Humans Being

Monday, August 7, 2006

By Robert Vanderkam

It's easy to despair about the condition of mankind. War, disease, and poverty are understood to be the result of a few bad apples that through their greed, self-serving and other sinful behaviour prevent the creation of a really great society. Just imagine! If only we, as a community, would just take to heart the words and examples of certain clearly identified spiritual leaders. But it never seems to happen, and the idealistic dreams never come true.

But for me, the despair does not come from the broken ideals. It comes from seeing the continued cultivation of those ideals by our leaders, parents, friends, and each other. The persistent cultivation of those unattainable and unrealistic ideals is a result of our being stuck in old mythologies that tell us a better world and our just reward is awaiting us somewhere else, and will be our due as long as we behave a certain way today. Our propensity for superstition, i.e., looking for rational answers in irrational places, is preventing us now from breaking out of that mold. This puts us in a position of vulnerability and we become manipulable by all the dear leaders throughout history and right up to today and tomorrow. This article will explain what I mean by this and present what I think are fundamental but not revolutionary (i.e., instant) new approaches to social “success”. I don’t want a revolution. I want a revelation.

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When I was a child in grade 3, I would line up for a drink from the water fountain behind any “big kid”. I was convinced that drinking from the water fountain after them would make me take on the attributes I admired in them, i.e., their size, confidence, robustness, etc. (And it worked, too; physically at least!) Humans and all other animals look for cause and effect and create a system of behaviour based on those interactions. This tendency to need to know why things happen causes problems for humans because we look for explanations for everything in the context of our limited experience. In my case, I probably drank water I didn’t need, but in other cases, we might waste much energy as a community building monoliths for the gods. And so on.

The point is that we are susceptible to needing explanations and accepting those that make sense in terms of community dynamics and our own experiences and needs. Needless to say, some of the explanations accepted in the past and until today are somewhat limited in their connection with reality as we have come to understand it. Today, of course, we know the physical facts of our reality and have the opportunity to realign our beliefs to fit.

:-) Yes, that was a jest. We certainly don’t know everything, and therefore we don’t know how much we don’t know, so why would we want to change what we believe to make sense in the context of a reality that just won’t stay still? The next thing we expect to hear from the science community is that the self-identity we each put so much importance on is just a series of electrical impulses travelling around a neural network. It will imply that we don’t live on after physical death as amorphous but self-aware points of light with ethereal i.d. (id?) that state our various fraternities from our time on earth (e.g., Country of origin, profession, hockey player, writer of letters to the editor, etc). (What, we've already heard that one? Well, there your go!)

Well, of course we don’t want to ignorantly keep our beliefs when they come from an invalidated reality, and we are wary about changing our beliefs due to the continual discoveries of empirical science, but are those the only two options? Sadly, these are the only two choices most people see. That is why it becomes possible for the unscrupulous to lie and cheat their way to the top of the pyramid – we don’t know what to believe, but we want to do the right thing, so they tell us (and we tell each other) that we can expect the ultimate reward by being kind, generous, and, especially, patient. It is this pattern that leads us to being susceptible to fallacies such as social hierarchies of intrinsic human value. From there we are hopelessly lost in a muskeg of kings and presidents and popes that proclaim themselves infallible by word and deed. Even when (if?) a genuine teacher/leader provides us with wisdom from beyond the lust for power, their teachings are meshed into the power structures anyway. Constantine comes to mind.

(By the way, did you see the T-shirt of the priest, the rabbi, and the imam standing together with arms around each other (on the front) saying that we are all religions of peace and love. On the back of the T-shirt you see them from the back and they are all holding some weapon or bomb or something. And no, that is not available from your on-line Walt Disney souvenir booth. In fact I just made it up, although I doubt it's original.)

I like to think of this problem in more fundamental terms. Instead of looking for a more bullet-proof belief system, I think we should admit that we are mistaken in having beliefs. I think it entirely logical for someone 5000 years before present (ybp) to believe the sun goes to sleep each night, and for someone in 500 ybp to think women are not human. But we have uncovered enough mistakes about our beliefs in the last 1000 years to understand that having beliefs based on a limited understanding of reality is illogical. Our understanding of reality will always be limited, so instead of extrapolating our need for explanations into belief systems, why not try to build a framework for society based on a different idea? The present approach is not working and it can’t hurt to think about this.

I am NOT promoting the idea that we should trash all we have, by the way. That would be going down the same path of changing externalities that has not really changed anything before. I am suggesting that by examining the roots of our problems, we may be able to provide the kinds of nutrients to the plant of human culture that will create something that is more sustaining and sustainable than what we presently have. The simple idea that we are not masters of the ecosystem but part of it, and can have gardens that sustain us forever if we see ourselves as part of the picture is appealing. Call it organic social evolution, if you will. And I am aware that my understanding of the “roots of our problems” may be incorrect. But that’s no reason not to think about this.

But is garden path mythology all bad? Not if you're immoral or unethical, I suppose. In that case, it's better than any pyramid scheme. You've got people telling ten of their friends telling ten of their friends that we should just believe that by laying low and taking our lumps and being "virtuous", we will get our true reward. What a great place for tigers! Also, some would argue that religion is the only thing making the world a half decent place. Doesn't having a public that believes in constraint and forbearance put pressure on leaders who represent us to do the same? Isn't this what allows democracy to happen, where we can focus on making specialised, and therefore efficient, contributions to the community because the leadership decisions are being made by decent and considerate people like ourselves?

Well, I am aware that the devil you know may be better than the devil you don't, but I would argue that what we have isn't truly justice when only a minority of the world benefits. In fact, the credit for the improvement of so many lives in today’s middle class is not even something I give to the industriousness and discipline of the believing majority. From my perspective, it is more a result of scientific and technical advances of the last half millennium and the resulting separation of church and state. Scientific methods of inquiry, called rationalist, empirical, etc. by some, and the resulting benefits had to be won with sacrifice from the dogmatic, fundamentalist organisations running states/religions. And is there any question in any mind that if enough people stopped objecting to the integration of church and state today, the church would be happy to run the state? Talk about the sacrifice of our fathers and brothers on the fields of battle! The sacrifice is clear to everyone when people die on the battlefield, but how many before us have been physically or socially killed or maimed just for believing they should read the bible themselves, or for having some small deviation of belief from the ruling or invading powers (see T-shirt joke above)?

My current understanding of life has morals and ethics as basic but essential components of successful culture. But those morals and ethics should be based on the understanding that we are not sacred or specially created beings. We are "creations" of the ecosystem/universe but not in any way different from any of the billions of beings/doings we share this universe with, such as stars, nematodes, and summer breezes. Of course, this is drastically different from the current, ubiquitous philosophy that “I” is the centre of the universe, which is a leftover from our creation myth. We’ve come a long way from the flat earth and the geocentric universe, but not as far as we should have with what we now know.

To summarise, I’ve said that we are superstitious by habit, but rational and reasonable by nature. Why not become reasonable in all three arenas? How can we change our cultural habit of being superstitious into a reasonable approach and find explanations for existence that reflect the fact that our knowledge is limited and don’t invoke a supernatural cause that could be right, could be wrong, and could be both at the same time (Vanderkam’s theory of relativity, which comes from having fundamentalist relatives).

I have suggested that a solution to this exists in not seeing ourselves as separate from "nature", and not important beyond our temporary physical manifestation. In my opinion, the most important thing I can do is to support activities that promote science and reason, which as far as I can tell, have resulted in the only small success towards breaking through the barriers of “them and us” and therefore given us creative and rewarding communities to live in. How much chance would there be of eliminating the "them and us" duality we instinctively feel (like hunger and lust?) if we had no technology with which to communicate and therefore couldn't learn from what others have discovered before and therefore couldn’t find common ground? It would leave dogma as the new rationalism (as it was before the enlightenment, I think).

This requires some adjustment and is, I understand, the weakness of this essay as an argument for further development and change to cultural foundations. How do we proceed without some inherent self value, just as any insect or small animal in the forest does as they try to satisfy their individual appetites for food, shelter, and procreation? Perhaps the key is to understand that although we feel self worth, it must not rule our actions. We do this with other feelings such as lust, hunger, anger and etc.

That we are not special is the key idea from my perspective – that’s what we as a so-called intelligent species never learn, and, I admit, may not be able to. But it seems clear to me that no matter how much we have, or how much we know, we cannot live together while misguided by this idea that the value I have is somehow in competition with the value you have. It divides us all and I can think of no better contribution to the foundation of future culture than that people inherently recognise that there is something special in everyone/everything, and nothing special about anyone/anything.

Interestingly, it occurs to me that perhaps there is something to the Garden of Eden story that parallels what I've described here. That story is about a creature becoming cognisant of being created, and the inevitable separation from the rest of creation (that doesn’t seem to know this) that results. Is it possible for us to go back to some aware-less state, or is it enough that we understand that being aware of being aware is only a little different from the rest of the diversity of existence. I think the former is not possible and the latter gives us a choice. We can think ourselves privileged or we can think ourselves just one more variety of life.

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In some sense, however, I think all this doesn't matter. Billions and billions of people and untold trillions of beings have lived and died in countless gruesome ways and are too. That will be the case as long as there is existence. So why am I so interested in trying to make a new dogma that can be carried through generations by culture long after the electricity goes off and that will provide a foundation of respect and kindness for people towards each other and their descendants? Like many, I say that the good life I live is such a counterpoint to the misery of the majority (of all life, not just people) that there has to be something that can be done. Unlike many, I cannot accept that we are fulfilling the role of some privileged hero in a Greek tragedy. If I think we have erred in hanging on to our remaining myths as social instruction even while giving up on them as real events and I want to make an effort to see what that means. And this is my first attempt at an argument for some kind of change. Doing the same things, after all, and expecting different results is lunacy.