The name 'Mediterranean' (derived from medius, "middle," and terra, "land" or "earth") preserves in its etymology the ancient conception of a flat earth whose center was the great sea of the classical world. This conception was quaint, insular and wrong. But almost every culture begins with—and defends to the bitter end—the presumption that it is at the center of things. That is, after all, the way things seem. The sky, most especially, impresses us as equally distant in all directions. If we were not at the center, wouldn't it appear closer in one direction and farther in the others?

Yet even those among the ancients who knew that the earth was spherical and hence that they were not at its center assumed that the earth itself was the center of the universe—and with similar reason, for is the firmament or sphere of the stars not equidistant in all directions? We know of only two contrary voices, those of Aristarchus and Seleucus the Babylonian—but even they supposed that the sun was the center and that we were close. The idea that there might not be a center was apparently not seriously entertained by anyone in the ancient world.

When, after Galileo, the failure of the earth-centered model became undeniable, the immediate inference was, as with the ancients, to a heliocentric (sun-centered) model, not a centerless model. This heliocentrism proved tenacious—especially after its apparent confirmation by William Herschel, the greatest astronomer of the eighteenth century. Herschel was among the first to realize that the Milky Way is a disk-shaped galaxy of stars. Since no other galaxy was yet known—others, the "spiral nebulae," could be seen but were not yet recognized for what they were—, the Milky Way was then and for more than a century after regarded as the entire universe. Herschel observed that the average density of stars visible through his telescopes was roughly constant in all directions along the plane of the Milky Way. From this he and other astronomers concluded that the sun is near Milky Way's center—and hence near the center of the known universe. Herschel's reasoning (things look the same in all directions, so we must be near the center) was little better than that of the ancients who thought they were centered on a flat earth; yet his mistake was not corrected until well into the twentieth century. We are, in fact, off-center, about two-thirds of the way toward the rim; and the Milky Way, far from being the whole universe, is undistinguished among the swarming galaxies.

Why do we resist eviction from the center of things? 'Center' has two meanings: (1) middle and (2) locus around which the whole structure is organized. Rome, for example, was the locus around which its empire was organized but never, exactly, in middle. We tend, perhaps unconsciously, to equate the two senses, but it is plainly the desire to be the locus around which everything is organized that accounts for our reluctance to be ousted from the center, for we want to believe that we are important.

We want to be at the center not only spatially but socially. We instinctively regard ourselves, our tribe, our town, our team, our nation, our race, our species as the center of the web of purposes and meanings. Thus our thinking (and our feeling) tends, unless we willfully resist the tendency, to egocentrism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, "centrisms" galore. It is a mistake we repeat in endless variation.

The same is true in matters of spirit. Many never outgrow the desire to be the center of parental attention. Thus we invent surrogate parents—gods or spirits—to minister to us personally, shaping the world's events for our ultimate benefit or instruction. Nietzsche mocked this tendency instructively: "The 'salvation of the soul'" [he said] "—in plain language: 'the world revolves around me.'"

But it was Nietzsche who also said, "Around the inventors of new values, the world revolves; invisibly it revolves"—as he himself sought to effect a "transvaluation of all values." Thus Nietzsche too made the same mistake.

In fact, we are not the center in any sense, and the world does not revolve around us—any of us. We are not that big a deal. To realize this is to take the first step toward an objective understanding—an understanding that there are other lives and other perspectives besides our own.