Why is Life So Infernally Hard

(This is a guest post from ~lagrev-nocfep)

There’s an uncomfortable secular truth which many of us have striven to understand or avoid or explain away. One way of stating it is Darwinian: “the survival of the fittest,” necessitating a violent and tumultuous natural world brim full of death. Another is Nick Land’s phrase, “everything of value has been built in Hell.”

What Dr. Land means by this phrase is that in the world we live in, robustness and quality emerge from combat and contest. “All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. … Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality … leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy.”

Now, Nick Land is something of a horrorist or nihilist, strange bedfellow for theological speculation. But while you disagree with the divine vacuum yawning underneath his worldview, you still must engage with the fact that some form of Darwinian competition seems to be prima facie descriptive of our reality and therefore true.

That’s a bitter pill to swallow, and many have completely refused any theory of evolution on the dual grounds that God would not create a world of death and that God would not create imperfect archetypes of creatures. Can we square this circle?

The Book of Abraham offers us a lapidary glimpse into the world of the Council of the Gods:

1. If two things exist, and there be one above the other, there shall be greater things above them. (Abr. 3:16)
2. If there be two spirits, and one shall be more intelligent than the other, yet these two spirits, notwithstanding one is more intelligent than the other, have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are gnolaum, or eternal. (Abr. 3:18)
3. These two facts do exist, that there are two spirits, one being more intelligent than the other; there shall be another more intelligent than they; I am the Lord thy God, I am more intelligent than they all. I dwell in the midst of them all. (Abr. 3: 19, 21)

We can infer some laws from these:

1. Any gradient implies an eternally ascending gradient.
2. The top of an eternally ascending gradient is God.
3. The elements of this gradient as spirits always had a prior existence and always have a posterior existence.

God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself. The relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge. He has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences, that they may be exalted with himself, so that they might have one glory upon another, and all that knowledge, power, glory, and intelligence, which is requisite in order to save them in the world of spirits. (King Follett Discourse)

God, or the Council of Gods, has arranged to elevate each intelligence to as high a pitch as it can rise.

We are faced with the incontestable observed fact that Nature is violent, vicious, and engaged in constant warfare. We have found it hard to reconcile this fact with a Lamb of God and a Garden of Eden. However, we may simply assume that what is is good. It was, after all, pronounced so by God Himself on the sixth day.

And not just violence in the sense of the biological theory of evolution by natural selection: also creative destruction, competitive marketplace forces, bankruptcy and dissolution and churn. Athleticism. Status jockeying. War. Any system that competitively favors fitness rhymes.

Again, how do we reconcile? We need to run the observations backwards to answer our question:

1. God is good and has pronounced Creation good.
2. God has arranged Creation for the telos of Man’s salvation and exaltation—and indeed all of the intelligences that will.
3. Creation selects hard for survival and the cold dose of reality. (Creation is fallen and doesn’t balance this anymore.)
4. Therefore “everything of value has been built in Hell” means two things:
   1. The only way for intelligences to enter into exaltation is by surviving the full world of opposites; and
   2. God has arranged Creation in such a way as to maximize exaltation and glory.

The law is the schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ because we’re not quite sharp enough to follow the good principles we need to unless we have some corrective experiences. In our use of language we tend to think of punishment as something imposed by an agent. It’s an active consequence. In divine terms, though, it seems better to conceive of punishment as a passive consequence, the other end of the stick we pick up when we sin. Flipping the definition, to sin is to elect punishment. To sin is to act in such a way that punishment is consequential and merited. “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.” (Romans 7:19–20)

Damnation is not as deep as exaltation is high. Zero is a paltry opposite to infinity. The Fall was necessary to Rise. The happiness and glory utterly overwhelm the shadows cast by them but those shadows are still fixed in opposition. The existence of a moral law creates the capacity for its breaking.

There’s a strange duality here. At-one-ment is literally at-one-ing, the very etymology of the word a union and not a sundering. Yet atonement, or at least “the ends of the atonement,” is what divides asunder like a two-edged sword.

Why does a loving Heavenly Father permit suffering on the human scale, sometimes beyond our comprehension? Presumably (modulo agency and the Fall) because there is no other way as Eve observed at Eden’s exit.

What is the purpose of creation? There is one purpose to creation. I am going to try to state it in a few equivalent ways:

1. Moses records the Lord stating that His purpose is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of Man.” (Moses 1:39)
2. Moroni echoes Malachi on the “[planting] in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children … [turning] to their fathers.” (D&C 2:2)
3. Moses again: “Worlds without number have I created.” (Moses 1:33)

There are three actors in this drama: God, Creation, and Man. God creates and the purpose, telos, of Creation is for Man to reunite with God. God creates and the hearts of the children turn to their fathers. God creates and Man may—may—become “joint-heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:17) Creation is for the Council of Gods to swell in number as new intelligences receive exaltation.

The Lord of Hosts is not a metaphor. Violence is part of masculinity; therefore there is an apotheosis of violence that is compatible with the character of gods and angels. Redemption is redemption of our nature, not from our nature. We do not leave the thing that we are by becoming something different in kind, but by becoming the consummation of that thing. Our is-ness is divine.

In game-theoretical terms, if the payoff is infinite, actually infinite, then literally any finite price is worth paying. In this particular case, I don’t mean the Passion and Atonement, I mean that the world red in tooth and claw is yet an infinitesimal price to pay for rectifying existence into the Council of Gods, or at least as much of it as will accept Christ’s help and ascend. Thus agency is innate to our nature as eternal intelligences: de-cision is cutting-away. It limits infinite possibility. Human endeavor is an increasingly tenuous tower of cards, yet sometimes we set the cards right. Decision is the quantum of agency.

Now, I do not intend an apologia for harm. We are agents and many human agents (and other agents) have abused their capacity in ways that destroy the agency of others. We cannot and should not applaud that, even if recognizing that in some sense it, too, participates in this hell-building. Modulating our competition to the contest of near-equals seems the best way to manage this, leaving a role of mentorship and compassion for large differentials of power. But the abuse of agency, more than harm or hurt, is the real sin: the inept and incorrect abrogation of others’ agency.

Have you ever pruned a tree? It’s difficult to communicate the tacit knowledge itself. There is a future history of the tree in each branch, and the gardener explicitly selects among those futures aiming for the one he want. It’s somewhat hard to take a branch in isolation and determine whether or not to prune it (barring small twigs): the tree must be experienced as a gestalt. The gardener coils the tree’s energy to throw it as hard as he can towards a hidden target future. Call it an “aesthetic trajectory” if you will.

There’s a lot I’d like to say some day about creation and our role as subcreators, but for now suffice it to say that God’s work is the reference aesthetic trajectory. Joseph F. Smith taught, “If Christ knew beforehand [the vicissitudes of mortality], so did we.” There is no end to glory. That is, there is a telos to glory, but there is no limit to glory: there can be no such thing as tame exaltation.

Even the bravest that are slain
Shall not dissemble their surprise
On waking to find valor reign,
Even as on earth, in paradise;
And where they sought without the sword
Wide fields of asphodel fore’er,
To find that the utmost reward
Of daring should be still to dare.

—Robert Frost, “The Trial by Existence”