. But if the natural impulse is the iron law of physics, if everything trends just being bland, why is it not?

There are only two known forces in the entire Universe that have fought the entropy death of the Universe. The first is the Big Bang. When it happened, when an immeasurably small concentration of all matter now exploded, it did not explode evenly in all directions. Either by the random chance of quantum probability forming energy into mass, or some inherent unevenness to the way the Big Bang happened, it seeded the Universe with an uneven distribution of matter. Over eons, the gravitational pull of this matter to each other brought them together, ultimately forming the first stars – which are giant concentrations of matter consuming itself and releasing energy into the rest of the Universe.

That initial seeding is a force against entropy’s pull that only happened once, at the very beginning of space and time. But there is another force that also fights the entropy death of the Universe, the only other force than the Big Bang to do so.

It is life.

Life, described objectively, is matter which consumes energy to produce ever more and more complex forms of matter. Like stars and planets, it creates complexity in a Universe designed or meant to obliterate it.

Complexity is the opposite of entropy death. Things are only complex in comparison to their environment, and the more complex they are, the more unusual they are compared to everything around them. While the rest of the Universe inevitably dissipates complexity, like waves on a beach melting away sand castles, life is the little boy scrambling to build ever more intricate castles, in defiance of the waves.

Life started with simplicity, as single-celled organisms, but unique in its ability to react to its environment – the first form of matter to do this. It could adapt itself to its energy sources, like sunlight, which it consumed to produce more of itself. The process of taking in simpler energy and simpler matter (food) to produce a more complex organization of matter (life), was, and still is, a miracle that constantly defies the laws of physics.

It didn’t stop there. Through an intricate process of reproduction, mutation, and evolution, once in a while, when it did this reproductive dance, life produced something more complex than itself. Single-celled organisms sequentially spawned multi-celled organisms, which spawned organisms with specialized organs, which spawned life with sensory abilities, which spawned life capable of surviving in other environments like land, which spawned life that exhibited higher and higher forms of complexity and intelligence, until it got to us – the most complex beings that we know of in the Universe.

And what we do is the same thing life has been doing for billions of years, but on an even grander scale. We build complexity. We do it not just through our biology, by consuming food and energy and converting that into action and children, but we also do it with our minds. We have an amazing ability to turn raw material into much more complex creations – to turn dirt and metal and water and air into chairs and tables and cars and computers, into cities towering over their landscape in a defiant show of complexity. A giant middle finger to the entropy death of the Universe.

That is what we have in common with the Big Bang, and our role in the whole giant Universe: not to fight our individual death, but to fight the collective death of everything, anything, that is a little different, a little more complex than the world around it.

If that is the point of our existence, then the longevity of any single instance of life doesn’t matter. What matters is its contribution to this, the Ultimate Crusade, the Why We Are Here, while it is alive. It’s not how long it lasts, but what it does while it is around.

The same reasoning that applies to life applies to societies as well. The success of a society should be measured not by its longevity, but by its contributions to the human mission toward complexity. Of course, just like with life, a society that’s around longer is going to have more of a chance at doing this, but the reason is not because of longevity itself. It’s because of what a society does that generates complexity. It’s the generation of new ideas, new ways of doing things to build things that are ever more complex, whether they be material, like cities, or immaterial, like organizational and political patterns.

Rome was a successful society, not because it lasted a thousand years before its collapse, but because in the time that it was around, it developed ever more complex, more effective ways of doing things. It laid the foundation down for modern civilization to grow from things like rule of law, republican decision-making, art and literature. It bequeathed the one gift every society is supposed to – the gift of ideas.

There are societies that have existed for longer than Rome ever did. The famous “undiscovered” civilizations of the Amazon or Andaman Islands, which have lived at Stone Age prehistoric levels in isolated physical environments for thousands of years. Are they more successful just because they survived? Or are they in some ways less successful because they have contributed little to the mission of complexity that we all share?

There is another word for complexity, at least in how we employ it. It’s not just technology – though technology, as the development of new methods for interacting with our environment to produce material goods, is probably the best example.

The word is creativity, and it encompasses in its many dimensions the purpose of the human species.

Technology is one form of creativity – the form our modern civilization is most enthralled by. This is creativity employed in the touch-and-feel world of material things. But there is another form of creativity, one employed in the world of immaterial ideas and abstractions. And this is Art.

Art encompasses much more than just paintings. Art is the evolution and advancement of all immaterial ideas. For example, how we should structure a society. This essay is an attempt at Art, at least to the degree it pushes new ideas, more than it is a form of Technology. Political ideas are Art. Religions are Art. And these ideas are not just sideshows to the real business of creating more complex material things. They allow us to even ask the why in the first place.

A successful society needs to leave behind a mark. That mark doesn’t just have to be things and structures. It can also be the more intangible legacy of ideas. Even if we don’t remember where they came from, the society that generated those ideas is still successful. It still pushed away the inevitable collective death of existence a little bit further, for a little bit longer.