Irrelevance

How does one deal with the fact of one’s irrelevance? Because with a broad enough view (and we needn’t get too broad here), face facts, we’re all deeply, irredeemably irrelevant. The greatest of the great men, those who have conspicuously altered the very currents of human history (think Alexander, Caesar, Steven Jobs) , have no more importance in historic, geologic, astronomical terms, than you or me. The human race is a flukish arriviste in the earth’s understanding, grossly fumbling its instant of fame. Human exceptionalism—What makes us different? Why are we better than the animals?—is a tragic canard. We’re dumb as dinosaurs and probably won’t be around nearly as long. The crocodile (200 million years old) and the shark (400 million years) rightly flaunt toothy grins; they know longevity. But even their longevity is a trifling, hapless, self-puffed sort; in earth-time they’re hardly more relevant than us (“You may have survived several major extinction events,” I shout at Jaws, “but we—haha!—we are changing the entire climate of this planet!”).

The bald fact of our irrelevance is sobering, or it should be. How do we reconcile the knowledge of our irrelevance with the fact that we are, that we do exist? For why exist at all, if we have no purpose, no greater relevance? Many reconcile these feelings by means of religion, no doubt. God gives life meaning, or the afterlife meaning, or perhaps life has meaning because of the existence of the afterlife. God does work, heavy lifting, to allay all manner of fears, of which existential irrelevance and meaninglessness must be close to the top. But for those who don’t believe—whether in God or some other divine order—irrelevance is a terrifying realization. What of the secularist, bedfellow of science, rationality, logic, empiricism, who proceeds to the logical terminus of the five centuries-old arc of scientific inquiry? He is confronted with: 1. No God; 2. A meager lifespan on a planet of 4.5 billion years; and 3. That planet, a stripling itself, sailing through a universe incomprehensibly large and around 14 billion years old. Gulp. You, Mr. Secularist, are an instantaneous mote, a speck, a jot on the face of a single grain of sand in the sprawling Sahara of the comprehensible universe. That is a cold and endless desert.

And for those staring out into the desert, those willing to contemplate its vastness, its aridity, its terrific impassivity, from whence comes succor? What comforts? What countervailing knowledge gives shape and meaning to the hours? Because, it seems, if one is perfectly honest with oneself, nothing shy of messianic delusion can offer the sparest hint that a single life, a billion lives, a billion lives for a billion years can be of consequence in this universe. Can it? Face facts, I wrote. Face them, truly face them, and despair, it seems, is all that is left to us. The final legacy of science, knowledge, and curiosity, then, is despair. In this world, ignorance must be an essential shield to deflect the eviscerating thrust of reality; thus, the first question, the most fundamental question facing the individual, is not whether to live or to die (to be or not to be?), but whether to choose ignorance of the bedrock truth of one’s existence (you are ineluctably irrelevant) over the inevitable despair deriving from the acceptance of that truth. Is it really so bleak as all of that?