Theologian Eric Springsted [1] draws upon the work of philosopher Simone Weil to illustrate a phenomenon that we all experience every day:
We are subject to an illusion, [Weil] suggests, that is analogous to the one we experience whenever we look up into the sky...and it appears that the sky is a bowl inverted above us, thus making it appear as if we were at the center of a spherical world. In the moral case the illusion is that it appears to us as if we were at the center of the world. We thus appear as terrifically important, and what else is of value can be ranked by its proximity to us. [2]
The late writer David Foster Wallace discussed the same illusion, which he described as a "default setting" in human psychology:
Here's just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. [3]
So we can acknowledge that we are not the center of the world (or the universe), and we know that this illusion is not true--and yet it certainly feels true. This "center of the world illusion" is deeply intertwined with conscious experience--in a sense, we can view it as an aspect of consciousness itself, which suggests that even as we find it "socially repulsive," it has served some sort of purpose. Psychologist Victor Johnston has written about "the adaptive illusion," the idea that our perceptions of the world around us do not reflect an objective "ground truth," but instead are a function of evolutionary biology:
[Our conscious experiences] are the emergent properties of the nervous system that have been selected because they amplify and discriminate between attributes of the world that are biologically important... But natural selection doesn't "care" whether such experiences are accurate reflections of our external reality; it "cares" only about biological usefulness--the extent to which they enhance the survival and reproduction of organisms that possess them relative to those that do not... As a consequence, organisms have evolved subjective experiences that impose a distorted but functionally useful view of the world "out there," and at the same time have evolved the neural machinery that underlies this interpretation of reality... In a sense...we are all hallucinating. [4]
We can readily grasp why evolution has selected for the center of the world illusion--viewing ourselves from this perspective, we typically put our subjective needs and desires above those of others, making our own biological success more likely. This need not conflict with research suggesting that evolution has also selected for empathy and that our ancestors' ability to connect with others and cooperate in relatively large groups is what allowed them to overcome their disadvantages against predators and environmental conditions. [5] But even if a capacity for empathy is also an evolved trait, in many situations the experience of empathizing with another requires deliberate and sustained effort, while the center of the world illusion can be evoked effortlessly in an instant. In our brain's hierarchy of priorities, the self usually takes precedence over others.
As with so many other aspects of our psychology, the center of the world illusion is a "feature" for the species that often "acts like a bug" in personal experience. [6] While it supports our biological success, it also causes a great deal of trouble. It distances us from each other, at times making it profoundly difficult to understand other people's perspectives or even accept their views as "real" in the same way that we regard our own. It leads us to privilege our subjective emotional experience, particularly the highly contingent states of fear and anxiety that are so often a function of mistaken assumptions and missing data. [7,8] It is the engine of our selfishness, the drive that so often causes us to act with heedless disregard for our impact on others.
This illusion's default nature is what makes it so problematic. The sense of naturalness that it evokes renders it invisible to us. It's hard to remember that it's an illusion even in moments of reflective calm, and it vanishes from awareness the instant we register a sensation or feel an impulse that grounds us in our individual identity and perceived needs. So what can we do? Springsted refers us to a passage in Weil, who locates the effort to resist this illusion at the heart of what it truly means to be human:
To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world, or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing. [9]
And Wallace challenges us to see the many ways in which contemporary society actively exploits and reinforces the illusion. He acknowledges the benefits we enjoy as a result, before reminding us that life presents us with an endless stream of opportunities to put service before comfort, to put others before self:
The so-called "real world" will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the so-called "real world" of men and money and power hums merrily along on the fuel of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. [10]
Attention, awareness, discipline, effort, caring, sacrifice. And, to Weil's point, love: Love of our neighbor, love of the order and beauty of the world. These qualities do not come easily to fearful, anxious creatures who believe themselves to be the center of the world. Perhaps the whole point of this existence is to try.
Footnotes
[1] Eric Springsted
[2] "Will and Order: The Moral Self in Augustine's De Libero Arbitrio," page 92 (Eric O. Springsted, Augustinian Studies, Volume 29, Issue 2, 1998). This essay is also available as a chapter in Springsted's The Act of Faith: Christian Faith and the Moral Self (2015).
[3] "This Is Water" (David Foster Wallace, 2005.) While I continue to find "This Is Water" worthy of study, I also believe it's important to acknowledge Wallace's violence and abusiveness toward the writer Mary Karr, which I discuss further here.
[4] Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotion, pages 18-19 (Victor Johnston, 1999)
[5] To take just one example: Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts (Dacher Keltner interviewed by David DiSalvo, Scientific American, 2009)
[6] "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature" Trite--or Just Right? (Nicholas Carr, Wired, 2018)
[7] Racing Up the Ladder of Inference
[8] Seeing What's Not There (The Importance of Missing Data)
[9] Waiting for God, page 160 (Simone Weil, 1973). Quoted in Eric Springsted's "Will and Order," page 93.
[10] Wallace, ibid.
Photo by Rachid Ahitass.
