Delphic Maxim 49: Choose what is divine
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day
49. Choose what is divine
Meanwhile, back in interpretation land, I’m going to have to find a way to interpret ‘the divine’ that doesn’t rest on the idea of ‘God’. I say this because I regard myself as agnostic, leaning fairly heavily towards the atheist end of the spectrum, but also because I think a maxim that invites us to choose the ‘divine’ in a Judeo-Christian sense might be a little meaningless to a lot of people. But what if we take ‘the divine’ to simply refer to something god-like or transcendent? Maybe something to run with?
Recently I’ve been reading Woo’s Wonderful World of Maths, in which high school maths teacher Eddie Woo explains and unpicks some of the fascinating phenomena that happen in the world of maths (and, spoiler alert, repeat themselves in wonderful ways in ‘the real world’). The structures in nature that he observes — the coastline of Australia, the growth of a sunflower, for example — really do have mathematical properties that exceed our ability to grasp. There’s a kind of transcendent, excessive beauty to the natural world that would be very hard to synthesise. Having said that, sometimes we synthesise things that we don’t realise have incredible degrees of complexity as well, largely because the things we build are ‘imperfect’ (at least as far as we expect them to be the perfect representation of a product). There’s a great image of the edge of an obsidian scalpel versus the edge of a steel one, and the difference is insane: what looks like a smooth metal edge is in fact jagged like a chainsaw:
Anyway, why am I talking about maths? Woo reminds us of an old distinction coming from early Greek myth: out of the primordial chaos emerges the order of the cosmos. When we use words like ‘cosmos’ or ‘cosmic’, we aren’t just referring to the vast universe that exists, but also the sense of order that underpins it. Were it not for some degree of cosmic order (and let’s not pretend it’s all ordered, there are definite pockets of chaos), it would not be possible for human life to exist! Isn’t that a divine stroke of luck?
When he spoke at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House a few years back, philosopher A. C. Grayling observed that we only know that we are alive while we are alive, and that we have control only over whether we live a good life or a bad one. And likewise, humans don’t know if we are the only evolution of conscious, intelligent life in the universe, and whether once we gone that will be it and the universe will be left with so much dust and energy and antimatter, and none of it thinking. So, he asks, don’t we have a cosmic responsibility — in the absence of a god — to make the universe a better place? If we are all that there is, shouldn’t we at least try to ensure that the universe was good?
Choosing the divine doesn’t have to be about believing in God, or deferring to a religious authority, far from it actually. Choosing the divine can simply mean choosing what is good, and that’s as good as maxim to live by as any we’ve read so far!
