Deep Objekt Lab
Thomas Moynihan: "The Death of Destiny: Or, How (Almost) Everything Became Contingent"
Sunday, August 18, at 10 am Pacific Time
Meeting Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83343522462
What does it mean for an action to matter? Answering this, unsurprisingly, is difficult, but often it has something to do with contingency and indelibility. That is, actions matter only when we acknowledge the consequences they unleash would not have happened otherwise; and they matter more in proportion to how lasting these impacts are, particularly so if they are irreversible. This is the very essence of history: of that arena wherein what comes before influences what comes after, in the sense that had what came before gone otherwise, then everything thereafter would have unfolded differently also. And history is the sole arena within which actions come to matter. For beyond what is considered to be historical, there is only timelessness, recurrence, and the eternity wherein every consequence—and its opposite—will eventually come to pass regardless of what happens now. Contrarily, only within historical domains does decision matter, insofar as not every possibility can—or will—come to pass. History is the domain of the possible, of all the ways things could have gone otherwise, and contingency the mark of constraint that gives decisions bite insofar as it permanently excludes alternate possibilities. So, all that said, it is probably practically relevant to us that, for decades now, science has taught us that we don't just live as a historical species, on a historical planet, in a historical Solar System, but we also live in a thoroughly historical universe. After all, changing gauges of what's ultimately possible also, by necessity, change what we think of as practical and, ultimately, imperative. Aiming to unveil the togetherness of pragmatism and cosmology, this seminar recounts how we got to this point before exploring some options for what it demands of us and how it all might impinge on the question of what, ultimately, must be done.
Readings:
About the Author:
Thomas Moynihan is a historian of ideas and writer. He holds a PhD from Oriel College, Oxford University, and is currently a Affiliate Researcher at Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, alongside being a Research Affiliate at the Berggruen Institute's Antikythera think tank. Primarily, he studies how worldviews transform over time, in often radical ways, as more is learnt and revealed about the cosmos and our placement within it. Thomas is author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction (MIT x Urbanomic, 2020) and Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (MIT x Urbanomic, 2019). Aside from lecturing at institutions ranging from Stanford to the Edinburgh Royal Society, Thomas's writing has appeared in publications such as the BBC, The New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, Noema Magazine, The Independent, and Tank Magazine.
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