Ted Gioia is author of The Honest Broker on Substack, a guide to music, books, media, and culture. He is author of 12 books, and has served on the faculty at Stanford. His latest piece explores why fans are throwing things at performers, knowing they might hurt them.
Gioia writes:
It’s a curious coincidence that, during this same period, activists have started throwing things at famous works of art. You wouldn’t normally think of museums and concert halls as epicenters of paintball-esque outbursts. But in the year 2023, they are hot spots for all the worst tendencies.
Of course, there’s a long history of fans throwing things on stage. But until recently, they were usually nice things. Only in the rarest instance—for example, a vaudeville show of embarrassingly low quality—were tomatoes tossed at a performer.
His judgment as to why American and European audiences are now creatures to be wary of:
The anger isn’t coming from the music. It’s coming from the broader culture.
Of course, all of us already know that there’s a collapse in civility and decent behavior in every sphere of public life nowadays. The stuff happening on airplanes blows my mind. And it’s also happening at restaurants, movie theaters, and any other place where people congregate for work or play.
"But there are specific triggering issues related to music", Gioia says, and:
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the worst acts of pre-meditated violence during the last decade have occurred at music venues. In addition to schools and shopping centers, musical performances are frequent targets.
You may think that violence plays out on the battlefield, not at a pop concert. But music has always been a cultural indicator. In some ways, it is our most revealing source of information on society. Sometimes the future shows up in our music even before it gets covered in the newspapers.
So even if I am saddened by the craziness at music concerts, I can’t say I’m surprised There’s something ugly simmering in our society, and it has finally arrived at the pricey front row seats of concerts. All of sudden, fans have decided that an expensive ticket gives them the right to do something abusive to their favorite pop star.
It makes no sense, but it’s definitely part of the zeitgeist. And it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.
Such is the state of mind of swathes of citizens in countries that have been captured by a progressive nihilism. And take note of this depiction that works for everyone who bears the burden of commitment only to self, the type that has become all too common:
He is a truly postmodern man: no truth exists apart from his; and any alternative reality has to be attacked mercilessly. Because his whims oscillate, so do the non-facts he invents to satisfy them. He is a spluttering, glowering fusillade of fantasies. He is, in Michael Wolff’s words, “a man whose behavior defies and undermines the structures and logic of civic life”.
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It's not a pretty sight, the place where many young women are coming from. Love, for instance, is barely a secondary matter, with money certainly to the fore. On that account, Kimberley McIntosh, writing in The Guardian, retorts that young women struggling with debt and burnout need a better vision than getting a rich man to pay the bills.
McIntosh reports:
Over the past few months, a number of straight-talking, self-help gurus for women (often described half-jokingly in the comment section as “the female Andrew Tate”) have been blowing up on TikTok. SheraSeven (real name Leticia Padua) has been attracting a large audience of young women. Despite not even having a TikTok account herself, clips that have cross-pollinated from her YouTube have racked up almost 20 billion views and counting.
The comment sections under these TikTok videos are full of women who are fed up with modern heterosexual dating to the point that they don’t believe men have anything to offer them emotionally. SheraSeven’s advice teaches women to game patriarchy and turn their pain into power.
Shera advises women over the age of 25 to seek out and date older, affluent men and to actively play games to get them. This includes hiding your insecurities from potential partners and using reverse psychology to manipulate men, so you can imitate intimacy without the risk that comes with true vulnerability.
SheraSeven, who is an American self-styled “financial adviser” rather than a relationship guide, and who has been making videos for about nine years, declares, according to McIntosh:
Once they’ve locked a man down, women should push for them to pay for all of their household bills and expenses. Men without money are “dusties” and not to be entertained.
[V]eering away from the stereotype of the 1950s housewife, and its modern iteration, the tradwife, SheraSeven doesn’t suggest women must take on domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing in exchange for financial support. A man of means can hire people to help with that. You are there to look beautiful and be worshipped. This is presumably what makes her gospel so attractive.
Slumflower (sic)
A kindred spirit is... "Slumflower (real name Chidera Eggerue), who initially implored millennial women to fight patriarchy by indulging in 'dump him feminism' via viral tweets and cute Instagram graphics that escalated into telling women to only date affluent men – and to take everything from them that they can."
Eggerue, who is British, has written several successful books on topics such as What A Time To Be Alone and How to Get Over a Boy, which the publisher proclaims as a "sensational manifesto and guide to dating men".
On dating, McIntosh states that SheraSeven "tells the audience she will never start a YouTube channel to give people advice on “real relationships” that aren’t based on money, because all relationships are ultimately based on power". McIntosh concludes:
It’s a bleak picture. So many of the ways women are being encouraged to live [... involve] a re-evaluation of our relationship to work, rest and leisure. We need a collective vision for improving our lives. Without it, women will continue looking for answers elsewhere.
Given the bleakness in dating or married life conjured up by McIntosh's reporting, what follows is a vision that women can live by that is of a higher order than any that Leticia Padua or Chidera Eggerue seem to offer. The vision arises from the nature of marriage, and on this I quote from the source I cite at the end of this post:
So, what is marriage? The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children (#1660). [Also], Jesus spoke about marriage as a one-flesh union that only husbands and wives can form.
Marriage is a special kind of communion between one man and one woman that is ordered toward their mutual love and toward the procreation of children—bonding and babies.
In 1930, Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical on Christian marriage, Casti Connubii, which says that “the child holds the first place” as a blessing in marriage. Second is “the blessing of conjugal honor which consists in the mutual fidelity of the spouses in fulfilling the marriage contract” (#19). This understanding of marriage is not merely a “Catholic thing.” It is universal, a part of our human nature. All cultures in human history recognized, until about two seconds ago, historically speaking, that marriage is a union of man and woman ordered to children and families.
As the Catechism says: The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes (#1603).
Everybody’s “Imposing”
People who claim that the Church is “imposing” its view of marriage on others don’t realize that anyone who claims to define marriage for himself also “imposes” a view of marriage. For example, laws that define marriage as “the union of two adults” impose that view on polygamists and those who believe in child brides (both of which are practices that, unlike same-sex marriage, actually have historical precedent). [...] In fact, the only way not to impose a definition of marriage is to say that marriage is “what anyone wants it to be”—in which case it ceases to be anything at all.
[T]he natural-law understanding of marriage (conjugal union of bride and bridegroom, woman and man) has always been a universal human understanding. The conjugal view of marriage is the only view that explains why government has an interest in regulating marriage in the first place: because it’s the only type of union that produces a child.
This type of relationship is unique among all others, and society rightly sees the need to bind fathers to mothers formally, in order to secure and promote a stable environment in which to rear and educate children born from their union.
When people think that marriage is simply 'relational" (for companionship) or romantic love, they have a hard time understanding why companionship and romance between same-sex couples should not be recognized as a marriage. They also don’t understand why sex should be saved for marriage when marriage is just about a fuzzy concept of “love” rather than a one-flesh union that is ordered to result in a child.
However, when we recognize that only a man and woman can form the “one-flesh” bodily union of marriage, any relationship that lacks this element, no matter how dedicated or caring it may be, is not a marriage.
The Catechism soars in its description of the vocation of men and women in marriage:
Conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter—appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of will. It aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility.
In brief, marriage is a state of life of high significance not only for the man and woman involved, but for the whole of society. It requires the giving of oneself totally to the other, and that is a challenge throughout life which purifies and strengthens the two who commit to becoming one. The gift of oneself raises each to to a true community of love and fidelity.
Such a vision of marriage is what the influencers should be promoting for the happiness of their followers and the benefit of society.
💖 Made This Way, Leila Miller and Trent Horn, Catholic Answers Press, California, 2018.
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💢“What is it that is about to be created, that enjoys such honor? It is man—that great and wonderful living creature, more precious in the eyes of God than all other creatures! For him the heavens and the earth, the sea and all the rest of creation exist. God attached so much importance to his salvation that He did not spare his own Son for the sake of man. Nor does He ever cease to work, trying every possible means, until He has raised man up to himself and made him sit at his right hand.”
— ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM (died 407)
💢 We are each of us, as Pope Benedict XVI (died December 2022) famously said, “not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.”
“Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary,” Benedict reminded us. My grandmother is still willed and loved and necessary today, no more or less than my 1-year-old daughter.
💢 It is important to realise that being a follower of Christ is intended to be a source of deep happiness and a realisation that one is truly fortunate to have discovered this vision of life. The happiness comes, even in a time of difficulty, from our close relationship with God, and a lifestyle that corresponds with how God made us.
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Augusto Del Noce (died 1989) was an Italian philosopher and political thinker. Regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers after the Second World War, he described the sexual revolution as the essence of the “Occidentalist heresy,” the radical abolition of the sacred. After that abolition, there is no objective, cosmic order of truth to which individual behavior and social norms and institutions must conform.
We can see this loss of orienation being borne out in the public disorder in Western cities with the young implicated in most instances, but also in the lack of the sense of the need to maintain self-control among older people, whether as aircraft passengers or, in the extreme cases the US often offers, in the shooting of annoying neighbours.
Stuart Heritage, writing in The Guardian, declares:
The last few weeks have seen a rash of headlines about a number of regrettable blow-ups that have occurred because people just can’t seem to remember the basic rules of cinema etiquette any more.
In Maidstone, a woman took her ticketless child into Barbie; an act that resulted in a stand-up, full-volume physical fight. A Brazilian Barbie screening ended with a similar brawl, apparently because a woman let her child watch YouTube throughout the movie. Nor is this confined to Barbie. In June, a fight broke out at a screening of The Little Mermaid in Florida, and in March the same thing happened in France at the end of Creed III. Meanwhile, Twitter is awash with tales of poor cinema etiquette, from talking during films to taking photos during films.
[...] as a regular cinemagoer myself, I’ve seen first-hand the lack of basic common sense that has trickled in over the last few months.
While Heritage doesn't view the "chaos in the aisles" as a sign of civilisational upheaval that in fact it warrants, he does highlight how social norms have become massively degraded. His account signals the degree to which an expectation of consideration of others is low, as is that of self-restraint among those who feel offended :
They’re so used to twin-screening during films at home that it seems alien for them to not have their phones in their hands. They’re so used to talking through films at home that it seems unreasonable to be expected to remain silent in a cinema. And when this sort of behaviour meets a wall of people who have spent a considerable amount of money to just enjoy a film, of course violence is going to erupt.
It’s like [...] being on a standing room only train next to someone who has their backpack slung in an empty seat. Things are always going to kick off.
This state of affairs ‒ the "of course" and "always" ‒ results from the lack of our acknowledgement of an"objective, cosmic order of truth to which individual behavior and social norms and institutions must conform," as cited above.
And there is more evidence that social norms are breaking down as the "self" takes precedence over the "social":
When Harry Styles was pelted with chicken nuggets while on stage at New York's Madison Square Gardens last summer, he took it in his stride. "Interesting approach," smiled Styles, who has also weathered kiwi fruits, Skittles and bunches of flowers while performing. But when a mystery object hit him in the eye at a concert in Vienna last weekend, he wasn't laughing but, rather, wincing in pain.
It was the latest in a string of incidents where audience members have hurled potentially dangerous objects at performers. Earlier this month Drake was hit on the arm by a flying phone. That came days after country singer Kelsea Ballerini was struck in the face with a bracelet. In May, Bebe Rexha was taken to hospital and needed multiple stitches after a phone hit her in the eye. A man, since charged with assault, told police he thought it "would be funny" to try and hit the singer.
Bebe Rexha
It's not just live music seeing disruptive behaviour. In April, police were called to a performance of The Bodyguard musical in Manchester when rowdy audience members reacted with "unprecedented levels of violence" to staff. At other venues there has been everything from "heated arguments" to full-on brawls. And in the US, one fan's disruption of a Broadway play in December 2022 followed several other incidents of audience outbursts.
Across the cultural sphere, it feels like audiences are misbehaving. At a recent Las Vegas show, Adele weighed in, saying: "Have you noticed how people are like, forgetting … show etiquette at the moment? People just throwing shit on stage" – before warning fans not to try it with her.
The BBC report above adds that Dr Kirsty Sedgman, a senior lecturer in theatre at the University of Bristol who specialises in audience research, has book just out, On Being Unreasonable, which "explores widening divisions in society over how we use public space".
Dr Sedgman is quoted as saying that cultural spaces have always been places where spontaneous outbursts could be expected but after the Covid lockdown people are behaving with more abandon:
"I work with a lot of people throughout the cultural industries, and the message seems to be pretty much unanimous that since lockdown ended, the situation has fundamentally shifted."
That is borne out in a report by the UK's Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union, which found that 90% of theatre staff had witnessed bad behaviour – and 70% believed things had got worse since the pandemic.
"It's not all audiences by any means, but for a lot of people, there's a growing sense of what I call 'don't-tell-me-what-to-do-itis'," says Sedgman. She believes we're seeing a breakdown in social contracts – the behavioural norms and rules of engagements that keep us all ticking along together nicely.
People are thirsty for live entertainment again, but increasingly want it on their terms – especially when ticket prices are soaring. "People are coming with actively competing ideals about what they want that experience to be like," says Sedgman. "Some people want to not be disturbed by others chatting or eating or drinking, or have phones blocking their way. Other people want to maybe take a step backwards to the time when the arts were a more sociable experience. The difficulty is that those pleasures are irreconcilable."
Meanwhile though, [Dr Sedgman] thinks recent incidents could be a bellwether for deeper issues. "Live performance has always been a laboratory space for figuring out what it means to be together," she explains. "Pretty much every time society goes through a big period of unrest, that unrest starts to ferment and explode in live performance first. Audiences are a kind of canary in the coal mine for much bigger frustrations and divisions starting to bubble over. It's important that we pay attention to what's happening in the cultural sphere. It's an indicator of what's happening to us as a society."
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Radical subjectivity for me but not for thee. It is an emblem of the moral confusions of the Woke Revolution that it is considered self-evident that one’s gender is determined exclusively by the imperatives of one’s own subjectivity but that one’s race is an immutable fact in whose determination subjectivity has no role to play whatsoever. Thus, the bedrock claim of gender identity politics that, say, one has never felt like a man but always like a woman and thus one is a woman, full stop, is something that decent people are expected to treat as a simple matter of fact, and unimpeachable as such in the context of trans.
But to say that one has never felt white but instead has always felt oneself to be black, Native American, etc., is to commit both a form of moral fraud and to inflict great psychological trauma and in many cases material harm on blacks or Native Americans, and as such should self-evidently — as self-evident of the authority of subjective regarding gender — always to be denounced and repudiated.
— Author and cultural observer David Rieff in his Desire and FateSubstack newsletter. See also this link on the trend of trying to change one's race based on the principles of gender ideology.
In like vein, writer Walter Kirn on the absurdities of the American cultural transformation. This from an interview in Palladium magazine:
If America is a story, then who better to diagnose its ills and prescribe a treatment than a novelist? Walter Kirn was born in 1962 in Ohio and grew up in Minnesota. After Princeton and Oxford he embarked on a literary career in New York media, reviewing books and writing for New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Time, The New Republic, and Harper’s.
Kirn’s 2001 novel Up in the Air was made into the critically-acclaimed 2009 film starring George Clooney. His memoir Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever chronicles his own adventure going from rural Minnesota to the Ivy League. Lately, he co-hosts the podcast America This Week and is the co-founder of County Highway, a new print magazine about America in the form of a nineteenth-century newspaper.
And so to the interview:
There seems to be a growing chasm between the real-life experiences that people have and the grand narratives about our common story—about what we suppose is normal. How did we get here?
I’m 60 years old. I went to grade school in Minnesota, in very small rural public schools. I was aware from maybe the fourth or fifth grade, through film strips and prepared lesson plans from textbook companies, that we lived in an endangered world. Outside of basic teaching, we were given the overriding message that we should be optimistic about things like computers and space, but there was a louder drumbeat about pollution, racial division, and the Cold War.
Because I was an ambitious kid who wanted to succeed in school, I was always attempting to discern the lesson behind the lesson. What I saw was that I was being asked to be very concerned and anxious about mankind’s stupidity and selfishness. That seemed to be the lesson underlying the pollution lectures—that people in their cars and their desire to have too many things were dirtying up the world.
The Cold War lesson was more sophisticated and went on even longer into junior high and high school. It centered on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and other depictions of the dangers of a totalitarian world. We were asked to congratulate ourselves as young Americans on our freedom and clarity and basic goodness compared to this lurking threat from the Soviet Union, in which the citizens were all forced to think alike, act alike, and be alike.
But a totalitarian-style political atmosphere has arisen, alarming this writer—artists and writers are usually the first they come for:
Over the years, it has caused me great consternation that the heavy aversion to totalitarian, dictatorial, and top-down systems that was implanted in me is now kind of useless—and even dangerous. As I discern trends in our society that seem to resemble those I was warned against and raise my hand to say that I don’t like this, I’m told that, somehow, I’m out of step, I’m overly alarmed, and I’m maybe even on the wrong side.
But, I want to reply, this is only what a seventh-grade Minnesota public school student was taught to fear, taught to be on the lookout for, and now you’re telling me it constitutes some kind of dissident position to be afraid of these things?
Fashionable principles derived from a Marxist school of thought now beguile academia and, as a consequence, so too the graduates forming the elite of media, corporate and political life. The mentality abroad in society is reflected in the statistics that young people increasingly support the use of violence or direct protest to censor speakers (See here and here).
Kirn finds that the decline in acknowledgement of the virtues that maintain civility, and the aggressive nature of the new Critical Theory ideology in its forms of neo-racism and gender self-invention are taking their toll:
Since the fall of 2016, it has gotten worse and worse. More American institutions have been cast as dubious, unpatriotic, and perhaps manipulated from abroad. More American attitudes, whether they be religious, cultural, or even intellectual, have been redlined as dangerous. More individuals from citizens to media figures to authors and artists have been cast in the role of dangerous dissenters.
The sum total, to bring it right up to the present, is that we now live in an age of profound anxiety. The political emergency, the environmental threat, and later COVID, were all globbed together as one giant example of our need for vast controlling authority that would keep us from dying. No longer could the citizens be trusted to make their own decisions, associate freely, speak openly, and spontaneously carry out their lives. All the risks had risen to the ultimate level, DEFCON 1. Our communications had to be monitored—and even manicured. Politics was too dangerous to be left in the hands of the population. Very suddenly, on every front, there seemed to be a rationale for total control and also a scenario in which, should we fail to yield to that control, doom was certain.
The narrative from the elite is that "some nascent revolution [is] about to break out" where dissent arises— "... the fact that it is imputed so often has started to scare me".
In America today, if you are having experiences going about your day that run counter to the mega-narratives on the news and social media, you have a choice. Do you compare notes with other people? If you do, you have an instinctive sense that somehow you are endangering yourself. Because you’ve seen other people be mocked for it and examples made of famous figures who have stepped out of line.
Therefore, signalling adherence to the elite-approved virtues is in full play in most Western socieities, along with unquestioning submission to the subjective decrees of those trying to control the narrative. It's hard to stand firm against the powers of those in the commanding heights of society in light of the social sanctions they wield, and it cuts no ice to point out that questioning something doesn't make you phobic of that item.
Still, Rieff and Kirn, by personally running against the tide of the cultural elite, encourage us to highlight the absurdities of the ideologies thrust upon us, and to stand firm in defence of reality.
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Dialogue in The Chosen provides many insights, but the exchange when Little James asks Jesus why he does not offer to heal James' deformity that handicaps his walking is particularly fit for reflection in that it sheds light on the mystery of human suffering.
In the Father's will I could heal you, right now, and you'd have a good story to tell.
Yes, that you do miracles.
And that's a good story. But there are aleady dozens who can tell that story, and there will be hundreds more, thousands. But think of the story you have if I don't heal you — to know how to proclaim how you still praise God in spite of this; to know how to focus on all that matters so much more than the body, to show people that you can be patient with your suffering on earth because you know you are spending eternity with no suffering. Not everyone can understand that. How many people do you think the Father and I trust with this? Not many.
Little James is in tears over his frustration at slowing the twelve as they trek from place to place, and the challenges likely to be thrown at him as he joins the others in travelling by way of outreach under Jesus' orders to spread news of the Kingdom of God, to cure disease, and to drive out demons.
Weeping, James compares himself to the others:
But the others are so much stronger..., better at this.
James, I love you, but I don't want to hear that ever again.
But James presses his case, stating that he is a burden:
I know how easy it is to say "I am wonderfully and fearfully made", but it doesn't make this any easier.
You a burden? First of all, it's easier to deal with your slow walking than to deal with Simon's temper. Just trust me. Are you fast? Do you look impressive when you walk? Maybe not. But these are the things the Father doesn't care about! You are going to do more for me than most people ever dream.
As James takes heart from what he is hearing, Jesus continues:
So many people need healing in order to believe in me. Or they need healing because their hearts are so sick. That doesn't apply to you. But many are healed or not healed because the Father in heaven has a plan for them which may be a mystery. And remember what Job said: The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!
They have a moment of quiet, and then Jesus tells James:
When you pass from this earth and meet your Father in heaven, Isaiah promises you will leap like a deer. Your reward will be great. So hold on a little longer, and when you find yourself discovering true strength because of your weakness, and do great things in my name in spite of this, the impact will last for generations.
Thank you, Master.
A man like you healing others — oh, what a sight! And James, remember, you will be healed. It's only a matter of time.
Wishing each other "Shalom", they separate, and trusting Jesus, James moves off to begin his ministry to the people of the regions who haven't heard the word of God addressed directly to them.
Little James will have an important message to bear: The joy of the kingdom comes through focusing less on the body, and our immediate needs, less on what we can't do, but, instead, to view our predicament with the perspective of the value of patience within a short life, whereas our destiny of eternal happiness is to meet Jesus, our lord and God, in the fulness of love.
ΩThe Chosen, Season 3, Episode 2, Two by Two.
Ω Job Chapter 1:21; Isaiah 35:6.
Jesus and Little James, from The Chosen
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A notable headline in The Guardian a few days ago: "The big idea: Why the laws of physics will never explain the universe".
Notable is the humility of the author of the piece, Andrew Pontzen, Professor of Cosmology at University College London (UCL), in what is presumably an excerpt from his new book The Universe in a Box: A New Cosmic History. This acceptance of the complexity of the world as beyond our grasp, both in the immediate and long term, may arise from his and other astrophysicists' struggle to comprehend the unseen dark matter. Of this he writes on the UCL profile:
My work focuses on understanding dark matter – a mysterious component of the universe that is hypothesised to drive the formation of galaxies and other structures. While little is known about the nature of dark matter, the basic idea of an invisible sector interacting through gravity with what we can see has been highly predictive. Over the last 20 years, the dark matter hypothesis has generated a huge number of correct predictions about both the present day universe and the ancient "cosmic microwave background" light.
Until the true nature of dark matter is identified, the resulting picture will remain tentative. My team's work focuses largely on using the visible universe to help us to understand better how the invisible sector operates. This is essential if we are to connect our expanding knowledge of the night sky to fundamental physics experiments performed here on Earth. Ultimately this work should point us to a fuller understanding of the basic building blocks of reality.
The science of the stars is young so it is to be expected that we struggle to achieve "a fuller understanding of ... reality". That struggle is expressed also in the title of a recent book by the prominent cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, titled, The Known Unknowns: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.
I think that key to the humility of these leading scientists, who put many others to shame, is this from Krauss just quoted: "The imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of humans".
Ponzten, likewise, is captivated by the immensity, but also the subtlety, of what we find in our domain:
It is hard to come to terms with the sheer scale of space: hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and, at a minimum, trillions of galaxies in the universe. But to a cosmologist there is something even more intriguing than the boggling numbers themselves, which is the question of how all these stars and galaxies were created over a period of 13.8 billion years. It’s the ultimate prehistoric adventure. Life cannot evolve without a planet, planets do not form without stars, stars must be cradled within galaxies, and galaxies would not exist without a richly structured universe to support them. Our origins are written in the sky, and we are just learning how to read them.
It once seemed that, for all its immensity, the cosmos could be understood through the application of a small number of rigid physical laws. Newton encapsulated this idea, showing how apples falling from trees and planetary orbits around our sun arise from the same force, gravity. This kind of radical unification of earthly and heavenly phenomena survives in modern teaching: all the innumerable molecules, atoms and subatomic particles in the universe are expected to obey the same set of laws. Most of the evidence suggests that this assumption holds true, so it should follow that perfecting our understanding of these laws will resolve any remaining questions about cosmic history.
Yet this is a logical fallacy. Even if we imagine that humanity will ultimately discover a “theory of everything” covering all individual particles and forces, that theory’s explanatory value for the universe as a whole is likely to be marginal. Over the course of the 20th century, even as particle physics revealed the secrets of atoms, it became clear that behaviour at the macro level cannot be understood by focusing exclusively on individual objects.
Pontzen refers to insects, ants in particular, as failed models of the way the universe operates because their sophisticated cooperation is not repeated in the highest macro level:
The solar system, seemingly the epitome of clockwork predictability, has an uncertain long-term future for this reason. In isolation, a single planet around a single star would orbit indefinitely but in reality there are multiple planets and they each tug, albeit very subtly, on the others. Over time a series of tiny nudges can produce a major effect, one that takes an inordinate amount of calculation to predict.
Solar system simulations disagree because no calculation can perfectly account for all the influences, and even the tiniest disagreement about the individual nudges leads eventually to a completely different outcome. It is an example of the phenomenon known as chaos, and it is simultaneously exciting and worrying. Exciting, because it shows that planetary systems can exhibit much richer behaviours than the cold, lifeless law of gravity might suggest. Worrying, because if even the solar system is chaotic and unpredictable, we might fret that attempting to understand the broader universe is a doomed enterprise.
Take in how Pontzen rejoices at the extravagance of it all, the galaxies in "lavishly varied their shapes, colours and sizes":
Consider galaxies, on average tens of millions of times larger in extent than the solar system, and lavishly varied in their shapes, colours and sizes. Understanding how galaxies came to be so diverse requires, at a minimum, for us to know how and where the stars formed within them. However star formation is a chaotic process in which diffuse clouds of hydrogen and helium slowly condense under gravity, and no computer is anywhere near able to track all the required atoms (there are around 10⁵⁷ in our sun alone). Even if the computation were feasible, chaos would magnify exponentially the tiniest uncertainties, forbidding us from obtaining a definitive answer. If we were strict in sticking to traditional laws of physics as an explanation for galaxies, here is the end of the road.
To fit inside computers, a simulation of a galaxy’s formation has to lump together vast numbers of molecules, describing how they move en masse, push on each other, transport energy, react to light and radiation, and so on, all without explicit reference to the innumerable individuals within. This requires us to be creative, finding ways to describe the essence of many different processes, allowing for a range of outcomes without obsessing over the detail, which is anyway unknowable. Our simulations necessarily rely on extrapolations, compromises and all-out speculations developed by experts. The uncertain parts cover not just stars, but black holes, magnetic fields, cosmic rays and the still-to-be-understood “dark matter” and “dark energy” that seemingly govern the overall structure of the universe.
This will never result in a literal digital replica of the universe that we inhabit. Such a recreation is just as impossible as a precise forecast for the future of the solar system. But simulations based even on loose descriptions and best guesses can act as a guide, suggesting how galaxies may have evolved over time, enabling us to interpret results from increasingly sophisticated telescopes, guiding us on how to learn more.
Ultimately, galaxies are less like machines, and more like animals – loosely understandable, rewarding to study, but only partially predictable. Accepting this requires a shift in perspective, but it makes our vision of the universe all the richer.
The richness of what we have to intrigue us as humans can't help but suggest an intelligent generosity that even incorporates the "chaos" that poses such a challenge to scientists. Moreover, what we have learnt has driven "many physicists [to] consider the supernatural design hypothesis to be just as reasonable and responsible as the multiverse for explaining the occurrence of our highly improbable anthropic universe" (Spitzer 2015).
Spitzer, who has written deeply on science and the evidence it lends to acknowledging the existence of God, finds the works of Hawking and Dawkins, for example, no obstacle. The first said this:
"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" (A Brief History of Time, p174).
Whereas the second argued in The God Delusion (p157-158) that a Creator-supernatural designer would have to be more complex than anything it could create, and therefore it was improbable, the Christian thinking is of God as pure Being, which means on Dawkins' terms that "absolute simplicity (the absence of complexity) must be the most probable of all states of affairs" (Spitzer p319). Spitzer continues that when Dawkin's argument is corrected in this fashion, "he presents us with a strong indication of God ‒ not the invalidation of God" (ibid).
A final reflection:
For the moment, we can conclude that current physical evidence certainly does not point away from God. Indeed, it comes so close to establishing a beginning of physical reality and an intelligent influence in the setting of our universe's initial conditions and constants that physicists are being pushed to the threshold ‒ and even beyond the threshold ‒ of metaphysics, into the domain of "nothing", purely intelligible realities, and the source of multiversal finetuning. This foray into metaphysics is not done out of sense of curiosity, but out of a desire to avert the implications of transphysical causation; and so it seems that physics has not explained away transphysical causation, but rather is opening the door evermore widely to an intelligent, transtemporal, causative power (Spitzer 2015 p319).
ΩRobert Spitzer, The Soul's Upward Yearning: Clues to our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2015).
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