Accident? Spare me!

For an action not to be accidental, it must be intentional, but if our intentions don’t matter—only our actions—then those actions have to be accidents, don’t they? What is one supposed to do with words that sound soul-searching but which come from a person who expresses doubt about the very existence of a soul and who denies value to thinking that is morally contemplative? Whose best advice in the face of cultural seismography is “get yourself a gun and have another cocktail”? Settle in for the binge-watching of artfully filmed violence, I guess. At what point do things cease to be “accidental” if it was an accident that started everything? Nothing comes out of nothing; action does not proceed from a vacuum. A Big Bang does not just “happen.”

If the minuscule scrabbling about of vermin on the surface of an unimportant globe are not meaningless and accidental, then why should it be thought that the massive gravitational forces that play upon that globe are? Nobody knows what gravity “is” or how it works but that shouldn’t suggest insignificance. People who have no problem with the idea that a week of cloudy weather affects your mood want you to think that the gas giants huddling on one side of the solar system for months on end don’t do anything important. As Galileo might have said, Risparmiami!

Jupiter radiates more energy than it receives from the sun. We are not obliged to accept the largely nonsensical dicta of modern astrology in order to assert that the planets of our system affect us materially or that the stars are our destination. Keeping in mind, of course, that it is precisely those truths of which we are most dismissive which will catch us most off-guard.

STANLEY G. JOHNSON

Little Rock