The Science of Discworld IV

thought-patterns. They evolved, along with us, because they had survival value. A million years ago, human ancestors roamed the African savannahs, and their lives depended – day in, day out – on finding enough food to keep them alive, and avoiding becoming food themselves. The most important things in their lives were their fellow human beings, the animals and plants that they ate, and the animals that wanted to eat
them
.
    Their world also included many things that were not alive: rocks; rivers, lakes and seas; the weather; fires (perhaps started by lightning); the Sun, Moon and stars. But even these often seemed to share some of the features of life. Many of them moved; some changed without any apparent pattern, as if acting on their own impulses; and many could kill. So it is not surprising that as human culture developed, we came to view our world as the outcome of conscious actions by living entities. The Sun, Moon and stars were gods, visible evidence for the existence of supernatural beings that lived in the heavens. A rumble of thunder, a flash of lightning – these were signs of the gods’ displeasure. The evidence was all around us on a daily basis, which put it beyond dispute.
    In particular, animals and plants were central to the lives of early humans. You only have to browse through a book of Egyptian hieroglyphs to notice just how many of them are animals, birds, fish, plants … or bits of animals, birds, fish and plants. Egyptian gods were depicted with the heads of animals; in one extreme case, the god Khepri, the head was an entire dung beetle, neatly placed on top of an otherwise headless human body. Khepri was one aspect of the Sun-god, and the dung beetle (or scarab) got in on the act because dung beetles roll balls of dung around and dig them into the ground. Therefore the Sun, a giant ball, is pushed around by a giant dung beetle; as proof, the Sun also disappears into the ground (the underworld) every evening at sunset.
    The physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford has written many essays with a common theme: broadly speaking, human styles of thought tend to fall into two categories. fn4 One is to see humanity as the context for the universe; the other is to see the universe as the context for humanity. The same person can think both ways of course, but most of us tend to default to one of them. Most ways to separate people into two kinds are nonsense: as the old joke goes, there are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t. But Benford’s distinction is an illuminating one, and it holds more than a grain of truth.
    We can paraphrase it like this. Many people see the surrounding world – the universe – as a resource for humans to exploit; they also see it as a reflection of themselves. What matters most, in this view, is always human-centred. ‘What can this do
for me
?’ (or ‘
for us?
’) is the main, and often the only, question worth asking. From such a viewpoint, to understand something is to express it in terms of human agency. What matters is its
purpose
, and that is whatever
we
use itfor. In this worldview, rain exists in order to make crops grow and to provide fresh water for us to drink. The Sun is there because it warms our bodies. The universe was designed with us in mind, constructed so that we could live in it, and it would have no meaning if we were not present.
    It is a short and natural step to see human beings as the pinnacle of creation, rulers of the planet, masters of the universe. Moreover, you can do all of that without any conscious recognition of how narrowly human-centred your worldview is, and maintain that you are acting out of humility, not arrogance, because of course we are subservient to the universe’s creator. Which is basically a superhuman version of us – a king, an emperor, a pharaoh, a lord – whose powers are expanded to the limits of our imagination.
    The alternative view is that human beings are just one tiny feature of a vast cosmos, most of which does not function on a human scale or take any notice of what we want. Crops grow because rain exists, but rain exists for reasons that have virtually nothing to do with crops. Rain has been in existence for billions of years, crops for about ten thousand. In the cosmic scheme of things, human beings are just one tiny incidental detail on an insignificant ball of rock, most of whose history happened before we turned up to wonder