STEPPING BACK FROM CERTAINTY: remembering we are finite, seeking what is true

Have you noticed that most of the voices currently shouting for their side (which ever one it is) seem to think they know for sure and that the other side is completely wrong?

As has happened endlessly in history past, leaders of today are forgetting that they are finite humans seeking what is true, but instead claim to know and that anyone who disagrees with them is________ (fill in the demeaned name-calling).

A few words from a brilliant character in Michael Crichton's book, Timeline, would seem good to reflect about and muse on by everyone today:

"The present is like a coral island that sticks above the water, but is built upon millions of dead corals under the surface...in the same way, our everyday world is built upon millions and millions of events and decisions that occurred in the past."

This is why confirmation bias and hostility are so present often in Republicans versus Democrats, Theists versus Atheists, Capitalists versus Socialists, and so on. Each opposing human's view of reality is partially shaped by his/her perceptional view from his/her particular coral reef.

Of course the Timeline quote is hyperbole, overstatement. Our Pasts--whether liberal or conservative, religious or non-religious don't define us completely.

We rational primates have the ability to advance, to make creative new choices, to advance closer to reality.

Most humans can choose to step back and question their presuppositions, their own understandings based upon their own worldview and life-stance which came about in the past,
BUT
it ain't easy.

If in doubt, look at how few of us are doing so.

So, let us PAUSE, and study again what we are stating, promoting, in all of these current philosophical and political conflagrations.

1. Are we aware how much of our past is leading us to hold to one position, rather than engaging in careful rational thought about it?

2. Are we remembering to be civil and courteous with those with whom we strongly disagree?

3. Are we open to new thoughts, new perspectives on these contentious arguments?

4. Do we seek to view the best arguments of our enemies with careful consideration?

5. Are we always seeking to be aware of our own confirmation bias?

6. Do we demonstrate benevolence toward those whose views we strongly, rightly, oppose?


Seek what is true,

Daniel Wilcox

A 3-Way Paradox

*

"The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar...It was tense."

Humans seldom live in the present. We are either regretting or longing for the past, or hoping and reaching for the future. Filled with loathing and fearing, remorseful or nostalgic, dreaming and planning, anticipating and aspiring...


That’s even what is happening as I write this article, I am dwelling on the past and the future:-), not living present at this very moment—except right here, Now.

First, let’s look backward. Take a journey into the past. And see history in a new way. So we can change the future.

“We are all ruled by the past, although no one understands it. No one recognizes the power of the past…The individual is sitting on top of a mountain that is the past….That is why I say, the future belongs to the past.”

“Just think about it, the past has always been more important than the present. The present is like a coral island that sticks above the water, but is built upon millions of dead corals under the surface, that no one sees. In the same way, our everyday world is built upon millions and millions of events and decisions that occurred in the past…” 500 years ago and 1,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago.
Michael Crichton, Timeline

As far as our physical selves go, a breath-taking study of our past is The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, where in the illimitable study he takes us on an evolutionary journey back through history all the way to the beginning of life at least 3 ½ billion years ago!

And all of the future is also built on our present use of that past. We are moment by moment creating our future right now by how we use the past.

For instance, our whole species, racial and ethnic background, worldview, society, culture, and family outlook is based on the past. And at every moment we live out those past realities, adapt them, or change them, or create something new.

Of course, the further a person goes down in levels the more difficult changing is. There have been millions of creative individuals who have altered their family outlook, moved to a very different society and culture, or who have changed their worldview for a different perception, religion, or philosophy. And they may even have tried to alter their ethnic and racial background. When I was a teen I remember reading the short controversial book, Black Like Me, where a John Howard Griffin, a Caucasian journalist got his skin darkened medically and lived as a Negro in the South for 6 weeks.

No one can change their species, though I suppose there are mental patients who even imagine themselves doing that. Reminds me of a famous essay entitled, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel.

Or a cat? When our cat Fizzy has again acted oddly—from our perspective—I sometimes stare into those feline eyes with their intense kiwi-green color and slivered black pupils and wonder how she perceives, what her consciousness is like.

But here’s the paradox again. While most animals have consciousness, few if any other than homo sapiens have the ability to consciously plan out their future. So not only are we ruled by all the past, especially our being of a particular species, we very strongly affect our future by our new choices of our worldview, our goals, aspirations, and dreams—whether for good or bad.

Think how different the 20th Century would have been if Germans had chosen differently? Or of the 21st century if Muslims, and other determinists didn’t think that Allah/fate/cosmos, etc. has ordained every detail of the future?

Contrary to what some scientists such as determinist Sam Harris claim that nothing can be changed, that even if time replays a "trillion time" it will always come out the same, other thinkers disagree.

“What you commit yourself to be will change what you are and make you into a completely different person. Let me repeat that. Not the past but the future conditions you, because what you commit yourself to become determines what you are—more than anything that ever happened to you yesterday or the day before.’
Dr. Anthony Campolo

With enthusiastic rhetorical flourish, Campolo overstates the case, because he wants individuals to realize they can change. For we are limited or enlivened by our physical characteristics, our temperament, our background, our culture, our society, our worldview, etc.

But as Dr. Eric Berne, the famous psychologist and creator of Transactional Analysis emphasized in his books and practice, we don’t need to be stuck reliving the past like a helpless twig caught in a whirlpool, repeat, repeat, repeat. Nor do we need to spend countless hours doing endless mental archaeology, trying to figure out what happened to us back in our family’s past or our country's past which causes us or leads us to behave as we do now.

NO! We at this moment can decide to reject attitudes and behaviors of the past, and re-decide how we will live now and in the future.

It won’t be easy going; nothing worth doing ever is. Consider, it took Thomas Edison thousands of attempts to invent a light bulb. But he didn’t give up. He said,“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Rebubble Company

Historical Judgments

What is the point of history, the purpose of studying the past? Aren’t we taking away from our here and now, having to learn what happened back when to who knows who, usually nobody we’re even vaguely related to?

When I taught history as part of helping students understand world and American literature, that question came up regularly. Indeed, how many, many people have pointed out—“history’s boring” or as Henry Ford said, “History is more or less bunk*. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn* is the history that we make today.” Chicago Tribune 1916

As a historian of sorts, I will grant that often the presentation of history is boring, and tragically/comically (how’s that for a contradiction?) history so often is “nonsense.”

But, of course, in the latter case—history being nonsense—is the very reason it so behooves us to study history with intense focus, so that we may learn its lessons in order not to repeat past actions now and in the near future. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it…and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.” George Santayana

We need to know the past, because as a human being, the historical past is OUR past whether we recognize it or not, and whether we like it or not. We are defined, often controlled and shaped, by our species’ countless past actions. Think how much of your life now is based in and affected by your own past actions and the actions of your parents. To not know that is to have a form of amnesia—to literally not know who you are or why you act as you do while others act so contrarily to how you act.

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree…Just think about it, the past has always been more important than the present. The present is like a coral island that sticks above the water, but is built upon millions of dead corals under the surface, that no one sees. In the same way, our everyday world is built upon millions and millions of events and decisions that occurred in the past.”― Michael Crichton

So what is this huge many millions of years old Tree of Life? Hundreds of thousands of years old Tree of Human History? And based on all the past, how does one make good ethical decisions now? Evangelical Christians often assert, “History is God’s story, HIS-story,” but this is a very problematic tragic, even horrific, idea. For most of recorded history is obscenely contrary to all that is good, true, and right, certainly not God’s story unless the latter is a moral monster.

That is my first historical judgment. And judgments are dangerous to make, but each of us must make them daily, hourly, minute by minute, moment by moment—for that is how we humans live, how we become.
So let’s take a look at a few historical past actions (the ghost of history past;-) and seek to discover what ethical lessons we can learn from back there and then.

The American Civil War
(More accurately The War Between the States, because essentially the war wasn't a fight over who would rule a country, but a refusal by the U.S. government to let States secede from the Union even though they had voted to do so.)

Lincoln claimed the Southern States didn't have a right to secede:

First Inaugural Address March 4, 1861- “I hold that, in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the union of these States is perpetual....It follows....that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances. I, therefore, consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken.”

“We find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776…

But Thomas Jefferson in that very Declaration of Independence argued completely the opposite:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

Thus Jefferson seems to argue persuasively—many would even say, “case closed.” But strangely Abraham Lincoln and millions of Americans have disagreed with the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s reasoning, instead claiming that the Union of the United States is “perpetual” and cannot be separated.

And the moral of the historical story for us now is?

To be continued

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox