The Aristos

may burn up an already dead planet. There are other hydrogen bombs waiting and closer at hand. Inwards and outwards the prospect before him is terrifying.*

THE NECESSITY OF HAZARD

20 But mankind is in the best of all possible situations for mankind. It may not be the best possible for you or for me, for this or that individual; for this or that age; for this or that world.

21 It is the best possible for us because it is an infinite situation of finite hazard: that is, its fundamental principle will always be hazard, but a hazard within bounds. A hazard without bounds would be a universe without physical laws: that is, a perpetual and total chaos.

22 A god who revealed his will, who ‘heard’ us, who answered our prayers, who was propitiable, the kind of god simple people like to imagine would be desirable: such a god would destroy all our hazard, all our purpose and all our happiness.

23 Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.

24 I am is I was not, I might not have been, I may not be, I shall not be.

25 In order that we should have meaning, purpose and pleasure it has been, is, and always will be necessary that we live in a whole that is indifferent to every individual thing in it; and the precise form of its indifference is that the duration of being and the fortune during being of each individual thing are fundamentally but not unconditionally in hazard.

26 What we call suffering, death, disaster, misfortune, tragedy, we should call the price of freedom. The only alternative to this suffering freedom is an unsuffering unfreedom.

THE GODGAME

27 Imagine yourself a god, and lay down the laws of a universe. You then find yourself in the Divine Predicament: good governors must govern all equally, and all fairly. But no act of government can be fair to all, in all their different situations, except one.

28 The Divine Solution is to govern by not governing in any sense that the governed can call being governed; that is, to constitute a situation in which the governed must govern themselves.

29 If there had been a creator, his second act would have been to disappear.

30 Put dice on the table and leave the room; but make it seem possible to the players that you were never in the room.

31 The good human and so the good universal upbringing gives freedom to develop, or hazard, within fixed bounds.

32 The whole is not a pharaonic cosmos; a blind obsession with pyramids, assembling, slaves. Our pyramid has no apex; it is not a pyramid. We are not slaves who will never see the summit, because there is no summit. Life may be less imperfect in a hundred years’ time than it is today; but it will be even less imperfect a hundred years after that. Perfectibility is meaningless because wherever we enter the infinite processus we can look forward with a kind of nostalgia for the future, and imagine a better age. It is also evil, because a terminus of perfection breeds a cancer of now. For perfectibilitarians, perfect ends tomorrow justify very imperfect means today.

33 We build towards nothing; we build.

34 Our universe is the best possible because it can contain no Promised Land; no point where we could have all we imagine. We are designed to want: with nothing to want, we are like windmills in a world without wind.

35 Emily Dickinson: If summer were an axiom, what sorcery had snow?*

36 We are in the best possible situation because everywhere, below the surface, we do not know; we shall never know why; we shall never know tomorrow; we shall never know a god or if there is a god; we shall never even know ourselves. This mysterious wall round our world and our perception of it is not there to frustrate us but to train us back to the now, to life, to our time being.

FINITY AND INFINITY

37 The cosmos is an infinite proliferation of fire, atoms, forms, collisions, attractions, sports, mutations, all happening in the space-time continuum; only thus can Law survive against Chaos, and only thus can Chaos survive against Law.

38 Only in an infinitely proliferating cosmos can both order and disorder coexist infinitely; and the only purposeful cosmos must be one that proliferates infinitely. It was therefore not created, but was always.

39 A finite creation is incomprehensible. If a creator were not self-suincient, it would be absurd to suppose that there was both a time when he was aware of this and did nothing, and a time when he remedied his deficiency. What is easier to believe? That there was always something or that there was once nothing?

40 Christianity says that creation has a beginning, middle and end. The Greeks claimed that creation is a timeless processus. Both are correct. All that is created and is therefore individual has a beginning and an end; but there is no universal beginning and end.

41 Our universe may fall in on itself, the red shift change to a blue. All universes may be like an expanding and contracting heart, with the spores of humanity growing in the cool spaces between stars; then withering in the autumn collapse. Or they may expand eternally.

42 A phoenix infinity; or an infinite expansion. Whichever it is, the astrophysicists now know what Heraclitus guessed: that suns must grow in heat and finally consume their planetary systems. Look out of the window: everything you see is frozen fire in transit between fire and fire. Cities, equations, lovers, landscapes: all are hurtling towards the hydrogen crucible.*

43 Even if we could establish a definite point of genesis for our own universe, we could never establish the genesis of what may or may not lie beyond the limits of our observational power. It is convenient to behave in science as if what may lie beyond our present domain of knowledge does not exist; but the logical chances are even, and the practical probabilities all on my side.

44 Nothing is unique in its species, even a cosmos; though everything is unique in its own existing.

45 If a cosmos is infinite, it has no end. If it has no end, there can be no end it is serving. Its only end must lie in its means. It exists in order to exist.

46 Only one process allows all conscious beings to have equal importance: an infinite one. If there were any end to which evolution was tending, then you and I would be slaves of a pharaoh, a builder of pyramids. But if there is no end, and only in an infinite universe can there be no end, then you, from whatever world or age you come, and I are equal. For both of us the slope is the same, and reaches as far ahead and as far behind. This is the great proof that the whole is infinite. It was never created and it will never end, so that all that is may be equal in it.

‘GOD’

47 I put the word in inverted commas in order to except it from its common meanings; to purge it of all its human associations.

48 ‘God’ is a situation. Not a power, or a being, or an influence. Not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’, but an ‘it’. Not entity or