I am currently reading "The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View" by Richard Tarnas. This book dives into the history of Western thought, from ancient Greece to modern times.
I'm reading in the last part of the book, which is about the Enlightenment era. The author divides the thinking in this period into a dichotomy that's familiar to us now, with Science on the one side and Romanticism on the other, though we may phrase it differently -- Logic vs. Emotion, Science vs. Religion, Evidence vs. Feelings, etc. It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog (if anyone does, which I doubt) that I generally operate in the Science side, and consider it "the adult" in the room. But this quote really struck me:
From the Romantic's perspective, the conventional scientific view of reality was essentially a jealous "monotheism" in new clothes, wanting no other gods before it. The literalism of the modern scientific mind was a form of idolatry--myopically worshiping an opaque object as the only reality, rather than recognizing that object as a mystery, a vessel of deeper realities.
Our reflex when confronted with a binary perspective like this is to align with the side we like and try to find reasons for our choice of sides. Our brains reward us for indulging this reflex because it saves on expensive thought and risky uncertainty -- a huge survival benefit when most threats were immediately lethal.
But black and white thinking turns out to be too inflexible for our current world, and causes much harm and chaos even while our brains try their best to make us forget or ignore that.
The reaction to this harm and chaos is to resist aligning with this or that "side", preferring to keep an open mind. Instead of seeing things mostly in terms of judgments of Good and Evil, we might try consciously to perceive the world in more neutral terms of costs and benefits. I know that's my favorite way of looking at things, and I consider the words "Good" and "Evil" to be thought-stopping terms that prevent us from questioning and digging below the surface to find the truth.
But is this "open-mindedness" nothing more than a fence-sitting pacifism? A fear of commitment? A craven avoidance of conflict? Holding back our support until we see which side is going to win? Is it nothing more than a wishy-washy relativism that refuses to condemn evil or to leap to the defense of good? I phrased all those in deliberately provocative terms, but when you come see the world not as clear black and white choices, but only as nuances and shades of gray, there is the risk that you allow evil to grow, or good to wither, because you fear to do harm or to commit an injustice by losing sight of the good of the many outweighing the good of the few.
When I traveled to San Francisco for a conference in 2011. I was struck by the decay that I observed in the form of homelessness, vagrancy, drug abuse, and certain areas being generally down at heels. "Why," I asked myself, "in the richest country in the world does this decay exist right alongside wealth and splendor?" There is among many a sense that our attitude of tolerance is at fault, or at least a contributor, to the decay. Unable or unwilling to condemn drug use as a bad thing, unwilling to judge lest we infringe on someone's liberty, we find ourselves unable to act. In essence, we hold the good of the many hostage to the good of the few.
On the subject of guns in the US, we hold the good of the many hostage to the good of the few because we simply can't bring ourselves to agree on whose Liberty is more important -- my Liberty to protect myself and my family from Tyranny and crime, or your Liberty not to have to live in fear of stray bullets from other people's drama flying around.
On the subject of roads and cars in the US, we hold the good of the many hostage to the good of the few because we idolize the Freedom of personal transport. We do this by incentivizing it through fuel subsidies, by saddling municipalities with endless costs for maintaining roads, and by requiring businesses to provide huge parking lots. We embrace the most extreme form of socialism with regard to roads -- paid for by everybody, used by anybody. We pour out public money by the billions and annex private property without a murmur to support Private Transport, and then fight like wildcats and scream like banshees when we try to use public money or annex private property for Public Transport, which scales much better, and much more cheaply as population density grows.
What do all of these examples have in common, and what do they have to do with the Enlightenment pitting Science against Romanticism? In my opinion, we lack balance. When driving we understand immediately the necessity of having both a gas pedal and a brake pedal (and to preempt the inevitable "well, actually...", regenerative braking is just a virtual brake pedal with side benefits, and "accelerator pedal" just has soooo many syllables, you hypocritical cell phone dialers and hanger uppers).
We focus so myopically on "Our" side being in opposition to "Their" side that it never occurs to us to try to view in a different, more productive way. Political partisanship can make us see the brake pedal as "good" and the gas pedal as "bad", or vice versa. Religion tends to label certain Science as "evil" (as in "evilution") when it treads on sacred ideas; and some scientists may sneer at the religious for their "irrationality" and "ignorance."
What is the better, more productive way? It is to step back and see the two sides as a single whole. When we examine two opposing tensions, we see that, not only are they related, they are two sides of the same coin. In this little rant, I have focused on the good of the many and the good of the few as an example. Does the good of the many outweigh the good of the few? Or does the good of the few outweigh the good of the many? Neither. The few are part of the many, and the many is composed of lots of fews. The problems arise when one holds the other hostage.
There are no easy answers. If there we're we wouldn't be having the problems we have.
- Less arrogance, less dogmatic certainty;
- More humility, more willingness to listen and understand.
- Remembering that one's worldview is not The World, it is just a view of the world filtered through the lens of our experiences.
- Judgment is perfectly OK. But the more info informing it, the better.
- Certain behaviors are not OK, and we don't have to allow them. But the law is not, and cannot ever be the ONLY tool in our toolbox. The law is about legality, not morality, and the two do not always coincide.
We need kids and adults with more backbone and self-sufficiency. We need more "do first, then ask".
Better parents raise better kids.
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