Life isn’t a conundrum, it’s a race across uncharted territory

A little talk is good, but if you discover yourself wanting to get the party going this festival time ask your fellow Gus which came first matter or mattering, physics or consciousness, chemicals or details, just the physical stuff or a God or higher power with a master plan.

Until recently everybody said mattering came initial. The physical world is a display of a higher power’s master plan. Creation was top-down with a master-builder creating it from anything else since it mattered to him. This way derives with Plato along with the thought that flowed from him into our Christian culture. Perfectness was perpetually present, the perfect to be matched by means of life’s attempts.

Improvement was a matter of approximating preexisting perfection, like matching your behavior to an existing model. Life was like a riddle. You might not know the answer yet, but it already exists perfectly filled out at the back of the magazine waiting for you to discover it. Life was arrayed in a fantastic chain of being. At the top was The Appropriate Answer, within the form of the Ideal, a higher power or God. Arrayed at successive distances from this perfection had been angels, humans, and the lowly animals, further from God and perfection, incomplete and incorrect answers to the riddle. If the master plan already exists men and women could claim to already know what it is and gloat or go on crusades and jihads to let other people know how far short they fall of perfection.

Evolutionary theory flips the story. We discover ourselves in a universe 14 billion years old, the 1st 10 billion of which had no behavior we’ve discovered that demands an explanation from intelligence. Mattering emerged from matter. Apparently consciousness had to bootstrap out of physics. Darwin gave us a partial answer to how, and scientists continue to fill out the story.
With Evolution, not only do the answers not pre-exist at the back of the magazine but the questions maintain changing. We build the road as we travel it. We aren’t matching a pre-existing perfection template, or even heading toward a predetermined destination, we’re guessing what will work now, and our guesses change our circumstances so what works today could not work tomorrow. We grope within the dark for a moving target. Life, it turns out evolves by trial and error. At numerous scales from our individual gestures to our entire lives, our cultures, and our nations, we are trials in trial and error processes, competitors in competitions. We are competitors for limited resources. We’re not test-takers to some universally standardized test. We didn’t fall from grace, we rose from slime and the qualities that win inside the competition we face are various from those that won in our slimy origins. There is no supreme universal moral standard other than whatever works, whatever keeps your trials in play.
Though the vast majority of people you meet at holiday parties is going to be Platonic not Darwinian in their outlook, the US, our proudly totally free marketplace democracy recognizes and embraces the evolutionary competition. We aspire to be an egalitarian meritocracy: Might all have a place and also the beginning line, and then could the most effective win! May the greatest talent win! May possibly the best political party! In the global competition, might the best system of government win! May the greater nations win!

Still, it is no fun losing. Central to the modern human condition is a tension between embracing the whole competition and wanting personally to win. We say, "Let the very best win" and "let it be me." The trial and error procedure makes sense. It got us this far as a result we honor it. But as a trial within the trial and error method we strive to be the trial that prevails within the competition. We have split allegiances-to the game and to our team.

There’s a bit of the sore loser in every of us. Nowadays, we hear among the hyper-hardline patriots an insistence that our nation and culture has already won the competition and also the competition was truly Platonic-meeting God’s ideal.
America is entitled to the spoils of success at this time and forever much more. In the big chain of being we are higher than the other people. And if for any reason the spoils of success aren’t coming, somebody else is cheating. Sore failures often cry "unfair!" while they feel threatened with failure.

And yet at the heart of our free times is the thought of very good will to all boys and girls. Embrace the competition. Resist our general and natural double standard. Don’t be a sore failure.