The Destiny Question: Gardener vs Winnower
Stoic matters of faith & rationality.
When the founder of Bungie, the videogame studio and creators of Halo announced their new project Destiny in 2014 I was impressed for one main reason. It was a space based first person shooter in which the aim was to make your character into a legendary hero. Now as a ‘tech guy’ who has played many videogames, there have been numerous occasions in which the game environments were mostly temptations into evil mayhem. (list here). But Destiny was thematically different. Not only would you be a solo hero, you would collaborate with other players in realtime. It wasn’t surprising that we ‘Guardians’ found ourselves as lightbearers aligned against the forces of darkness. For nearly a decade, I have expressed various aspects of my manhood and personality in a very satisfying way by logging on and shooting bad guys.
It was also inevitable that an opportunity to usurp the forces of darkness would be thrust upon us. That opportunity has manifested itself well in the capable hands of Bungie’s master storytellers whose narratives and playscapes drive seasonal and annual content for millions of players worldwide. There is a long and coherent canon in the Destiny universe that is considerable in the gaming world. Some would even say that it rivals that of Star Wars, Star Trek and various Marvel stories. Although I haven’t been one to geek out on the lore of Destiny I am aware of its large arcs in dealing with the various causus belli that occur between the last humans on earth and a solar system full of alien allies, enemies and mysterious forces. However recently I discovered an interesting set of reflections in that lore:
The Darkness, or the being that speaks for it, claims that the extermination of all those who choose the Light is inevitable; that the universe will be inherited by the morally impoverished advantage-seekers like the Vex and Hive. Logically I cannot see an escape - so long as I accept the Darkness’s logic.
But this is exactly why we fight. Not to preserve our own lives, but to preserve the possibility we represent. When all choices are measured by their fitness payoff - by what they do to benefit the continued existence of the chooser - the Darkness has won completely.
The most important thing we can do, the great formidable blow we can strike against our true enemy, is to offer irrational grace: to choose unreasonable hope and unreasoning compassion even if it goes against calculated advantage.
It is only by disregarding the logic of mere survival that we can create a possibility of existence outside of that logic.
So, if they do not offer you a spot at the campfire. If they call you naive. If they dislike your complaints against the casual violence of the casually violent. If they quote from the Unveiling text, tell you how the Gardener lost because it always stepped to offer peace, and the Winnower always struck - then ask them who they would rather sit by at the fire: Gardener or Winnower.
Then ask them if they would like to live in a universe where no one ever sits beside anyone else at the fire.
Here is a reasoned argument for the human values of unreasonable hope and unreasoning compassion. It is the ethical acceptance of sacrifice. It reminds me of a story I read a long time ago about human beings as vessels of spirit. It is the human spirit that gives us value whether or not we individually recognize that spirit.
I look at this from two contexts. One is the matter of self-discovery and the other from Christian ethics.
Self-Discovery & Hope
One could be forgiven for saying that childhood is a series of dramatic traumas, and that with a little bit of encouragement, they are all overcome. As children we are small, weak and dependent and so it is natural for us to imagine who we will be able to cope with those difficulties when we become larger, stronger and more our own person.
My favorite aphorism in this line of thinking is the story of the young parents whose toddler falls off the tricycle. Their incorrect approach was to attempt to placate the crying with “I know, I know”. Instead they should have asked the child “Tell me what happened.” Then the child would have had to first, stop crying long enough to explain what went wrong, and narrow the context of his injury - maybe setting up a more specific sense of cause and effect. Nope. They got the kid off the trike and rushed off to get some ice cream. What is the likelihood that the trike becomes disposable rather than mastered?
In self-discovery then, we look to our specific weaknesses with the aim to becoming stronger. As part and parcel, we engage our third-order epistemics of understanding the world around us in order to alter our first-order epistemics of understanding what we are individually capable of. Long division remains long division. By the end of the fourth grade, we should have it licked.
As the world becomes less objective, specifically in manners of human interpersonal relationships and our personal relation to society, we are always presented with a choice of optimism or pessimism with regard to the world and our capabilities in it.
What I’m saying here and in this chart is that if you think you’re ‘keeping it real’ and that your personal ability in the world decreases past a line of chaos and disorder, you may be selling yourself short. In the end, nobody can clutch pearls tightly enough to stop a real thief. You’re only saving yourself from imaginary thieves. And while hope is not a strategy, you are likely to make more splashes on the red carpet if you take the a less paranoid attitude about how may thieves are after you. To be anti-fragile means that you learn enough jiu-jitsu to competently succeed in an actual tussle; you train with actual opponents reaching for your neck.
This arc of self-discovery can show you that you can function in more of the world than you previously imagined. You are still a child somewhere, but you can hope to grow larger, stronger and more independent.
Christian Ethics & Hope
As I have mentioned before, Christians in Imperial Rome did not control the laws they lived under. They were able to transform their lives by having expectations of an afterlife which enabled them to transcend the morality of Roman Law. We in America are fortunate to have a separation of powers that allows us to freely practice belief in our own creeds. Our secular law manages our civil lives with lots of space for an adopted canon law to manage our spiritual, aesthetic and social lives. I happen to believe that the marginal atheist must work a bit harder to adopt a reasonable & coherent praxis. After all, everybody knows that a proper Christian is not racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic or generally out of compliance with the New Covenant. All due respect to Daniel Schmachtenberger, but the story of Job is already universal.
We covered this before with regard to the Iron, Silver and Golden rules. Transcendent ethics allow us to behave in a perfected way in an imperfect world. Sometimes it seems to go against all logic, but as soon as you are ready to sacrifice your health and well-being in a consistent and clear-eyed manner, then you are invoking something deeper. What could be deeper than logic? That would be evolutionary biology, something we don’t yet completely understand. We have certainly engaged in contests of fitness much longer than we have engaged in formal logic or formal language. This is a big deal. It opens up a lot of scary doors. The quick and dirty aphorism reminds us of the dearth of atheists in foxholes.
While I’m not trying to suggest that only Christian ethics achieve this praxis, I am saying that there is no free and open Church of EvPsych readily available to the Peasantry.
Whatever you want to call it, your realm of knowledge must exist in an informational ecosystem that runs on and is sustained by the energy of apologetics. It’s about you and your colleagues establishing a ruleset of confirmation and disputation. This reflects my recent learning from Donald Hoffman who argues quite convincingly that we do not perceive the universe as it is, but that the simulation of the universe is in our minds and it is a matter of evolutionary fitness that guides our perspective, not the accuracy of our perception.
We have engaged in contests of fitness much longer than we have engaged in formal logic or formal language.
Parents sacrifice for children. You don’t need a theory to explain it. You just need to have children of your own. We may not raise them to be expert tricyclists. We will defy logic to do right by them. Nothing quite expresses that universally like the application of the New Covenant / Golden Rule translated as, “Treat your children the way you wish you were treated as a child.”
That takes us right back to hope, and the self-discovery of the weak, small and dependent. Were we to have sufficient power and resources, applying the Golden Rule universally would sanctify us. We could all be some version of Santa Claus and everyday would be Christmas. Sorta.
What indeed is our Destiny? We are presented the opportunity to wield powers of light and of darkness. Why cooperate? Why give more than we take? Who deserves our transcendent virtue? Who can sustain such an attitude in support of irrational grace and unreasoning compassion? We all can. We simply have to attempt to be anti-fragile in a chaotic world and discover the virtues and strengths within ourselves, even to the point of self-sacrifice. Memento Mori. That is the journey. It doesn’t matter if you perceive that it is a road less travelled. Just stay on your trike, stop crying and keep pedaling. Hell, try a wheelie.