IS REALITY “GOOD” OR “BAD”?

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D. 8-25

In an essay appearing online in Aeon.com (the week of 8-17-25). Dr. Drew Dalton describes human reality as seen through the lens of thermodynamics.  Since there is a strong scientific consensus that the universe is “running down”—i.e., that given the inevitable movements in time of all entities (including ourselves) from greater organization to lower levels of organization (we die; our Sun die; the icecap melts), it would be more accurate for us to see reality in the light of this inevitable and unending deterioration rather than viewing life and our human circumstances as being ever-expanding (onward and upward!).  He suggests, then, that “reality” is “bad” rather than “good.”  He implies (but does not state) that “bad” for him means “acting against the human tendency to expand human capacities and power” and “good” would be the opposite.  We human beings are certainly amazing creatures and in disasters can rally around even strangers, but we are not perfect, and we often treat each other quite badly.

While this is certainly one way to look at the matter, it is a totally human-centric view (as was the notion that the Sun revolved around the Earth).  From the point of view of anything else (the Earth, the Universe, the various other forms of life on the Earth), it is not necessarily a “good thing” that human beings exist, interfering with what would otherwise be the natural order of things by trying to make things good for human beings even if that is bad for anyone/anything else. Even God, who many traditions currently view as supportive of human beings, has according to Jewish tradition several times taken or threatened action to wipe out human beings due to their greed and general licentiousness.  Some philosophers (and others) are now taking an anti-natalist position, claiming that rationally the rest of the Creation would be better off without us.

Despite the fact that human beings have made great strides in protecting ourselves and furthering the cause of our species, many things act against human ascendancy, including animals that are more powerful than we are, viruses that could evolve to wipe us out, our daily inability to do without food, and the fact that we are using up the world’s resources at an increasing rate with no real hope of having any other source.  (Can anyone seriously think that we can supply our mineral needs from the Moon or Mars?  How much does one rocket and launch cost, compared with the amount of material that it could bring back to Earth after a several year voyage?)

As with most bipolar choices (“good” vs. “bad”), the best position is probably something else, perhaps that reality is simply what it is and is neither “good” nor “bad.”  Some aspects of reality are helpful to human beings, and some things hinder human beings.  Reality is not going to change just because of our blind faith that “things will work out; they always have.”  We have succeeded as a species to the extent that we have made what most of us would agree are good lives for a majority of human beings currently on the Earth, but that is not yet universal.  We will continue to be attacked by new viruses (and bears, if they see us as threatening), and we will continue to invent new ways to extract resources from the Earth and use them to make the lives of some of us better.

An aspect of being human that most people don’t wish to acknowledge is that human beings are by definition “takers.”  We must take in order to survive, both individually and as a species.  This is never going to change.  So, if human life is to be seen as morally good, we should probably take less for granted and be more grateful for what we have and the opportunities that we have.  This might include a greater appreciation for the other forms of life here with us, who are also takers and in their own ways amazing.  It would also require us to see realistically the future of our situation.  If we continue to reproduce, our species will eventually use up all the resources on and in the Earth that we need to have our current quality of life, and we will regress back to much simpler and more primitive ways of life. 

One thing we could do now regarding our accelerating use of the Earth’s resources is to agree on limiting our current resource use, so as to at least push back that inevitable use-everything-up date, but this would call for a degree of individual self-denial (for the sake of the species) that we have not yet seen from ourselves, since the dominant mode of operation for human beings is to get all we can now (“a bird in the hand is….”).  The overall attitude of human beings about most things is to get what we can now and worry about threats when they actually intrude on our daily lives (including climate change).  This attitude is reinforced by the fact that these changes, like using up all the resources, will take a long time, and people alive now will not face the worst of the eventual outcomes.  This attitude has apparently been advantageous for reproduction evolutionarily, but it could bite us in the you-know-what very substantially in the future!  (Actually we don’t know enough to be completely sure which approach to climate change would result in the greatest net benefit to human beings; hence at the moment we can claim whichever one we “believe in.”)  Nothing is keeping us from taking a longer-term view of things except who we are!  Are you willing to acknowledge these realities of our human nature?

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