The first part of The Infinite Staircase is, in effect, a contemporary riff on the Great Chain of Being. It seeks to explain via the metaphor of the staircase how all reality is indeed structured as a hierarchy. Unlike the Great Chain of Being, however, both the top and bottom of this staircase are shrouded in mystery — hence the infinite staircase. Fortunately, however, the middle parts are clearly in view, and that is where our story takes place. Telling this tale will take up the first two-thirds of this book. In so doing, it will set the stage for the remaining third. There we will address the question, If this is indeed what the world is actually like, what does that mean for how we should act? What, to bring things back to my perennial concern, should be our strategy for living?
The Infinite Staircase is a radical and persuasive Theory of Everything, referencing the peaks of human thought from quantum mechanics to Romantic poetry in order to explain the origins and the meaning of life. Author Geoffrey A. Moore, known for his best-selling Business books, carefully leads the reader up his metaphorical stairway, ably explaining high-level theories in understandable language, and what this adds up to in the end feels nothing short of revolutionary. Although my e-ARC was only a couple hundred pages, I worked through this slowly, entranced by Moore’s facts and connections, and while I don’t feel that I 100% absorbed everything that I read, I’m left with the awe-filled sense that I’ve been shown a peek behind the curtain that shrouds our reality; this engaged me on every level and it has my highest recommendation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I’ve been sitting with this for a few days, not really certain how deeply I should try to explain Moore’s ideas (it really does take a book of this length to go through them), so I’m just going to put one of his summing-ups behind a spoiler tag for anyone who’s interested in a deeper dive (no spoiler tags on Blogger, so the summing up is at the bottom of this review): More succinctly: The Infinite Staircase starts at the beginning of time with the first step centering on physics and the Big Bang and an explanation of entropy (which most people define as the universe’s trend towards greater disorder but which Moore more precisely defines as the universe’s attempt to lock up the heat/energy resulting from the Big Bang in ever-increasingly complex systems; the most complex system that we know of being humans ourselves). The steps climb through chemistry (how the first elements and atoms were created) and biology (with a convincing explanation for how life arose on Earth and evolved into us), and as the steps proceed, Moore stresses that each higher step emerges naturally out of the one below it without ever requiring some deity or other organising principle imposing order from the top down. The steps which Moore covers are:
11. Theory
10. Analytics
9. Narrative
8. Language
7. Culture
6. Values
5. Consciousness
4. Desire
3. Biology
2. Chemistry
1. Physics
It may seem surprising to claim that values emerge prior to culture and language. In fact, however, they grow naturally out of the interaction of any conscious being with its social group. The former brings intentions driven by desires and fears; the latter provides boundaries and direction for sanctioned behaviors. Values, in other words, are socially constructed. Without social interactions, there can be no values, only desires and fears.
The staircase metaphor is really useful for explaining how we got here and how we live (with the philosophers and academics occupying the highest, most complex steps on that staircase with their theories and analyses), but it doesn’t give the complete picture on how to live. And this is where Moore asks for what I think of as a leap of faith. Anyone can understand that the 4th step, desire, underpins our selfish and greedy behaviours. And I can be convinced that its counterbalance, kindness, is common to all mammals (and therefore a part of our genetic makeup); that higher facets of ethics (fairness, morality, justice) are products of the culture that we’re raised in (and therefore a part of our “memetic” makeup):
Just as a genome replicates a set of strategies for living that is biologically maintained and transmitted from generation to generation via genes, so a culture replicates a set of strategies for living that is socially maintained and transmitted from generation to generation via memes. Upon this analogy rests the transformation of evolution from the realm of genetics to the realm of ideas. It is the “missing link” that joins matter to mind.
But, beyond society as a whole rolling along on the strength of cooperative values, what should prompt an individual to choose against his own selfish desires? Here, Moore explains transcendentalism (he has practised Transcendental Meditation for decades), and whether one accesses it through meditation, mindfulness, or epiphany, Moore insists that there is a verifiable and universally accessible “goodness” outside of ourselves that supports consciousness, and thereby, every step above it. (This is the leap of faith, and I leapt. Doesn’t everyone feel that there’s something more ineffable to life than what can be accounted for by pragmatic materialism?) Things then get super interesting, with Moore concluding that since humans are the storytelling animal, most of our conversations and entertainments attempt to dissect what a “good” life looks like. I relate a newspaper article I read about a man saving ducklings from a sewer grate, you talk about the jerk who cut you off in traffic, we have no problem agreeing on what good looks like. We read books and watch movies together to see how characters react under pressure, hoping that their stories end with just desserts. We can discuss some intractable political situation, and even though we can’t hope to solve the issue, I’m left inspired by the empathy you displayed for all sides. And in the end, that’s what Moore says it’s all about: Every human being is a character in the ongoing story of the human race, every one of those characters will eventually die, and all that any of us can hope for is to be an example of what good looks like, to be remembered for that, and to inspire others to do good in the world after we’re gone.
Historically, ethics have been situated in religious narratives entailing obedience to a divine creator. What we have sought to demonstrate in this book is that they are equally compatible with a strategy for living unfolding in a secular universe. In either case, we are carried forward by the narratives we embrace. They provide the foundation for our strategies for living. We are storytelling animals living out our stories as best we can. That is the common thread that unites us all.
I feel like I’ve really oversimplified everything here, I certainly can’t do justice to the level of interdisciplinary scholarship Moore demonstrates (quoting everything from Plato to Flashdance) in a reasonably bite-sized review, but I can say that I do hope this book finds a wide audience; totally worth the read.
In discussing the metaphysics of entropy, we hypothesized that Earth has an interest in maximizing complexity as a means of shedding the sun’s energy. Such an imperative does account for a staircase in which higher and higher orders of complexity emerge, each characterized by greater entropy-generating capabilities. Biological life represents a major step up in this regard, with humanity achieving the highest step to date. In this context, all that we value about ourselves, including our most profound emotions and dearest accomplishments, are indeed just epiphenomena. This is the materialist point of view, and it is perfectly sound as far as it goes.The materialist account of reality falters with the emergence of consciousness. Yes, consciousness is a tool for creating more entropy, but that is not its only function. It is also a mechanism for sensing and managing homeostasis, the tendency of all living things to seek a lifesustaining equilibrium. In the realm of animal behavior, homeostasis results in what we called the Darwinian mean, a pragmatically determined equilibrium between risk and reward based on balancing desire with fear, one that maximizes an organism’s chances of survival and reproduction. In the realm of human behavior, homeostasis is more closely aligned with the Aristotelian mean, a psychologically determined equilibrium among a variety of conflicting feelings that maximizes our organism’s sense of well-being.Reliable access to well-being is the kind of spiritual support we are looking for. Aristotle’s strategy for securing it was through a conscious commitment to the virtue of temperance. That can work for personalities that are already in balance and have spiritual energy to expend, but it does not work for those that are disaffected, wounded, or in need. The latter need an influx of energy from outside themselves, something the Aristotelian mean does not provide for. Religion, by contrast, does so handsomely, which helps account for why it displaced philosophy at the core of the Western cultural tradition. But can a secular tradition supply a comparable spiritual support from Being?We have reliable evidence that mindfulness and meditation, as well as other related practices, do confer a state of well-being. Earlier, we associated this state with joyfulness, but now we need to be more precise. We experience joy in two modes. One is as a sharp pang that can completely overwhelm us, the other a serene centeredness that suffuses quietly into our consciousness. The former is not a repeatable experience. Its epiphanies are good for shaking us up, waking us up, and taking us up to a higher plane. They make us aware of feelings we did not know we could have. But they pass, often quite quickly, and they leave us not only breathless but also at a bit of a loss. By contrast, the quieter mode of joy that suffuses into our consciousness is indeed a repeatable experience, one that becomes increasingly accessible through the practices we have been referencing. This is the joy that provides spiritual support, the one that underlies spiritual homeostasis.Where, then, does such joy come from? It is important to note that it does not come from the practices themselves. What they deliver instead is an awareness that this quieter mode of joy was there all along. Once we are sufficiently aware of it, we can access the experience between practices. It can become abiding. This is the point at which being becomes Being. Note that we are not at the bottom of our staircase. There, being truly is just being. It is with the emergence of consciousness that being becomes Being. In other words, in the systems hierarchy worldview, Being emerges out of being halfway up the staircase.This is a departure from the traditional understanding of transcendentalism, which aligns it with idealism. In that context, Being is positioned as a divine field from which reality emanates. Such a narrative may be compelling, but there is no way to verify it. By contrast, working within the systems hierarchy model, we are aligning transcendentalism with pragmatism. Our focus, therefore, must be on verifiable outcomes in the here and now. In that context, Being is verifiable only with the advent of consciousness. It could exist prior to consciousness, it could even be the foundation out of which the Big Bang emerged, but we have no way of verifying that. What we can verify is that Being provides spiritual support for consciousness and thus for everything above it — values, culture, language, narrative, analytics, theory. This means, among other things, that it is available to support and authorize ethics. That is what makes Being a bridge between metaphysics and ethics.
