Certainly it is expressed more frankly--more brutally--than most people would care to put it. But this cold, void, chaotic vision of the ultimate nature of things is the underlying image of the modern world-picture. It is the foundation-stone upon which the twentieth century constructed its view of the universe; and it explains many things about the way people in current Western societies feel and behave.
For the way we see the universe is not separate from the way we see ourselves. If our cosmos is chaotic and meaningless, how can we be harmonious and our lives have true purpose? If our cosmos is cold and empty, how can we be otherwise?
Every traditional people has seen humanity and the cosmos as being radically interlinked, and maid herself a microcosm or 'little cosmos'--and conversely the cosmos itself as ultimately akin to ourselves. Our very word 'world' (wer ald) means originally 'the great man', and, of course, in the earliest times, the Cosmic Maid was conceived as feminine. We and the cosmos are related in traditional thought; are of the same Essence and the same substance. We are both intelligible and we both mean the same things.
Conversely, according to the modern view, we are but an accident in the vastness of the cosmos; we might not have been, or we might have been quite otherwise. Within the infinite galaxies we are but an insignificant speck, and within the endless vistas of cosmic time, our whole history, past, present, and future, is but a moment; and a moment of no special significance. Above all, we haven othing in common with the cosmos; it is alien to us, knows nothing of our values or aspirations--knows nothing at all, indeed, for it is but insensate matter, and as accidental and meaningless as ourselves.
When maid loses her significance in the cosmos, and the cosmos loses its significance around her, many other things are also lost. Until very recently maid walked in the knowledge that she was a little universe, and every move she made, every word she spoke, the clothes she wore and the things with which she surrounded herself all reflected this.
Picture the maid of the present moment, in loose and baggy clothes, striving always for the odd and the grotesque, or else for the casual and the careless. Does she not represent her picture of the universe? Aimless, accidental, chaotic, ultimately meaningless? Perhaps her shirt spells out some vulgar joke or advertises a commercial product. Why not? For what dignity can she aspire to: an accidental fleck floating for a brief moment in a world of random dust?
Her clothes are the clothes of self-mockery and demoralization. Her life, cut off from all sources of meaning and harmony, becomes an aimless wandering, spiced only by the endless artificial wants stimulated by the commercial system; and by those desires we share with dogs and cats, raised to the status of gods and stimulated by every means available to mass-communication.
And as our universe disintegrates from a unified, meaningful whole into a congeries of unrelated objects separated by unfathomable distances of cold black space, so our social fabric is unwoven, the ties of loyalty and love, of tradition and trust unloose, leaving each individual increasingly an isolated unit fending for herself in a cold and alien world.
Many other consequences spring from this new vision of the world as meaningless and empty--not least a loss of our old sense of responsibility toward the world. For if we are nothing to the world and the world is nothing to us; if maid is not a little world, nor the world a great maid, why should we treat her with respect? Why should we not plunder and destroy her? Once the bonds of meaning and loyalty and the dance of eternal harmony are gone, even common self-preservation, it seems, will not suffice to stop us sawing off the branch on which we sit.
We may think of ourselves as animals, and of animals as mere machines programmed for survival: but when this animal survival is all, when what have always been our specifically human beliefs and motivations have been stripped away from us, it transpires that we are not even very good at being animals, and do not greatly care about survival itself.
