"'The trend of events must ever seem toward the best, since it is toward the one observing the trend.'"
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World (London, 1984), Epilogue, p. 179.
Not if the observer is suffering greatly! This question is imponderable. Recently, I spoke to someone who thought that life involves so much animal and human suffering that it would have been better if the Big Bang had not happened. Fortunately, we do not have to decide whether or not a universe exists.
If I had inherited a different genetic combination of dispositions and aptitudes, then my life would have been very different and, in some scenarios, much better but then the present version of me would not have been here to say this. The twentieth century would have been better without the Holocaust but, in that case, subsequent history would have been so different that neither you nor I would have been here to discuss it. (In fact, I value my daughter's and granddaughter's existences more than my own.)
Just before the sentence quoted above, Danivar had said:
"'...I do not blandly consider that all worked out for the best. Had it not been for that damned war and its aftermath, we might stand here amidst flowering gardens and know that our people had already reached the stars.'" (ibid.)
His host, Orna of Nildo, replied:
"'We would not exist...'" (ibid.)
- and it was this reply that prompted Danivar's remark about the trend of events seeming to be toward the best.
Is it?
In another Anderson series, the Time Patrol has a lot to answer for.
2 comments:
These are fascinating ideas. And I think quite important to ponder in the same way that the concept of "memento mori" allows each of us...in the modern take of the concept, anyway...to understand that we are finite and to live the life we are given to the best extent possible.
I like to think that if there are multiverses full of "What Ifs" then there might also be some sort of Universal Library where journals are kept that detail all of these personal, cultural, and civilization threads. A job for the Time Patrol? Or maybe that is more of a Terry Pratchett concept, LOL?
Thanks as always for the food for thought! Best, Scott
Kaor, Paul!
the 20th century would have been better off without Sarajevo, WW I, and the Russian Revolution. Without those things there would have been no "Final Solution," after all. And I do wonder sometimes what kind of world would have come to exist absent the events I listed.
But, I agree, absent those bad things, WE would not have come to exist (altho my father was alive in 1914).
Ad astra! Sean
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