Oh! to believe, to believe with his whole soul, to plunge into faith for ever! Doubtless there was no other possible happiness. He longed for faith with all the joyousness of his youth, with all the love that he had felt for his mother, with all his burning desire to escape from the torment of understanding and knowing, and to slumber forever in the depths of divine ignorance.
Émile Zola – Lourdes (1894)
There is a limit, vague and diffuse perhaps, but there is a limit to what people are willing to understand. Worlds beyond the comfort zone are understandable in principle, but no, we don't go there.
It's an important distinction between what we are able to understand and what we are prepared to understand and allow into our established viewpoints. There is a viewpoint censor in case we find ourselves adrift on the strange sea of other possibilities, other people, other worlds.
The eternal indifference of the universe, the unimaginable vastness, the absence of purpose may be abstractions, but they are not abstractions we generally contemplate with enthusiasm in our day to day life. We need local human viewpoints, especially when we catch bleak glimpses of the impersonal behind our local reality. We reject the torment of understanding - the lure of the impersonal tempting us away from those comfort zones.
How do we cope with it in our digital world of instant communication?
Not too well apparently.
Even so, we are all aware that understanding ought to be better than not understanding. This was the core of Spinoza’s philosophical journey, he saw understanding as blessedness, the only thing worth striving for. Yet instead of understanding things ourselves, we have the option of proxies, someone else or some institution which purports to understand on our behalf.
Large numbers of politicians wilfully misunderstand the job they are supposed to be doing. Or they avoid understanding it, which amounts to the same thing. Political parties and big media promote themselves as proxies for understanding abstract ideas such as freedom, democracy, integrity, veracity, science, progress, government… even facts… even common sense.
Politically active people such as environmental activists use some obvious proxies. The catastrophe narrative is their proxy for understanding the environment - and themselves. A more impersonal understanding is evaded, personal motives, even emotions are hidden behind the proxy, out of reach.
6 comments:
The Abstract of The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics:
The final chapter of Part I sets up the importance of the biology of communication and argues for the innateness of deception in all forms of
persuasion. Human language, being a very complex and varied technology, is
most susceptible to corruption by manipulative utterances, which is ironic
because it is held up by the vast majority of language scholars as the most
effective form of communication in the world. Efficacy is a double-edged sword,
then, because sophisticated talk is just as important to the vicious as it is to the virtuous. It is indeed a constant struggle to weed through deceit, even when it is trivial or mundane. The ones we love lie to us as often as a stranger on the street (on some touchy personal topics, even more often), and our various media are inundated with commercial advertisements filled with lies, half-truths, and spin. There is an evolutionary and cultural arms race going on between those who want to deceive and those who want to learn the truth, and as we become more civilized as a species, it does not appear to be getting easier to find the latter.
Richard Dawkins argued that 'Communication' was not an unalloyed good, as generally proposed, but a means of manipulating the brains of those listening to you. So politicians, public relations people, advertisers, are 'just' doing what comes naturally. There is very little 'fact' in the manifest world - the best we can do is to treat almost everything we encounter as 'opinion' rather than knowledge.
In past centuries it was religion that supported proxy beliefs and maintained the boundaries of understanding, wasn't it? Now, a large proportion of the population have to shrink from the possibilities of examining the external in order to stabilize their peace of mind, under their own steam as it were.
Understanding is difficult, especially when (as with almost everything outside of pre-literate societies) it requires the use of complex metaphors and symbols. Having faith is relatively easy. It's probably why we fall in love, have children, adhere to religions, and cultivate long-term ambitions.
But it always requires an assumption that we understand something worth knowing: that this person is good, that I'm up to raising the next generation, that God exists, etc. Naturally, we are psychologically disposed to avoid any doubts in this area, which is why contact with that unimaginable vastness and the absence of purpose - life, really - involves so much painful disillusionment.
DJ - yes there is an evolutionary and cultural arms race via language and it's a pity English as taught in schools doesn't focus more on protecting people from their own language. It could have been a core function of the BBC too, but the Beeb makes as much use of it as anyone else. No major institution wishes to see scepticism promoted more formally.
Tammly - and one advantage of theistic religion has been the significance of boundaries beyond the core dogma, where human knowledge can never be god-like and there is always a better interpretation. We seem to be losing that in much of the developed world.
Sam - some people seem to be more psychologically disposed to avoid doubts than others, which may be necessary for progress in that there must be both stability and innovation. But we also need doubts about specific innovations and that seems to be missing.
My other half has faith that evs will eventually come good. I don't.
Tammly - at the moment, for the private driver, EVs feel like niche city cars at best.
Post a Comment