How Einstein Broke the Story of Everything

The Neo Axial Age, Part 5

“The artist, the scholar, the philosopher, the contemplative should really admire the world and pierce through the film of unreality that veils it and makes of it, for nearly all men at nearly every moment of their lives, a dream or stage set.” — Simone Weil, from her essay “Forms of the implicit love of God”

I remember all too well the first time I heard the now infamous phrase, “alternative facts.” They were uttered by Kellyanne Conway in a confrontational interview with Chuck Todd’s Meet the Press on January 22, 2017, just two days into the Trump presidency. (You can watch the heated exchange here.) Conway used the phrase in defense of Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claim that the inauguration of President Trump had “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration…period, both in person and around the globe."

I watched the inauguration on livestream, and noted how, at least to my eyes, the crowds looked quite sparse compared to previous inaugurations I’d witnessed. I even reviewed videos and photographs of previous inaugurations to confirm what I was witnessing. Because of my personal assessment on the matter, Conway’s comments produced a sinking feeling in my gut, like I had just stumbled out of reality and into an episode of Black Mirror, or, worse, into the “newspeak” of George Orwell’s 1984. How could a public spokesperson for our government so blatantly lie to our faces (again, my perspective) and then, when confronted, shamelessly label those lies as “alternative facts”? Was this really happening? The entire exchange felt disturbingly surreal.

When you add to that the genuine likelihood that at this very moment some of you just labeled me as a “sheeple” — a brainwashed citizen who would rather walk blindly into my own destruction than open my eyes to what’s really going on here — it only further highlights the surreal quality of this new reality Conway named with those two seemingly innocuous words:

We now live in a universe of alternative facts.  

But just how on earth did we get here? 

Well, like everything involving human belief systems, cultural dynamics, and relationship hierarchies … it’s complicated. And just to acknowledge this point up front: We hate that it’s complicated. We’d all love nothing more than to identify and root out that one, singular enemy who is ultimately to blame for this current confusion and at whom we can point our collective anger and judgment and with a rush of deep-seated satisfaction bind them in chains and cast them headlong into the eternal lake of fire, and subsequently throw a party where at long last all the good people of the earth can finally breathe a sigh of well-deserved relief. 

That longing ache we all feel — for a simple answer, for a straightforward, black-hatted, mustache-twirling bad guy — is completely understandable. 

And it is naive. It’s not that there are no bad operators out there. There certainly are, and they must be dealt with. But the seeds that produced the poisoned vines that choke the better angels of their soul are planted deep in all of us. We are not alien to the darkness we oppose. It lives in every one of us, and until we face that reality, and honestly confront with courage and compassion the darkness in ourselves first of all, we will remain stuck in the tired loop of self-righteous us-vs-them thinking, and therefore be ill-equipped to deal with the complex realities of who we actually are as human beings, and what we actually need to thrive in community together. 

Throughout the history of humankind, no amount of scapegoating, or vilification of a persecuted class, or hate mongering of the unholy “other” has ever made a society safe, or set the hearts of its people free. Not ever. Not even once.

I believe we are now living on the back half of St. Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 13:

“When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.” — 1 Corinthians 13:11

It’s time we stopped behaving as children, and looked our reality square in the mirror. Because it is indeed into a mirror we need to look. 

There are multiple factors that have contributed to the confusion of our current times: The decline of civic virtue, by which I mean, the decline in popularity of status markers related to being a “good” citizen; the rise in social media and the subsequent formation of “reality bubbles;” the rise in the monetization of attention; the decline of news organizations into propaganda machines designed wholly to make money for the corporations who run them; the failure of organized religion to adapt to the new realities of our times, along with its failure to attend to the very real spiritual needs of people trying to navigate them; the degradation of trust in public institutions due to ongoing problems of greed, corruption, and incompetence; western culture’s stubborn refusal to confront the negative impact of its own systemic shadow on the world both in the past and in the present in the form of racism, misogyny, ethical duplicity, war mongering … and the list goes on. Don’t worry. We’ll get to all of that in time.

But when it comes to the collapse of the Story of Everything — the primary truth narrative, if you will, that Western Civilization has relied on since the time of the Reformation to explain to us who are as humans, what reality actually is, and what’s really going on here in this thing we call the universe — I believe we can point to a particular moment, and a particular man, who we might think of as a kind of “first thread,” that, once pulled, began to unravel the whole elaborate tapestry of our shared Story of Everything.

The moment was the early 1910s.

The man was Einstein.

Well, to be fair, it was Einstein and his fellow scientists. But it was most especially Einstein. It’s no wonder the man looms so large in our collective memory. It was he who dealt the first blow to our Story of Everything; and it began, innocently enough, with a curious quirk about special relativity that Einstein explained. 

Fair warning, we’re about to go down the relativity rabbit hole here, but not very far, and I really do believe you’ll find this as fascinating as I do … so buckle in. 

Einstein called this curious quirk the “relativity of simultaneity,” and explained it via a short vignette about two people observing two lightning bolts striking both ends of a moving train. The first observer — we’ll call him Sam — is standing on a platform at a train station as a train speeds by. The second observer — let’s call him Frodo — is seated at the exact midpoint on the train itself. 

Then, says Einstein, this unlikely thing happens. From Sam’s perspective, at the very instant Mr. Frodo crosses his direct line of sight, two lightning bolts simultaneously strike either end of the train. These strikes seem simultaneous to Sam because Sam is equidistant from both ends of the train (as is Frodo, it’s important to note), and the light from each strike reaches him at the same instant.

However, from Frodo’s perspective seated on the train, the lightning strikes will not appear to be simultaneous. The bolt at the front of the train will seem to strike before the bolt at the rear of the train. Why? Well, if we were Sam, we would say it’s because Frodo is in motion toward the bolt at the front of the train, so naturally the light from that end of the train will reach him a little sooner, and the light from the back of the train will lag behind a bit. 

But that’s where the quirk comes in: You see, we can’t actually say who’s in motion and who’s not. I know that sounds like a weird assertion to make here on earth, where we have this big blue green marble constantly dominating our perceptions of location and movement … but there is no singular frame of reference like that in spacetime. Everything in the universe is moving relative to everything else, and to say something or someone — like the Earth, or Sam — is stationary, is nothing more than a convenient illusion. In the train example, we could have just as easily said the train was stationary and the platform was racing past it, and the physics would all still work. 

So, which hobbit correctly perceived the timing of the lightning strikes — Frodo, or Sam?

The answer is both. And neither. 

That’s the first quirk presented by the relativity of simultaneity: When people are moving in different directions or speeds relative to each other, they perceive outside events differently, and we have no way to know which of them is seeing the absolute “truth” of what’s happening. In fact, it seems that they are both seeing the truth as it appears from their frame of reference. 

There are even more complex quirks related to the relativity of simultaneity that have to do with the malleability of time, but for our purposes I think we’ve explored the rabbit hole deeply enough to make the point: 

Through the discovery of special relativity, Einstein established that the absolute truth of an observed event cannot be known by anyone who exists within spacetime. 

Of course, it must be understood that the truth Einstein is describing here is happening at relativistic speeds. In our ordinary day to day Newtonian existence, the “facts” of events appear quite consistent. It is highly unlikely that Sam and Frodo would ever have a falling out over whether the lightning strikes were simultaneous, as the difference between their perceptions are so minuscule as to be nearly impossible to detect. 

Even so, the important bit to grab hold of here is that Einstein proved that in an absolute sense, we humans cannot know with certainty the full truth of any event we observe. It is this concept that has gradually woven its way into the collective conscience of society, leading first to the rise of Relativism (a philosophy that predates Einstein but enjoyed a significant surge in popularity thanks to his discoveries related to special and general relativity), and, more recently, to the notion that facts are themselves relative, and are at least to a degree dependent on the viewpoint of the source naming them. Thus, two people can watch a video of a police officer struggling with a black man on a street corner, and one will see blatant police violence while the other sees an officer simply doing his job in a difficult situation. Thus, a young girl can tell her parents she thinks she’s actually a boy, and they feel pressure to accept her assertion over their own experience of her, even though she is still a child. And thus, Kellyanne Conway can claim that Sean Spicer was simply stating “alternative facts” about Trump’s inauguration. 

On the surface, this may sound like a rapid descent into chaos for society at large — If we can’t agree on basic facts, how can we hold ourselves together at all? — and while there are most definitely significant dangers to be concerned about here, it should be pointed out that the fruits of this revelation have not been all negative. For example, because of our new appreciation for the uncertainty of perception, we now have a better understanding of concepts like confirmation bias, and the “perception box” our brains create that shape our view of reality in ways that differ from the people around us. It turns out the human condition is indeed as Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani described it in the Jewish Talmud:

“We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

On a societal level, we now understand, perhaps more keenly than ever before, that you and I can observe the same thing happening out in the world, and have two different views on what is factually occurring. And we might both be right (at least in part). And we might both be wrong (at least in part). 

This new understanding reinforces the critical role compassion and empathy has to play whenever we engage questions of morality and behavior in other people. After all, if my perceptions of your actions are unavoidably influenced by my own biases and assumptions, how can I claim any authority to pass judgment on the morality of your choices? This is why it is so critical, argues theologian N.T. Wright, that we learn to engage what he calls our “sympathetic imagination” whenever we attempt to discern the relative “rightness” or “wrongness” of another person’s behaviors. It is only through empathy that we can hope to rightly discern the full truth of another person’s actions. It seems the old adage of withholding judgment before “walking a mile in another person’s shoes” is far more essential to our shared human thriving than perhaps any of us realized.

It’s not that there is no such thing as absolute truth — that’s never a claim that Einstein makes (though Relativism does). It’s that we can never fully perceive that truth as it actually is. We can only perceive it as we are — which is to say, only through our particular lens of experiences, biases, beliefs, and limiting perceptions. In effect, none of us can escape the waters of perception we’re swimming in, and those waters always warp to one degree or another the things we see. 

Only a being who is outside of spacetime can perceive the universe in its fullness as it actually is. Only someone outside of our reality can observe an event in our reality and say with any authority “this is what happened.”

It is as the great writer Madeline L’Engle once observed: “I have a point of view. You have a point of view. God has view.”

“I have a point of view. You have a point of view. God has view.” — Madeline L’Engle

This doesn’t mean we can’t know anything about the truth of our existence…only that what we can know about it is limited and circumspect. It’s a bit like trying to determine the exact shape and size of our galaxy from our current location inside the galaxy. It’s not that it can’t be done at all. But it can’t be done (at least with current technology) with absolute certainty. Not many sources of measurement are available, and none are infallible. 

At this point, I would hope that my Christian friends would point to the Bible and say: “There! There is the truth. God revealed it to us through His Word.” And, as a Christian myself, I would agree. But in full intellectual honesty I must also admit that my confidence in the Divine origins of scripture is just as subject to the limitations of my “perception box” as anything else in my world. In other words, I could be wrong about my belief that the Bible is Divinely inspired. And, even if I am right (and I believe I am), my views on the meaning and interpretation of God’s Word are still far from infallible. My perception of the Bible is unavoidably shaped by the particular frame through which I’m looking at it, the biases I hold in relation to it, and the limiting perceptions my brain has built relative to it. Thus, even though I find its truths deeply meaningful and nourishing and rich in wisdom and direction for life, another person may evaluate it honestly and in good faith through an entirely different lens, and since we are co-habitants of the same spacetime universe, neither of us has the authority to declare with absolute certainty that the other got it completely wrong. 

In other words, just as Galileo’s and Luther’s revelations slowly dismantled the authority of kings and priests to declare what is or isn’t “absolute truth” in the Middle Ages, so Einstein’s revelations regarding the relativity of perception are calling into question any human’s authority to declare what “truth” is or isn’t to any other human.

How can we be confident of any truth at all, then?

I’ll save that exploration for a future post. But I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the question in the comments below.

The implications of this shift are indeed far reaching, and in this post I’ve only just begun to peer over the edge into their possibilities. But now that we’ve had Einstein’s revelation pinging around in the back of our minds for the past hundred years or so, perhaps it isn’t so strange to imagine why we’ve seen such a surge of debate in recent decades regarding grey areas of our reality that we have historically categorized as black and white. New questions around the nature of sexuality and gender, around race, culture and intersectionality, around individual rights and communal responsibility, around the purpose of religion and the nature of spirituality, around the line between humanity and technology, around the line (if there is a line) between the earth and us, around what it even means to be human at all — all of these debates have come about at least in part because of what Einstein revealed … that every one of us who lives in this spacetime mystery is peering out on the universe through personalized lenses. None of us really knows with certainty the absolute truth of what we are, what all this is, or what’s really going on here. 

We are, for better or worse, embedded in this Great Mystery together. And none of us can say with certainty what it’s all really about.

In light of such a revelation, asking hard questions about many assumptions we’ve long held sacred in our Story of Everything seems quite an appropriate response, and even an essential one, however uncomfortable it makes us feel. Just because a process is disruptive and painful, as P. K. Dick reminds us, does not mean it isn’t good, and even essential to our shared thriving. 

"Do not believe…do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new." — Philip K. Dick

Our best hope at this critical juncture, it seems to me, is to share our experiences with one another, as simply and honestly as we can, especially across lines that have historically divided us, in the hope of finding a more comprehensive view of our actual reality as it is in community together. It’s time we let go the tired old battle cries of us vs them, and embarked on a more fertile path, sown with the skills of courageous self-examination, empathic listening, reasoned debate, and communal sensemaking. We must each in our own way take the vulnerable risk to invite other people to walk a mile in our shoes, and then be willing to humble ourselves enough to walk a mile in theirs.

(Note: This is the 5th installment in a series of essays. You can find all the entries by following these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.)