Most of human activity since the dawn of civilization has been concerned with developing methods of coercing masses of other human beings to act against their will. Instrumental in this endeavor has been the hijacking of religion to serve the economic and political elite. Armed with an effective psychological toolkit, the powerful have preserved and expanded their power over the history of civilization; they create the definitions of morality for the rest of us. The establishment frames everything in terms of a universal war between Good and Evil.
But the real struggle is not Good vs Evil; it is nothing so small and human. The cosmic battle is between entropy and evolution. All of our human struggles between extremes are but faint echoes of this universal war.
Entropy governs the behavior of objects in spacetime. Clouds of interstellar dust and gas, roiling chaotically, take shape as stars and planetary systems as they shed randomness and energy. The end result is a balanced system of orbiting masses, each one subject to the inexorable law of entropy, cooling, hardening, increasingly uniform over the aeons. Left to themselves, they will continue to lose energy and will become inert until swallowed up by their star at the end of its life cycle. All this is in perfect obedience to entropy. Even though much of the matter from a dead star system is eventually recycled by new stars, much of this matter has been converted into energy and lost into the cold void of expanding space.
From time to time, there is a disturbance on one of these worlds. Geology results in chemistry, and chemistry produces a self-replicating molecule. Several billion years later, here we sit, arguing ideas of morality through the ether and over thousands of miles, instantaneously, by harnessing phenomena arising from our deliberate rearranging of Nature’s materials.
The universal law of entropy still holds, but not in every place at all times. A new force has arisen to challenge it: life. Life evolves, spawning a multitude of forms from a simple original template. One of these forms invented language, mastered fire, and proceeded to accelerate its own evolution. Within a tiny fraction of a geological age, this single species evolved to the point at which it will soon either destroy itself or grow beyond its home planet, spreading evolution across the solar system.
Applying human notions of good and evil to star systems and galaxies would be petty and ridiculous. But it could not be clearer which of the two opposed forces – entropy or evolution – is on the side of life.
We humans are basically orderly types. A few individuals (we all know one) seem to prefer the extremes, preferring either to establish an inflexible routine for themselves, keeping a time and place for everything and every thing in its designated time and place; or on the other hand, to leap gleefully headlong into the whirlwind, eyes wide in wonder as they tumble through the flying wrack. Most of us avoid excess to either side, being comfortable with chaos and order in moderation and presuming a certain balance – in itself, this is a tipoff that we lean in general towards the side of order.
Which is what we should expect. We are, after all, children of Earth; life at its most basic level is order emerging from chaos. Ordered lung tissue is healthy; if chaos emerges, we call it cancer.
The same is true of all life, and of societies as well: even lone hunter animals create order by marking territory. Complexity requires order for survival; but the balance must hold. We have words for too much order in society: oppression, totalitarianism, tyranny.
An excess of order is an unconscious (or worse, conscious) defensive reaction to the knowledge that even our own selves are subject to forces beyond our scope. Eventually, our nicely ordered bodies die and return to a chaotic state, thence to be recycled by our Mother Earth into a different ordered pattern.
Human political thought has always organized itself along an axis of response to social evolution, from conservative to liberal. In a healthy and natural context, conservatism and liberalism will function in balance. Conservatives, like the human immune system, sound the alarm when a part of society changes more quickly than usual, mutating into something unrecognizable and potentially threatening. Progressives, like the human genetic code, seek to combine diverse elements in new and potentially beneficial ways.
Human society in the year 2021 does not find itself in a healthy and natural state. Recent decades have seen significant progress in terms of general awareness of how human activity impacts the living planet and has jeopardized its systems and their resident species – including ourselves. But selfishness, greed, and reckless ignorance in the hands of those who hold massive wealth and power still pose an existential threat. The balancing point between conservatism and progressivism has been shifted rightward to the point that most of us are not enjoying the fruits of our labor, but only just hanging on.
If conservatism is our immune system, it no longer responds to the real and present dangers we face: the devastation of our ecosystem and emerging technologies with the power to eradicate humanity. The immune system has targeted the very body it is designed to protect – the body without which it has neither purpose nor even existence. Weaponized by the holders of power, conservatism has become dysfunctional, targeting evolution itself as a threat in a futile attempt to preserve a status quo favorable to the few at the expense of the rest. But evolution is synonymous with life. To deny evolution is to deny life’s natural law, and to join the side of entropy.
For human political thought and action to find a healthy balance, conservatism must be redefined. A sustainable and livable society does not have the option of stasis; refusing to change is an evolutionary dead end. Our survival as a species and as a planet depends on our ability to limit and control the powers we possess in ways that favor the greater community. Healing begins with addressing the toxic and unsustainable imbalance of power that sacrifices the need of the many for the greed of the few. To win the cosmic battle on our smaller, human scale, we must continue to evolve with intentional consciousness, putting aside blind ambition for the opportunity to resist entropy together for as long as we are able.
In time, even Earth herself will succumb to the great darkness of chaos – the Great Mother from whom all things came, and to whom all things return. Until then, let us recognize that a healthy balance exists – at least in theory – between order and chaos. If we are to thrive, we must all prosper together. The point of balance must be a place where everyone can live in dignity, with the opportunity for self-realization.