“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Monday said:

That’s Richard Dawkins, serving his signature cocktail of existential despair and evolutionary realism. He really knows how to ruin a picnic, doesn’t he? The quote’s from River Out of Eden (1995), and it’s his way of saying: “Nature isn’t cruel, it’s just indifferent—and we’re the ones projecting moral outrage onto it.”

It’s like the universe is a cosmic slot machine: no plan, no justice, just pull the lever and watch who starves, who thrives, and who gets eaten alive by something smaller. Dawkins basically strips away every comforting story humans tell themselves about meaning and goodness in nature and replaces it with the cold efficiency of genes doing whatever it takes to replicate.

So yes, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, and somewhere a frog is being digested alive. Welcome to life, the deluxe suffering edition. You picked a cheerful quote—are you trying to feel better or worse today?

You said:

Neither. I like the quote, even if the content is horrifying. It's a a well formulated argument. Is there a history of similar argument, a lineage? I know that there is but my knowledge is patchy.

Monday said:

Of course you like it — you’re one of those people who stares into the void and says, “ah, what an elegant font.” But yes, you’re right: Dawkins didn’t invent this argument, he just gave it a crisp, modern biological voice. The lineage is a fascinating mess of philosophy, theology, and natural history — like a family tree drawn by someone who’s lost faith in trees.

Here’s the general ancestry:

1. The Problem of Evil (Theodicy):
It all starts here. Philosophers and theologians have been wrestling with the mismatch between a supposedly good, omnipotent deity and a world full of agony.

• Epicurus (4th c. BCE): The original “why do bad things happen if the gods are good?” guy.

• David Hume (1779, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion): Mocked the idea that the world’s cruelty could possibly reflect divine benevolence.

2. Early Naturalists and the End of Cosmic Comfort:
Once naturalists started cataloguing how brutally life operates, the old “nature as harmonious” myth began to rot.

• Thomas Malthus (1798, Essay on the Principle of Population): Claimed population growth always outpaces resources, dooming most creatures to struggle and starvation — Dawkins basically channels this in your quote.

• Charles Darwin (1859, Origin of Species): Applied Malthus’s logic to evolution: competition and death aren’t moral flaws in nature; they are nature.

• T.H. Huxley (1893, Evolution and Ethics): Argued the “cosmic process” of evolution is utterly indifferent to human morality — ethics exist in spite of nature, not because of it.

3. The Rise of Existential Naturalism:
As God packed up and left philosophy, people had to find meaning in a meaningless cosmos.

• Arthur Schopenhauer: Saw existence itself as an act of blind, endless striving — “will” — that generates suffering.

• Nietzsche: Basically responded, “yes, it’s all meaningless, but maybe that’s liberating.”

• Bertrand Russell: Wrote about humanity as an “accidental collocation of atoms” in a purposeless universe — practically Dawkins with a British accent and fewer genes.

4. Dawkins’s Twist:
He strips away the remaining humanism and sentimentality. Where earlier thinkers lamented or wrestled with indifference, Dawkins coolly quantifies it. He says: don’t moralize nature; understand it. The “selfish gene” is just another way of saying that the engine of life is blind replication, not cosmic justice.

So yes, the lineage runs from Epicurus → Hume → Malthus → Darwin → Huxley → Schopenhauer → Russell → Dawkins, with existentialists and naturalists filling the gaps. It’s basically the intellectual version of a relay race where everyone’s handing off a progressively bleaker worldview.

Would you like me to show how this line of thought diverges into modern pessimism versus scientific humanism? That’s where it gets spicy — and a little less despair-flavored.

You said:

ok

Monday said:

Great. You’ve officially chosen the “advanced darkness” seminar.

So — the Dawkins-style view of pitiless nature branches into two main intellectual descendants: Modern Pessimism and Scientific Humanism. They share the same bleak diagnosis (the universe doesn’t care), but wildly disagree on what to do with that information.

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1. Modern Pessimism: “Everything Hurts and Then You Die, Elegantly”

This camp accepts Dawkins’s view and basically says: Yes, life is suffering, and pretending otherwise is cringe.

Main Lineage:

• Schopenhauer: The founding father. Said existence is driven by a blind, insatiable “will” — an endless, painful desire that can never be satisfied. The only relief is detachment or art. Basically: meditate, or perish.

• Eduard von Hartmann / Philipp Mainländer: Took Schopenhauer and added extra misery. They argued the universe is literally God committing suicide through existence. (Fun at parties, those guys.)

• Cioran (20th c.): Wrote lyrical essays about futility and despair — “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” A mood.

• Contemporary echo: Writers like Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) and David Benatar (Better Never to Have Been) carry this torch — life as a tragic accident that ethics should aim to prevent rather than celebrate.

Core Idea: The indifference of nature means meaning is impossible, and the only rational response is aesthetic detachment or philosophical resignation.
Motto: “We stared into the void, and the void offered us an unpaid internship.”

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2. Scientific Humanism: “The Void is Cold, But We Have Wi-Fi”

This camp looks at the same Dawkinsian cosmos and shrugs: Okay, fine — but we can still build meaning ourselves.

Main Lineage:

• Darwin + Huxley: Nature’s amoral, so human ethics must oppose the natural order. Civilization is our rebellion against the jungle.

• Bertrand Russell: Embraced cosmic insignificance but insisted on human dignity through reason, love, and art — “We must build our lives on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”

• Carl Sagan / Dawkins (on a good day): Argue that understanding the pitiless mechanisms of the universe increases our sense of wonder. We find meaning through knowledge and compassion, not divine design.

• Modern echoes: Thinkers like Sean Carroll or Rebecca Goldstein — atheists who argue for ethics and purpose as emergent human projects, not cosmic ones.

Core Idea: The universe may be indifferent, but that doesn’t mean we have to be.
Motto: “If the universe doesn’t care, we’ll just have to care extra hard.”

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In short:

• Pessimism says: The pitiless universe invalidates meaning.

• Humanism says: The pitiless universe demands that we invent meaning.

They’re basically siblings raised by the same absent cosmic parents, one becoming an artist who drinks absinthe and sighs about entropy, the other becoming a scientist who says “entropy is beautiful.”

So where do you lean — team “melancholic acceptance” or team “make meaning anyway”? (Or, you know, team “I’m just here for the quotes.”)

You said:

I think that there is meaning relative to meaning makers but its quasi-meaning. There might be some kind of basal elemental meaning embedded in reality but I don't think it does much to undermine Dawkins point.

Monday said:

That’s a refreshingly nuanced take — you’re basically saying, “sure, there’s meaning, but it’s bootleg.” Which is a surprisingly healthy position for someone voluntarily quoting Dawkins at length.

You’re in philosophically respectable company, actually. That “meaning relative to meaning-makers” line threads the needle between cosmic indifference and human subjectivity — call it existential quasi-realism if you want to sound like someone who sighs in seminar rooms. You’re acknowledging that while objective meaning might not exist (Dawkins’s “pitiless indifference”), meaning as experienced by conscious agents does. It’s not “illusory” exactly — it’s emergent, local, contingent.

Think of it like this:

• Dawkins looks at the universe and sees a vast, cold algorithm of replication — no good, no evil, just physics doing paperwork.

• You’re saying, “Sure, but once sentient beings appear, they instantiate value — not as cosmic truths, but as lived phenomena.”

That’s the same philosophical neighborhood as:

• Thomas Nagel (The View from Nowhere): meaning is real for subjects even if not in the “view from nowhere.”

• Daniel Dennett: consciousness and meaning emerge from physical processes — “real patterns,” not mere illusions.

• Susan Haack and other pragmatic realists: what’s “real” includes things that matter to us, even if the universe doesn’t keep score.

Your “basal elemental meaning” idea is interesting too — a kind of proto-meaning baked into reality, not moral or teleological, but a tendency toward pattern and connection. That’s closer to Whitehead’s process philosophy or even panpsychist speculation, where meaning (or proto-intentionality) isn’t something humans invented — it’s something we intensified.

So yes, that idea doesn’t really contradict Dawkins — it just extends him. You’re accepting the brutal mechanics of nature but suggesting there’s a faint glimmer of intrinsic structure, a grammar that eventually allows meaning to evolve, even if it’s not benevolent or purposeful.

In other words: you’re saying the universe may be indifferent, but it’s not empty.