For life is that rarest of all things, a refuge from the tractless immensity of the cold, dead spatter of inert objects across spaces and times.
Life begins as molecular chains of such size and complexity that they occur only by random accident under rare conditions, the so-called Goldilocks zone of habitable planets.
The Goldilocks zone is found only in solar systems, heated by a central star, the system’s sun.
To support life, a planet must orbit its sun in an elliptical orbit not so far removed from a perfect circle that temperatures vary too wildly to support life, which requires enough background condition consistency to evolve dependable processes to sustain itself.
All life is precarious, vulnerable, needy.
By contrast, inert objects — mere aggregates of simple objects not further divisible — are already decomposed (for they were never incorporated into an unstable compound with its own systemic character with heritable traits.
Such simple inert objects, moved only by universal external forces acting on their simple constituent particles, can endure forever, not being at risk of dissolving further.
And if entropy should ultimately reduce them to a mass of featureless uniformity, what do they care?
Life, by contrast, can only rest from its constant struggle to stave off death for intermittent periods of respite, most obviously, sleep, which feels alarmingly near the loss of all powers to defend oneself — a precursor of death, where there is no longer a self to defend.
From its first beginnings, life struggles to sustain its transient existence.
At first, this means no more than the self-replication of its exceedingly complex organic molecules, the iconic power of RNA and DNA, which evolve into the genetic languages by which life encodes its own blueprints into a lineage thereby created, allowing for further evolution of individuals and their types (i.e., species), and opening up an immense permutation space of possibilities.
At bottom, life is about reliable chemistry, the sort that converts into energy the fuel absorbed into the walled city that is life. This happens in cellular mitochondria, the tiny bio-power plants that produce the energy needed to sustain all the biological process of life (whose dysfunctions we experience as disease or organ failure).
Hence the Goldilocks zone, the range of temperatures within which organic biological processes can reliably occur, cross-referenced against the availability of the key elements of organic chemistry (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, so far as we are the model).
Too close to a sun, water vaporizes, making impossible many useful chemical reactions and compounds. Too far, water solidifies as ice and there is insufficient atomic motion for larger molecules to form at pace.
Life When It Thrives: Origins and Dreams
the sweet spot…
Thus, the Goldilocks zone.
The current list of planets that may support extraterrestrial life is simply that of observed planets (generally deduced from variations in the light reaching us from stars when their planets pass between their sun and our scopes), after removing those planets falling outside the Goldilocks zone, and those whose spectroscopic profiles suggest the absence of life-critical elements or the heavy presence of life-toxic ones.
“If you build it, they will come.”
So, create the enabling conditions of life, add water, stir, wait 800 million years, and voila! Life!
But that’s just life’s audition. It now must beat out its competition to win the role.
And the competition never ends.
Were a single form of life to beat out every last competitor, new competitors would arrive form its own progeny!
No escape! No exit! Endless competition, unceasing innovation, ultimate pre-programmed failure!
You are king of the mountain for as long as you hold your ground; victory is only provisional.
Of course life dreams of more, of ultimate victory, of an end to the ceaseless effort to sustain its little spark in the dark, cold expanse!
And every provisional champion feels threatened by the gaping abyss of eternal competition…
…and dreams the dream of a durable, eternal hierarchy grounded in the moment of its own victory.
Two dream-ideas inevitably emerge from this: the Golden Age, and the God of my forefathers.
Both offer a bulwark against the rolling seas of ceaseless change.
Both implicitly place one’s own lineage and heritage above every other.
both are founded on a deeply-held, visceral belief, closely tied to a deeply-felt visceral fear — the fear of the end of the run of good fortune from which one, as the reigning champion, has benefited.
And, to the extent that this is a zero-sum game, to one’s own advantage and to the disadvantage of all others.
See the case clearly, and one sees that it cannot last.
We’re in with a chance!
Life When It Thrives: Biological Replication
To begin again, life, is a complex chain — then network, then system — of molecules, compound and complex in nature, and organized into levels upon levels (genetically-coded molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, functional systems, organisms, colonies, communities).
It thus occurs only rarely, being dependent on the random, unguided, purposeless aggregation of multitudes of simple inert objects.
Without the power of self-replication, these aggregations would last only an instant, having no internal principle guiding their maintenance as a structured organization of elements.
We could only know of the existence of organic compounds (and would only be here to know it, i.e., given observer bias) if that principle of structural conservation came to exist by the same random aggregations that produced the compound bing observed.
That principle is the power of self-replication.
It follows from the nucleotides that make up the double helix of DNA, which forms a chain of unique combinations of nucleotides that then act as a kind of molecular plaster cast, since only the precise nucleotide partner of any one nucleotide fits into its place in a new chain alongside the old.
This creates a perfect inverse mold of the original molecular chain, which then becomes the mold for a new chain that is an exact copy of the original.
So, now life replicates — as it must if it is to have more than a momentary existence.
But, it is still an unstable compound, subject to dissolution by any solvent that undoes its molecular and atomic bindings, by any disruption of its cellular machinery (as when radiation deforms normal cells into cancerous ones), or any interruption of the needed supplies of water, food or energy required by the life-sustaining biological processes.
All of which means that life is permanently transitory, permanently in a state of struggle, in a word: mortal.
Thus replication at the cellular level demands replication at the level of the organism.
In another word: procreation.
We produce our own replacements or our lineage dies out.
And because we live by controlling a territory from which we draw our material needs, resources, above all, land for raising or culling food, and access to water. Later comes shelter, transport, trade and defense.
And because the territory sufficient to support one is not enough to support that one and its offspring, life is inherently colonizing.
So neighboring colonies, species, tribes or nations that could otherwise live in harmony find themselves competing for new territories and colonies, and the cycle begins again.
All life colonizes.
That’s why those species that eat our food we consider pests, and hunt or poison them to extinction, if we can.
That’s why those species that eat us as food we consider infectious diseases, and hunt or poison them to extinction, if we can.
Life colonizes.
The birds and the bees… and the bacteria
Life When It Thrives: Cultural Replication
We can do anything you can do better, anything you can do…
Life Colonizes
So does life in the aggregate: communities, societies and cultures.
Religions, until recently, fought wars of religion, that is, cultural replication by force and fraud, the classic vectors of belligerents.
If it continues, it continues in the guise of wars of national, hence cultural, self-determination.
Nations, until recently, fought wars of national conquest, that is, cultural replication by force and fraud.
If it continues, it continues inthe guise of wars reclaiming lost cultural territory:
Greater Russia, which so far includes the Ukraine, Belorussia, and bits of Georgia and Moldova.
Greater China, which includes Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Greater Iran, which includes, I imagine, the Shia parts of the Persian Empire.
Greater Serbia, Greater Hungary, Greater Israel.
O Brave New World Order!
And everybody loves the Kurds… as a subject people with no state of their own. For them, and them alone, all other nations must observe the existing boundaries that disenfranchise them (for none among the sovereign nations counts them as kindred, the essential condition for a “right” of self-determination; if nothing else, it guarantees a steady stream of good PR).
As is so often the case, rights belong only to those who already have them.
Real versus Make-Believe Choices
The one partial yet notable exception to this urge to colonization shared by all life is the law-governed order, under the Pax Americana, of largely affluent democratic states, who are content within the fixed borders of existing sovereignty, flirting more with devolving government (e.g., Slovakia, Catalonia, Scotland, Quebec) than annexation.
That order is fraying at the moment, with players inside the covenant, and protected by it playing both ends against the middle (e.g., Orban’s Hungary, Erdogan’s Turkey).
One could object that the law-governed order of the pax Americana is no exception. It’s just colonization pursued by other means — by which the argument means cultural saturation and seduction, the overwhelming predominance of the affluent world, ‘cultural imperialism’, “saturation and infection, “soft power”.
This sounds ghastly, until one compares it with its more traditional form, colonization by force and fraud– being rehabilitated , as we speak, back into respectability — Ukraine being just the most brazen example, in the merging New World Order, attacked from without by the autocratic axis and attacked from within by a motley crew of populist us-first-and-to-hell-with-the-rest domestic political movements across the affluent West.
Honest moral choice works within doable alternatives — seeming at times just the lesser of two evils.
Appeals to Utopian ideals require either a contrafactual, magical consensus (“if only everyone thought as I do”) or the willingness to use force or fraud to implement them, thus leading ideal-crazed, would-be benevolent dictators down the path to ruthless absolutism.
People whose moral life reduces to an internal morality play starring themselves invariably choose Utopian ideals.
People who care about others reluctantly choose the feasible in place of the ideal, as the condition of having any good effect at all.
Head games
Our Situation Now
My take on this: everyone can read the writing on the wall, Big Changes Coming, so everyone with an advantage to protect (earned or unearned) is crying foul.
Same old same old.
Taking the long view, there are only two big picture paths for humanity, separated by a fork in the road. 1) The natural inclination to colonization — conquest or suppression, when met with resistance — continues unabated, well within the natural order, both between and within nations. 2) Nations learn to recognize one another’s sovereignty within existing boundaries, with some devolutions of government where differences are too wide for the mutual trust of fellow citizens.
In other words, we the people, live by the laws of nature, which are causal forces oblivious to individuals and their identities, to ends and reasons and moral concerns, or we live by a law-governed system of mutual respect and recognition of one another as communities of moral agents with rights and responsibilities that shape their behavior towards one another.
If this sounds Utopian it is, but not completely.
Its rough outlines have become visible under the pax Americana, an imperfect early move in the right direction.
Purely Utopian ideas suffer the same fate as unarmed prophets, that is, they they cannot crush with force either resistance from without or doubt from within (Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 6).
But, harness an ideal to a system supported by the self-interst of all contracting parties, and you’re now in with a chance!
That is the dynamic behind the core Enlightenment ideas of the social contract, a republic, and a world federation of republics.
Examples of these make up the Free World: NATO, the EU, AUKUS, and the bilateral defense treaties between the US and Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand.
If US allies seem fractious at times, and clearly pursue their own interests, that’s because they are allies rather than vassals.
I, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.
Xi, Vlad and Donald beg to differ.
Replication is different when what it replicates are autonomous, self-governing moral agents.
They don’t always do what you want.
And, unless you take upon yourself a dictator’s powers, you just have to live with that.
Enlightenment, Armed Prophets, History & Hope
Enlightenment republics are armed prophets, leading peoples to moral agency, to life and freedom under law.
Because they are armed, they are not purely Utopian, neither in word nor in deed.
Their most Utopian principles are now just blueprints for a better life for all, implemented incrementally, at what must seem a glacial pace to the impatient.
If you’re feeling impatient, read history. Lots of it. And sing the old, sad song of rise and fall, the refrain that echoes through all history.
Shed tears with Scipio as he puts Carthage to fire, knowing that Rome, too, will someday burn.
Today’s wavering interlude of peace is shaky, but firming up the last few years..
It is anchored by the military predominance of the US.
For the Free World is — in Machiavelli’s terminology — an armed prophet.
Only that stands between us and the abyss, by which I mean the same old, same old of history past, set to revert to the mean — but this time with multiple nuclear-armed belligerents, and with a frustrated Putin already recklessly shaking his nuclear sabre.
Immigration and inflation are concerns for many. Recognize the two issues as serious problems, Troublemakers, if you like. But the collapse of the pax Americana, its North Atlantic and Pacific branches, would be the Terminator, the Mother of All Crises.
Let the expansionists have their way today, and war comes tomorrow to a weakened Free World.
Think it through, as if everything depended on it!
When All Is Said and Dunn 