William Anders died on June 7th. On Christmas Eve, 1968 he was orbiting the moon as part of the Apollo 8 mission when he became the first human being to see the Earth rise. He snapped the photo that soon became an iconic symbol for the peace and environmental movements of the the unity and fragility of the only planet that we know of that can support life on its own. The pilot of the mission, James Lovell, stated with profound simplicity: “The vast loneliness is awe inspiring.” The half earth hangs in an empty field of perfect blackness. If we traveled along any vector from our planet out into that vast loneliness, it is probable that we would not encounter another living thing, even if we traveled forever.

Decades later an even more poetically evocative photo was taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it was orbiting Saturn. Looking back from 550 million miles away it captured earth, a “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan was moved to say. The picture enabled us to see ourselves as we typically see the other stars and planets: static, motionless, without structure or topography, just there.

Neither photo captured the face of God, just our home as it really is. A century before such pictures became possible, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that progress begins when we are confronted by and understand our real conditions of life. Here are the real conditions of life: We live on a spinning ball of iron that generates a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic radiation. A just-right mix of atmospheric gases allows plant and animal life to flourish. Liquid water was available as a solvent in which life evolved and provides to this day the means of hydration that complex life-forms require.

A few years ago, my partner bought me a telescope for my birthday. It immediately rekindled my childhood love of astronomy. I can still feel the overwhelming excitement of seeing the rings of Saturn– the same rings from which Cassini would look back almost a half century later– through the eye piece of my uncle Joe’s telescope. I compiled vast notebooks of astronomical terms and facts, but I realise now that it was not the facts that compelled my interest, not even the marvels that I saw, but an idea. I would never have been able to express it when I was 8 or 9 years old, but I understand now, thinking back, that what seized me on those cold nights in the little Northern Ontario mining town where I grew up was the idea that human existence is a paradox: we are, at the same time, and for the same reason, utterly insignificant and infinitely valuable and precious. We are alone in an entropic system of energy winding itself back to nothing. At some point in the future will we cease to exist and all records of our ever having existed will have been erased. So every value in the universe depends upon our existing right now. If there is such a thing as sin it is not violating the laws of the god that does not exist, it is failure to cherish every second of our lives that do.

Out of all the billions or trillions of solar systems, ours seems to be the only one in which life arose and lasted long enough to discover what it really is: a mathematical improbability so extreme that it forces even highly educated people to imagine that there must be some divine cause. But to fully feel the terrifying beauty of human existence we must resist the temptation to posit external causes. I don’t think that I ever, even as a kid going to Catholic school, seriously believed in God. My atheism has never been dogmatic but rather aesthetic: the absurd contingency of human life makes it ours alone, to fashion into a beautiful, open-ended creation, if only we make the right collective decisions.

But rather than create the social conditions for universal cooperation, we have spent millennia inventing distinctions that have no ultimate value but which function as justifications for depriving some groups of what they need and killing them if they are too insistent on resisting that deprivation. Looking back from Saturn we do not see any borders, nations, or people. We do not see any distinctions between “mine and not-yours.” We need to look at things from up high and far out in order to understand the proper value of those social distinctions that we create. As we spread out from our original home in the rift valley of East Africa our ancestors found themselves living in different material conditions. With the same brains and hands they worked to survive, and in the process developed different tools, different languages, different traditions, different forms of art and expression, different spiritual systems and mythologies, different types of architecture, structures of rule, and different philosophical explanations of what this all means and why it matters. We should celebrate the Tower of Babel which is the Earth.

But for different reasons in different historical epochs some groups want to silence the magnificent cacophony and make everyone speak the same language and sing the same song. But all cultures are variations on a theme of creative activity under survival pressure. One can do philosophy in any language. Science and philosophy are cross cultural and transhistorical efforts to understand the basic forces that shape our universe. Everyone has contributed in different ways. It is absurd to call natural science and philosophy “Western” or “Eastern” or whatever other qualifying adjective one wants to impose. There is no master race or one chosen people; no one is special, no way of life the only way. We have all been chosen– and not only us, but the millions of other life forms with whom we share the planet have been chosen too.

When we look at ourselves from space we can see that the only meaningful whole is the earth. The stillness and silence of the black ether in which our world orbits the sun should inspire stillness in ourselves: stop trying to force the future, stop lamenting the past, just stare into the sky, into the hopeful bright blue or the meditative dark of night, and be glad that you are here. And not only be glad that you are here, but be glad that you are here with plants and animals and others, all of us different, but all earth creatures who need to eat and breath and drink and be cared for and enjoy their brief moment under the sun and stars.

Years ago, I saw Laurie Anderson perform in Ann Arbor. She created a character who spoke in an unsettling, metallic, synthesised male voice. I cannot remember the main thrust of that part of the show, but I have never forgotten one thing that the persona said: “I love the stars, because we cannot harm them.” The phrase testifies to the magnificent untouchability of the stars, but also the cruel violence of human history: anything we can get our hands on, we can destroy.

For the past two years a plurality of my posts have focused on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. When I started this site thirteen years ago I did not see it primarily as a vehicle for commentary on international relations but as a free space in which I could develop my philosophical work more creatively and accessibly than in academic publications. I continue to try to do that, but I also find myself pulled by some inner necessity to shed what little light I can on the defining conflicts of our age. I wish I could let my thoughts meander freely, but since there is no other world to go to, we have to learn to care for this one, and those of us with the privilege to be able to think for a living have a duty to turn our thoughts to the hot zones where life is being needlessly destroyed. No thinker should elevate their thoughts so high above the bloody realities that they can no longer see the people who suffer within them. They should think as clearly as they can about the causes of those problems.

It has been along time since I was a part of any political movement and it will be an eternity before I ever join one again. My philosophical side has always won out over my political sympathies. As a philosopher, I value the independence of my own mind above everything else. I try to learn from everyone I read or listen to and every sound and sight that my senses take in, but I refuse to toe anyone’s line and have become allergic as I get older to the mindless chanting of simplifying slogans. If problems were simple, they would have been solved by now. Nothing that I write here is the final word; everything that I post is an honest thinking through and an invitation to you to think those same things through in your own way.

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As with previous years I have collected last year’s posts and published them here. I hope that you will continue to read and think along with me as year fourteen of the site begins.