Often, when frustrated with the tenor of American politics, the abysmal failure to assimilate information, the many manifestations of a colossal inability to tolerate complexity, etc. etc., I wonder why these conditions exist. Is it that education has diminished? Is it the death of the dialectical process as an ordinary part of communication? Are we seeing a seething response to decades of repression? Are we responding to Machiavellian propaganda?
Well, I often speak about the need to be counter intuitive. The ability to respond in terms of questioning the obvious is uniquely human, it seems to me. Questioning and juxtaposing assertions, testing them for credibility…these things are linked with memory, anticipation, and language. I have all kinds of ideas about the extreme requirement that we be counter intuitive, if we are to be happy, and certainly if we are to survive.
Here’s an example: what if the most aggravating elements of today’s society are the product of decency and self-respect? Though I’m describing aspects of human nature that are ubiquitous, I will couch my points in the context of the United States.
Americans are proud; we do not want to be humiliated by handouts. We want to earn our keep. We want to make our mark, or at least take care of ourselves and our dependents, on our own. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, the sentiment is universal. The complexity arises when one sees oneself in context. We are each one among many, and our capacity to thrive is deeply interdependent. Merchants must have customers, builders must have workers, patients must have doctors, and so on and on. No man is an island, even if he wants to be. Self-reliance, that diamond of attributes, must be tempered with an understanding of context, or it becomes a self-congratulatory affectation, and the person who touts it perpetuates a series of fallacies, rather than strength of character.
Interaction always involves power. The injunction to ‘do unto others as you would have done unto you’ is both an emanation of the empathy that we acquire as we are raised up by creatures other than ourselves, and study those creatures in order to survive, and recognize that they are similar to ourselves, and it is a very practical piece of advice. The probability of a good outcome for oneself is contingent on our willingness to imagine the other person, who, though in circumstances that are not the same as our own, in nevertheless similar to ourselves.
Symbiotic relationships, those in which each party perceives that he is benefitting, are the most likely to be successful. Constructive activity relies on this kind of exchange. Sometimes this is truer in the long than in the short view, but while in nature destruction can be relied on to transpire, and nevertheless, the earth, indifferent to us, survives, human beings’ survival requires the will to coordinate outcomes. Back to the concerns I referred to at the beginning of this essay, regarding the apparent dearth of willingness to recognize the value of context, flexibility, and cooperation, of seeking agreement, even though the chance of prospering lessens because of this disregard, I speculate that early societies relied on abstractions in order to create order. Morality was presented in terms of dictates. Idols and gods were accepted as beings with magical powers, in relationship to needs, to whatever was beyond the control of people. Philosophers and religious figures have attempted to link virtue with aspects of being, However, the tendency is to believe in axioms and ideas that have been handed down, in a way embracing the authoritarian aspect of religion by the very acceptance of it. The problem is that moral sense that is not rooted in an individual’s psyche on the basis of his own correlations between what he has perceived and what he has understood by means of observing causal chains-that moral sense will not be reliable as a stimulus of conscience. We are always susceptible to peer pressure. We place our trust in those who are strong, and who either literally or symbolically offer us protection. If we are led to matching the injunctions of leaders and peers with religious axioms or truisms of any kind, rationalization of abusive actions and failures to act follow easily. Weighing wrong and right for ourselves becomes an unnecessary digression.
I think of formal religion today as an anachronism. The battle between blind faith and science cannot be made to disappear with tropes about the coexistence of religion and science. The acquisition of knowledge undermines mythology of every kind. The conflict of trying to reconcile an evidence based world with the need to believe is painful. The result, for the community, is vagueness. The conflict is one of the things that is undermining the very concept of the search for truth, agreement, and harmony. There has been a series of faux paradigm shifts that offer bandages. Critical thinking is obviated by kiss ass ‘respect’ for all opinions.
The fatuous righteousness, the unctuous sanctimonious, and sentimental positions that result from the avoidance of conflict in general, and specifically of the one between blind faith and science, have rendered society vapid, and conversation trivial.
Most importantly, conscience is vestigial, a quaint idea, receiving little succor from scholars, priests, or politicians.
A dystopian future will be our new ‘paradise’, I fear; a world of ‘innocence’, without knowledge, leading quickly to a world without laws, and without sense.