Zooming Out
It’s a small world after all
— Disney-funded post-Cuban Missile Crisis propaganda song
My post on The Horrors mentioned that a past chapter of my life was defined by a concept I think of as Smallness. I wish I’d had the time to write about Smallness during that period, when the ideas were fresh and sharp, but we will have to settle for my oneiromantic attempt at reconstruction. (See my forthcoming post on problems with college for more.)
The post on The Horrors also included some information about William Shatner, who I have just learned played Captain Kirk on Star Trek. I wrote,
William Shatner seemed to have a similar revelation [that death is the default condition of Earth] during a “suborbital space tourism flight.” He reported that “Everything I had expected to see was wrong.” Instead of a beautiful, flourishing planet, “I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing.” He concludes, “All I saw was death.”
One reason his reaction is so striking is that it contrasts with the expected reaction for an astronaut upon beholding Earth. According to Wikipedia,
The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as "a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus". The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. The effect can cause changes in the observer’s self concept and value system, and can be transformative.
How do we reconcile the divergent reactions of Shatner and his forenauts? While we might not get to travel to space, ourselves, we have other vehicles for appreciating our size on a cosmic scale. When we are inevitably confronted with the fact that ours is a small world, we can respond with “an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole,” or we can take after Shatner.
Politics of Violence
I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel
About all the blood that’s been spilled
— Tom Waits, Day After Tomorrow
To introduce Smallness, it will help to situate the concept in its life chapter. COVID forced the denaturalization of institutions and norms that many had assumed immutable. When the veil slipped, people saw that judges are other people in robes, that marble capitols are glorified tents, that we work in offices due to historical inertia, that we could replace rotten police departments with social workers. Leftists have long proclaimed the empire’s nudity, that even the oldest policies were crafted by people—fallible, biased, people—and could be overturned by the same. But more than any leftist thinker in recent memory, it was COVID that disabused the public of its false consciousness. @ceeeee_eeeee on Twitter attests, “this concept zapped into my brain today and i have to share it”
Not only leftists, but absurdists have long maintained that many things we “thought were real actually aren’t and society is all made up.” For Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, this reality is so elusive, that our condition is only laid bare when he is ordered to perform a reconnaissance flight that will almost surely end in his demise. With thousands of feet of perspective, he observes,
It is too evident that we are playing a game that we call war. We are playing Cops and Robbers. We are abiding by the rules of conduct prescribed by the history books and the rules of tactics prescribed by the war manuals.
We know that nothing can do any good, yet we blow up bridges nevertheless, in order to play the game. It is in order to play the game that our men die.
The words I used to describe my civilization never went to the heart of the matter . . . I used words like mankind, but without defining them. The idea of a community of men seemed to me natural and self-evident. But what is there natural and self-evident about it? The moral climate I had in mind is not natural—it is the product of a particular architecture.
Much of Flight to Arras illustrates how Saint-Exupéry resolves this crisis of meaning by reformulating his connection to civilization on more authentic grounds that do not take for granted its “rules of conduct.” COVID did for many people what World War II did for Saint-Exupéry.
In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig voices his own realization
That our civilization is just an agreement, one that could be revoked at any time. That beneath our rules and quarrels, we’re stuck together on a wide-open planet where anything can happen, which leaves us no choice but to survive, to build a shelter, and find each other in the storm. Knowing that every passing day is very nearly miraculous, a cascading series of accidents that just happens to fall our way.
Eventually, the storm will pass, the skies will clear, and we’ll pick up our lives just where we left them, no more urgently than before. We’ll soak in the sunshine as if none of it mattered, forgetting the sense of fellowship we once found in the shelter.
Did we really “find each other” and foster a “sense of fellowship” during the storm of COVID, though? Hold that thought.
So in the Fall of 2021, I, like many others, had absurdism on the mind. That season, I took a course in “Politics of Violence in 20th Century Europe.” And what a course it was. Every lecture brought forth unheard-of famines, genocides, and wars. I read the stories of countless people whose lives held the darkest depths of atrocity and the highest testaments to the human spirit. In One Woman in the War, Alaine Polcz recounts the evils she experienced as a prisoner of Russians during World War II. It’s the kind of story that makes your bones fall out. But even the darkness of the cellar where she starved could not extinguish the light of human kindness.
I don’t know how it happened, but to me it was like a miracle, like an embodiment of goodness, as if the firmament had opened up. She sent her child over to me with a small, fresh, real, soft, fragrant piece of her bread. I ate it very slowly, so that I could savor it at leisure. The pleasure of the bread, which we had been without for weeks by then, the pleasure of eating, the pleasure of goodness—this is what that piece of bread meant to me.
If this happened to me, it would be the great event of my life, but on they went, tale after tale of horror and glory. It was dizzying; it was impossible to make sense of. We only managed to chart these precarious waters by the capable helmsmanship of our professor, who would name The Great Weight of Things, The Importance of Bearing Witness, and The Ways The World Resists Comprehension.
The opening reading defined a theme of the course: history’s short-term memory for tragedy. In “Reality Demands,” Polish poet Wisława Szymborska writes,
Reality demands
that we also mention this:
Life goes on.
It continues at Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.
There's a gas station
on a little square in Jericho,
and wet paint
on park benches in Bila Hora.
Letters fly back and forth
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a moving van passes
beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea,
and the blooming orchards near Verdun
cannot escape
the approaching atmospheric front.
There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Music pours
from the yachts moored at Actium
and couples dance on the sunlit decks.
So much is always going on,
that it must be going on all over.
Where not a stone still stands,
you see the Ice Cream Man
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been
Hiroshima is again,
producing many products
for everyday use.
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.
The grass is green
on Maciejowice's fields,
and it is studded with dew,
as is normal grass.
Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch forests and the cedar forests,
the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps
and the canyons of black defeat,
where now, when the need strikes, you don't cower
under a bush but squat behind it.
What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only that blood flows, drying quickly,
and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.
On tragic mountain passes
the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can't help
laughing at that.
What transpired at Bila Hora? Maciejowice? History began to feel very big, populated by a hundred billion people whose experiences eclipsed my own. Early humans who had marveled at the stars and preserved their imaginations in pigment. Eight billion humans alive right now—a larger population than any other mammal species by a mile. Walking around the forgotten battlefields of my own neighborhood, I would reflect on the stone wall that had immured the local insane asylum for over one hundred years but now encircled the local gym. I would inspect the bricks laid by enslaved people and the nearby statue to their memory. I would turn a wary eye to the colonial houses constructed on infilled burial grounds. I felt humbled by the vastness of history. Like any good absurdist, I felt small.
But Mighty
Is this how it is?
Is this how it’s always been?
To exist in the face of suffering and death
And somehow still keep singing
— Florence & The Machine, Free
When people reckon with their size on a cosmic and historical scale, they tend to despair. They feel that they have lost something, often something of a religious character—think of the Church’s distress at heliocentrism and evolution—but even atheists grieve a perceived loss. The semi-sacred quantity of which vastness has robbed them occasionally receives names like “Meaning” and “Significance.” They despair like the reader of Ozymandias’ prophecy, which, like any good prophecy, has come true in an unexpected fashion.
Why do they despair when confronted with spacial and temporal scale? The mourners say it is because they had once indulged in the delusion that they mattered, but the universe has forced them to confront their Insignificance. The nihilism then breeds quietism; since nothing they do matters, they might as well do nothing.1
I think an insidious sleight of hand lurks in this procession from feeling small to feeling despair, and “Insignificance” supplies the misdirection. In fact, this is a huge inferential leap; despair does not follow inexorably from our tiny relative size. Smallness affords us an alternative lens to consider our position, a lens which may reveal more hopeful and agentic conclusions than those presupposed by Insignificance.
A Horse of a Different Color
I understood my place then,
And my purpose in relation
To the young and ancient night
— Anaïs Mitchell, Bright Star
First of all, why is significance relative? Why does the size of the reference class make any difference to how you feel about your life projects? Maybe grappling with your size has made you realize that it will be harder to influence the light cone than you had thought, or whatever, but even people who had not been underestimating the difficulty of their goals seem to succumb to Insignificance. I don’t understand this reflex. Just think on the margin. Like Will MacAskill says, “It’s not the size of the bucket that matters, but the size of the drop.”
Even if there is a legitimate reason to care about relative size, the direction of the effect on your self-efficacy does not need to be negative! Unlike Insignificance, Smallness can invite positive attitudes, like love, inspiration, divinity, wonder, bravery, and truth.
Love: Often, when nature imposes its enormity upon you, the default response is not to despair but to revel in its majesty. When you see a breaching whale or you behold the northern lights, you don’t whine about meaninglessness. So I find it peculiar that Insignificance has entrenched itself as the default response when confronting many types of scale.
How might we respond instead? When you feel overwhelmed and scared, the natural outlet for expressing these feelings is to reach out and connect with your fellow sufferers—other humans, who are the only ones in your immediately reachable universe who share your Smallness. For the same reason, you hold your siblings at your parent’s funeral: they’re the only people in the world who know what it was like to be raised by that parent and how it feels to lose them. Recall John Koenig remarking that we “find each other in the storm” when civilization feels fragile. In the context of Smallness, John extends this movement:
There’s a certain kinship there, shared by all things. The stars and the tombstones, the family dog and the honeybees. A comfort to think that we are all united in our impermanence. . .
The meaning of things isn’t an emergent property of how long they last. We are the ones who define them for ourselves, if only for our own satisfaction. It is an honor reserved for mortals; we just have to have the courage to do it.
John continues to denaturalize our social world:
Maybe it’s healthy to soak in that feeling, to lean out over the edge and stare into the abyss, and remind ourselves of the weight of everything we don’t know. If only to get us to hold on tighter to the structures we do have—the handrail on the basement stairs, the fence around the playground, the rules and norms of a civil society. If we forgo the comfort of absolute certainty, we might be better adults for each other, asking more questions, wondering what we might be missing.
Maybe then we’d feel a little more at home in this mostly unknowable universe, making our peace with the chaos of it, even finding comfort in the responsibility it gives us. What might be out there? Nobody knows!
Aside from the bootlickery in his desperation for the “rules and norms of a civil society,” which I thought he would have shaken, he gets at the idea nicely. Most importantly, we hold on tighter to each other.
@_weloveyou__ on TikTok demonstrate the love-response to Smallness in a skit that opens with two boys coming across an ancient tree:
“Oh man that’s big.”
“I know.” . . .
“You know, it’s almost 2000 years old.”
“Wow, that’s bonkers.”
“Yeah man, it makes you think. It’s been around since, like, Caesar times. . . for like every single historical event, this exact tree has been growing right here. It kind of makes you feel—”
“Small.”
*Wide shot of boys staring up at tree*
“Yeah.”
*In unison*
“Anyway, I’ve gotta go check out this thing over there…”
“Anyway, I’m gonna go look at the fence…”
*Boys embrace the huge trunk, eyes closed and smiling*
Inspiration: Your predecessors have accomplished some amazing feats, and their triumphs are now your inheritance. You are a small part of that larger whole. When you look upon the highways we have paved to accommodate Ford’s invention and the wires we have laid to bring you Edison’s, it would be reasonable to feel pride for your people. This awareness will suffuse your labors with dignity if you then endeavor to advance humanity’s stake. In What We Owe the Future, Ol’ Willie MacAskill demythologizes:
But can one person make a difference? Yes. Mountains erode because of individual raindrops. Hurricanes are just the collective movement of many tiny atoms. Abolitionism, feminism, and environmentalism were all “merely” the aggregate of individual actions. The same will be true for longtermism.
We’ve met some people who made a difference in this book: abolitionists, feminists, and environmentalists; writers, politicians, and scientists. Looking back on them as figures from “history,” they can seem different from you and me. But they weren’t different: they were everyday people, with their own problems and limitations, who nevertheless decided to try to shape the history they were a part of, and who sometimes succeeded. You can do this, too.
Again, this is a common leftist talking point: elevating role models into gods makes it hopeless to follow their examples. This post’s contribution is that, phenomenologically, defeatism at the hands of your heroes can feel like Insignificance, and Smallness circumvents the hero-worship pitfall. Instead, you can take inspiration from the collective accomplishments of your predecessors.
Divinity: Environmental historian William Cronon points out that the wilderness has historically been a site of Smallness; for this reason, the wilderness has also been a site of revelation.
Although God might, of course, choose to show Himself anywhere, He would most often be found in those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality . . . Less sublime landscapes simply did not appear worthy of such protection; not until the 1940s, for instance, would the first swamp be honored, in Everglades National Park, and to this day there is no national park in the grasslands.
Wonder: The Smallness that wilderness imposes also inspires wonder toward and respect for the other. Cronon continues,
When we visit a wilderness area, we find ourselves surrounded by plants and animals and physical landscapes whose otherness compels our attention. In forcing us to acknowledge that they are not of our making, that they have little or no need of our continued existence, they recall for us a creation far greater than our own. In the wilderness, we need no reminder that a tree has its own reasons for being, quite apart from us. The same is less true in the gardens we plant and tend ourselves: there it is far easier to forget the otherness of the tree. . . the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder. The striking power of the wild is that wonder in the face of it requires no act of will, but forces itself upon us—as an expression of the nonhuman world experienced through the lens of our cultural history—as proof that ours is not the only presence in the universe.
The cultural history in question involves the artificial distinction between the human and natural worlds, the rupture of which is experienced as wonder. When other false boundaries collapse, such as those between ‘judge’ and ‘citizen,’ ‘hero’ and ‘human,’ ‘peace’ and ‘war,’ we can learn to respond in pro-social ways. When the boundary collapses between past and present, Earth and universe, we can choose to experience Smallness instead of Insignificance.
Bravery: When encountering the size of history, some people are crippled by the horror of mortality. They shrink from the world to shelter their feeble flame; if nothing matters, you are licensed to indulge in your selfishness and prioritize your own life over all else. Granted, this is not the only possible reaction to Insignificance; perhaps some people buy such a strong version of this perspective that even their death appears Insignificant, unlocking a new fearlessness. But it is a Pyrrhic victory, more akin to recklessness, because the courage comes at the cost of all the worthy ends toward which it might have been wielded.
Smallness points out that each of the hundred billion humans who came before us faced that final frontier. They were often vulnerable people, the kind of people you feel called upon to protect, to bleed for. Many of them were children. Some of them were feeble as your elderly neighbor. All of them met with death. If even the weakest among them could do it, surely you can, too. In the context of this long procession, you can see your own death as the mundane event it will be. Here is a framing that bends death to your will, allowing you to take on risk in service of the higher goals that you did not have to sacrifice along the way. It is an authentic way to defy death, as opposed to the usual artifices like ignoring it or pretending nothing matters.
As Howard Thurman put it, upon gaining personal dignity in the face of violence, “The individual now feels that he counts, that he belongs. He senses the confirmation of his roots, and even death becomes a little thing.”
Truth: If I am Small, I desire to believe that I am Small. Acknowledging my Smallness does not make me any Smaller. If you want to effectively intervene on the world, you better accurately understand your place in it.2
Dispositional Attunement
Toni says it's important to bear some witness when you can,
And that's not hard to do in the city that I live in
— AJJ, People II 2: Still Peoplin’
A natural objection to Smallness (and possibly to Insignificance, too!) is “Sure, yes, if you really wanted to Live In Truth, you would internalize your relative size, but that is an impossible and unreasonable task.”
Consider a related proposal: should we also calibrate our judgements about our personal pleasure and pain against the global distribution of suffering?3 In Detach the Grim-O-Meter, Nate Soares says no:
I've met many who are under the impression that when you realize the world is in deep trouble, you're obligated to respond by feeling more and more grim. . . Many people seem to have this internal grim-o-meter which measures how grim the state of the world is, and they dutifully try to keep this calibrated. . . When they hear that there was an earthquake in Napal, they get a little more grim, and they maybe even feel guilty if they can't feel appropriately grim for appropriately long. . . The world is dark and gritty, but that doesn't mean that you need to be dark and gritty to match.
Nate goes on to argue this internal instrument takes only coarse measurements, and if we yoke it to the stake of the world, it can no longer guide our actions. I too reject the strawman Nate has conjured that the world must be the sole determinant of our grimness level. Indeed, you cannot afford to sacrifice all your grimness all the time to keep sight of the world’s suffering. Likewise, trying to visualize every action you take in its cosmic-historical context would be a recipe for constant vertigo.
But Nate is too quick to embrace total pragmatism. I think you do have an obligation to sensitize yourself to the world, and there is something virtuous in letting yourself be moved by sorrows and joys that are not strictly your own.4 While a war rages on another continent, you are supposed to feel something. And sometimes it is not enough to relegate these thoughts to your System 2: sometimes your System 1 is the appropriate tool to internalize a richer understanding. Nate makes the weak claim that it would be foolish to dispatch your faculties in constant attendance to the experiences of others, but who would disagree? Instead, you can periodically zoom out, checking your actions against your sober knowledge of your relative position, occasionally consulting emotions like “grimness,” as well as fear, relief, etc.5
Conclusion
Reach out, reach out
To all the ones who came before you . . .
I would rather be a flower than the ocean
— Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine
Your thoughts do not need to proceed inexorably from recognizing your relative position, to lamenting your Insignificance, to wallowing in quietism. There are alternatives available to you, one of which I have sketched under the name Smallness.
Insignificance goads you into gnashing your teeth at the cruel indifference of the universe and doing nothing about it; Smallness invites you to bear witness to the unknown soldiers, whom history has forgotten, and act with greater knowledge.
Of course, it is possible to fail by fetishizing Smallness. Insisting on it everywhere or demanding something specific of it strips Smallness of the truth-character that is the source of its revelatory potential.
Acknowledgements
To my mother, Robin Feuer Miller, who first taught me to pay attention to The Smalls and whose love was the tether through the darkest days.
— Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist
Thank you to Holly for the perspective, to Claire for originally recommending the Cronon reading, and to Ronny for putting the overview effect on my Twitter feed at the right time.
Appendix
Absurdism
“Everybody who read the Jungle Book will know that Riki Tiki Tavi's a mongoose who kills snakes. When I was a young man I was led to believe there were organizations to kill my snakes for me; i.e., the church; i.e., the government; i.e., school. But when I got a little older, I learned I had to kill them myself.” — Donovan, Riki Riki Tavi
“But the scariest realization is that there is no crack team coming to handle this. As a kid you have this glorified view of the world, that when things get real there are the heroic scientists, the uber-competent military men, the calm leaders who are on it, who will save the day. It is not so. The world is incredibly small; when the facade comes off, it’s usually just a few folks behind the scenes who are the live players, who are desperately trying to keep things from falling apart.” — Leopold Aschenbrenner
Insignificance
“I’m just a raindrop in a river, just a little itty-bitty grain of sand.” — Trampled by Turtles, Wait So Long
“It’s a tough thing to realize you’re only a blip.” — Days N’ Daze, My Darling Dopamine
“Maybe tomorrow, the pills I couldn't swallow, they'll seem small, small, small, small, small. Sometimes I feel like a raindrop in the ocean. Fell from the sky, I
melted into nothing.” — Debbii Dawson, Eulogy for NobodyI might be a speck in an indifferent universe, or I might be the physical appendage of a larger consciousness, but today I am flesh and blood, and I make pizza, baby.” — @gaptooth._ on TikTok
“. . . the universe is so big, nothing in it matters.” — Summer, Rick and Morty S2E7
“From the perspective of the stars or infinity . . . one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck on a speck, soon gone.” — Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist
“The reasoning goes: ‘IF the universe is so large, how can I matter? If the world is in such deep trouble, how can I make a difference? If all this were true, nothing would matter.’” — Nate Soares, Dark, Not Colorless
Bearing Witness
Eric Bogle, No Man’s Land
Accepting Death → Pro-Social
“People extoll their contempt for death. But I would not give a fig for anybody’s contempt for death. If its roots are not sunk deep in an acceptance of responsibility, this contempt for death is the sign either of an impoverished soul or of youthful extravagance.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
“The flames of the house, of the diving plane, strip away the flesh; but they strip away the worship of the flesh too. Man ceases to be concerned with himself: he recognizes of a sudden what he forms part of. If he should die, he would not be cutting himself off from his kind, but making himself one with them. He would not be losing himself, but finding himself.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras
You might protest that you prefer mopey nihilists to arrogant narcissists. I am receptive, but I find that arrogant people compartmentalize well enough to internalize Insignificance while keeping intact their place at the center of the universe (see Bravery below). There is more to say about techniques for destroying the sense that you are special or exceptional, and Smallness can certainly play a role, but that will have to wait for another day.
Some evidence suggests that delusionally optimistic people attain superior life outcomes than depressed realists. I would reply that population-averages are uninteresting here, and this framing supposes a false dichotomy. Smallness opens a third way: realistic and joyful.
I think the concept under consideration here is related to “Attunement.” Kierkegaard opens Fear and Trembling with an “Exordium” (Attunement), depicting a man who struggles to understand the story of Abraham and Isaac. Zadie Smith writes,
When I read the “Exordium,” I feel that Kierkegaard is trying to get me into a state of readiness for a consideration of the actual Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, which is essentially inexplicable. The “Exordium” is a rehearsal: it lays out a series of rational explanations the better to demonstrate their poverty as explanations. For nothing can prepare us for Abraham and no one can understand him—at least, not rationally. Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity. To get us to that point, Kierkegaard hopes to “attune” us, systematically discarding all the usual defenses we put up in the face of the absurd.
Given our present interest in Smallness, we should not be surprised to learn that Zadie appealed to Kierkegaard’s story to make sense of her visit to Tintern Abbey in Wales, which has stood in ruins since the 16th century. Katja Grace reacts to Zadie’s essay,
What I wanted it to say was, open yourself in some deep way, turn yourself around, open eyes that you didn’t know you had, and everything might touch you. Touch you like you are its edges and its texture and you know everything, even if you can’t put it into words—not just some heightened tendency to mindless tears, or another ‘positive mental state’ for the utility logs. Don’t ask for more reasons on your blind and empty abstracta table, be your soul instead, and press yourself against the world, into the world. Hear every cell itself, not the trace it leaves in your proposition set. ‘Attunement.’
And, of course, Joe Carlsmith has to get in on the action:
What is attunement? I'm thinking of it, roughly, as a kind of meaning-laden receptivity to the world. Something self-related goes quieter, and recedes into the background; something beyond-self comes to the fore. There is a kind of turning outwards, a kind of openness; and also, a kind of presence, a being in the world. And that world, or some part of it, comes forward as it always has been—except, often, strangely new, and shining with meaning.
Smith's essay emphasizes the yin at stake in the attunement—the listening, the letting-in—and also, the sense of recognizing something intensely (intolerably?) important, to which it is possible to be blind, or inadequately sensitive.
The main differences, as I understand them, between Attunement and the receptivity I am pointing to, is that Attunement emphasizes those Ways The World Resists Comprehension, and it is more concerned with natural beauty than pan-historical suffering.
The obligation to bear witness is easily couched in deontological or virtue ethical terms, but I want to be clear that my argument is strictly consequentialist. You need to understand the world to model how your actions might affect it, so knowledge is instrumentally useful, and responding emotionally to the suffering in the world is one possible component of a strategy for understanding it.
I imagine that nightly prayer affords some people this opportunity.