Copernican Principle
Have you recently seen Blackadder Goes Forth? No? I cannot recommend it enough. Frankly, it is the wittiest thing to have ever graced my TV screen and to borrow from Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, 'the (wo)man that hath no Blackadder in him, nor is not moved with concord of sweet wit, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such (wo)man be trusted.' But this is not about wit, this is about heart.
Blackadder was always about class and the madness that ensues at every rung of the ladder. The old scenario of a genius stuck in a room full of idiots plays itself our in different ages (Elizabethan, Regency, WWI) across different seasons. The characters are always the same - a scheming antihero in Blackadder, a fool in Baldrick, aloof and insensitive upper class. The tropes are so poignant, so immediately familiar that they become simplified caricatures of themselves over time. And we, the viewers, believe those caricatures up until the final 5 minutes of the last episode, perhaps the finest 5 minutes on British television.
As the company is about to launch an offensive over the no man's land, the mood changes. Blackadder, who spent the most of the season trying to escape this very event, comes to terms with his fate and loses some of the sharpness and sense of superiority that marked him out for most of the show. This bout of humility relinquishes his stranglehold on the narrative and lets others in. Captain Darling, season's cartoonish and cowardly antagonist, reveals a painfully human face. He, like Blackadder, tried desperately to avoid war so he can go back to his job at Pratt & Sons, keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen, and marry Dorris. In accepting his place in the company of men around him, Blackadder displaces himself from the centre stage of the narrative thereby giving us a chance to imagine others as more than their simplistic caricatures.
Ever since Nicolaus Copernicus has unseated us from the centre of the solar system in the 16th century, the true astrophysical scale of our position in the universe has come to bare. Not only are we not at the centre of the Solar system, solar system itself is not at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy but some mundane two thirds of the way out. Number of Earth-size planets in the Milky Way alone is estimated to be in the billions. Milky Way in its turn is also nothing special and a recent estimate puts the number of galaxies in the observable universe at some two trillion. On top of everything else, we are neither at the beginning nor the end of time, and so cannot claim a special place in any of the 4* dimensions that we are able to perceive. As if this wasn't enough, there's also this whole talk of multiverses.
You, dear reader, will notice that each discovery made it considerably harder to beat one's chest and claim a special place in the universe, this or the other. In his own day Sigmund Freud described these discoveries as 'great outrages' upon our 'naive self-love'. They go contrary to the story we tell ourselves where we are the central protagonist of the narrative. Look past these affronts to one's sense of importance and you'll notice what Copernicus and his ilk knew all along - each spoonful of humility is accompanied by a giant leap in understanding. At every step down from a pedestal we see farther and understand more about the world and our place in it.
Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla etc. all have one kind or another of an X division. Their goal is to discover the next moonshot that advances humanity. Argument being that humanity advanced not in incremental improvements but in discoveries that improved our circumstances by a factor of 10x. Freud indicated that displacement from the centre takes place on both physical and psychological plains. For our sake, I hope that the next moonshot will not be in field of technology but in the field of empathy. The sort that can help us displace ourselves from the centre of the narrative and imagine others with the same depth and complexity as we imagine ourselves. It is the necessary prerequisite to solving the most pressing problems facing us today.
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*I freely admit that my decision to include time as the fourth dimension is controversial for a variety of reasons I only half understand. If you, dear reader, happen to take offence and would like to author a strongly worded letter, please consider this: Einstein treated time as inseparable from three dimensions of space. And if its good enough for Einstein, it is good enough for me.