In the age of new, we forget how much we need the old
During a quick little cry sesh with myself the other day, I told myself that my purpose was to do my part in fixing the foundations of our society, and that’s a good a thesis as any for this blog, so this is a moderately fleshed out idea of what that is. This will be very vague and metaphorical, but so is the nature of these questions, it is the unknown, if we had figured it out, we wouldn’t have these problems.
When I say the structure of the world I am acknowledging a couple implicit things. 1) We cannot see the world in it’s entirety, it is cloaked in mystery. Why? Because our conscious experience is unbelievably limited in a world with limitless information. We ask ourselves why we can’t we all be nice to each other and that’s because we only have vague notions of whats it’s like to be in someone’s head.
This creates a divide, and how rigid this divide is to us is up to much debate. We have the world itself and our human perspective of the world. (What I am arguing is the .001% of the world we get to see) Now the world has to inform your perspective, otherwise you aren’t going to make it, in other words you can’t stand in a basic denial of reality, that generally doesn’t work out well. However, what has continued to surprise me, is how much fungibility there is in how one perceives the world. There are many different ways to approach it, and many are equally valid. Some are not so valid, yet people hobble along stubbornly holding onto their preconditions.
There has been a major event in this spiritual plain that we have been dealing with the ramifications of for longer that we can recollect, but I believe we still feel the pain so deeply, are living with this trauma long forgotten. This would only make sense if humans were historical creatures with short memories, if we did things long after we could forget why we ever did them. Which is our second proposition.
What I am suggesting is that we are profoundly influenced our collective past in ways too difficult to fully process. There are many ways to think about this tear of the human spirit. Let’s think about it through Science and religion. Science, is an objective study of how things are. Science studies reality not how it appears to us, but all that can be grounded in objective fact. Religion is the development of a structure of representing reality, so that the human can have an interpretive structure to guide themselves in the world. The issue becomes what do we replace religion with, once science has knocked religion to its knees, and with it the structure of our perceptions of the world. This has happened and continues to happen in different forms; and I think there is a developmental nihilism which we continue to suffer through collectively.
Because everything that we are is built upon who has come before us. A modern high schooler gets a better education than almost all previous humans simply because that knowledge has been codified and embedded into a system that distributes that knowledge and informations en masse. While Leibniz and Newtown genius took years to figure out the basics of calculus and is a feat and a testament to their intellectual prowess. The high schooler has trouble staying awake during calculus and is safe in knowing they can find the information online or in a textbook.
We imitate and we learn. We learn what works and what doesn’t and we imitate what works. We improve, we embed that knowledge in the next generation who takes it further. From the plains of Africa onward, this is how we learned to conquer nature. The default of nature in terms of change is close to static at least in a human timescale. However, in a human lifetime a new idea or a new technology can rapidly change the course of history, can doom a civilization or take it to new unprecedented greatness.
Our two presuppositions have brought us to this point.We have very little idea of what the world is and what we do know, has been built up from the ground up, and certainly not all of it is relevant or helpful to the modern person, yet it is likely that we may still be acting the patterns out if you see the basis of this process as imitation. The world does not updated everyone equally Some people might be trying to imitate a society where women are seen primarily as caregivers, or some might only trust people who look like them. Sexism and racism are two terms that would go well here, but that isn’t what I am asking you to consider. I am asking you to consider how the structures are instantiated in society. I am talking about the old and the new colliding. I am talking about how everyone has these structures learned from imitation that they are trying to apply to the world.
So what does that make our job? As humans existing in the present, to do about these broken structures and overwhelming information? It is in part to take the best of the old, the ideas that have been tested across human societies across time and space and still prove to be a solid foundation. Forming meaningful communities and relationships with one another. Respect in the sanctity of the individual The things that have been demonstrated time and again to be the foundation of a worthwhile society and with it an existence worth participating in. Looking at what we have been given we must each decide what is baby and what is bathwater in the 21st century and the difference is often times far from obvious.
There is another component to this, and that is asking what will be our future foundations for our agreed upon structures of reality. Humanism and science, is honestly my best guess, and that is a guess. Humanism because the potential of the human spirit must be worshiped above all else. The potential of the human spirit to emerge and transcend itself, to respect with awe and delight in the way we can change the lives of those around us, how a human aimed properly can be a force for good and love in the universe. A spirit that will not be treated different because of the body it comes in and yet simultaneously an understanding and respect for the ways our bodies and our roles do shape our being.
Science, is a bit trickier. It does not give us a structure through which to interpret the universe, but it’s discoveries must inform our structures and behavior in the world. It’s one challenge to do this individually but it’s another to do it collectively and that challenge; in the age of fake news, deeply concerns me.
As we slowly and painstakingly uncover the mysteries of the universe, there is the continued temptation to lose all sense of wonder, especially in regards to the human spirit. Identity politics has been born once more into the world because it’s easy to see how things like our skin color and sex define so much of our reality what room is there left for choice? How easily we forget that we are fumbling around in the darkness because we now have a lamp that shows us our surroundings. We are still in the dark forest, what we know is a drop, what we don’t is the ocean upon our little structural rafts float, waiting to be taken back into abyss. Science must be our light in the darkness, but we must never forget that the night is dark and full of terrors, and we don’t know what the hell could be out there. More importantly, we don’t know if we’re just seeing an incomplete piece of a much bigger puzzle.
These are some pretty huge topics, and three pages is nowhere near enough to truly do this topic justice or even present these topics as compellingly as I might want to. This is what you get from an amateur philosopher with a fractured attention span. What I will tell you dear reader, is that I’m not going to stop. What you are witnessing is me trying to put together knowledge at the end of my territory of information. My reach will always exceed my grasp and I think that’s okay because I know my grasp isn’t too far behind, and most importantly it’s only up from here.