Two weeks ago, another deadline passed, and nothing happened. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains a member of the European Union. For the third time this year my country failed in the task it has set itself. We will try again next January. In the meantime, we will have a general election. One of my American friends reminds me of some lines from a famous song from the late seventies: “You can check out any time you like/ But you can never leave.” Hotel Brussels doesn’t quite capture the glamour associated with the original lyrics, but the message of the song continues to resonate: wanting is not the same as getting.
The missing tapes
The oral historian has been recording the life of my father, although it’s hit a bit of a scheduling snag recently. Her daughter, two years old, has just started daycare and as a result is at that lovely stage where she’s transmitting every infant cold and flu virus to her mother that she can lick from her nursery mates’ toys and drinking utensils. Plus she’s received a bit more actual oral history work, and the combination of the two makes both her energy level and her availability to complete my father’s oral history quite a bit less than it was during the summer. Which isn’t the end of the world – my parents also seem to be upping their game for extracurricular activities on the weekends, which is a pleasure to see, and they now have a new dog friend to take care of when I’m out of town. But it’s a bit disappointing as well, as my father had completed the conversational journey just up to the moment my parents moved to Maine and started their family. In my sister’s words, Dad, we’re finally born, and now we can’t hear the rest of the story.
That’s not strictly speaking true; the story has been told to us, crafted in our presence, for all these forty five years. We are the embodiment of a decent chunk of that story, but I share my sister’s craving for hearing him tell the rest of it, the bits that might have been hidden from the view of one’s children, but deserve to be remembered in the completeness of one’s life. Moreover, I’m especially interested to hear the bits that come out which aren’t moments of triumph or warm recollection. I’m interested in the failures, the losses, and the disappointments – the things you don’t normally advertise.
At the same rough moment that I was thinking about this, the first edition of The New York Review of Books to arrive at my house in Scarborough came in the mail, with an essay reviewing The Invention of Time, a recent book by Paul Kasmin. The author of the essay, G.W. Bowersock, is usually worth reading, and in describing the book and its themes, he made an interesting observation: in essence, the ancient world lost its historical memory of the Hellenistic period – from the death of Alexander the Great to the final defeat of the successor dynasties by the Romans just before the start of the Roman imperial period – largely because the Roman successors were joined by the Greek-speaking Hellenistics in jointly establishing the cultural supremacy of imperial Rome. The Greeks who created Roman culture were happy to ignore a period of long-term decline in political power and influence; the Romans were happy to have the best writers in the ancient world pulling together their copy.
It’s an old saw that history is written by the victors, but I think Bowersock is hinting at something more: those who sense that they are on the losing side of history actually lose their voice. It isn’t just that the victors expunge the record, although often enough they do; those who are seeing their influence, their importance, their relevance drain away slowly but steadily put away their pens and their paper (or their quills and their papyrus) and start to wait for the victors to bring them something worth writing about again. Bowersock references a Greek anthologist, Philostratus, in the 3rd century BCE, who describes the work of the great orators and authors of the Greek golden age, then skips ahead to authors of the 1st century BCE – when Greece had been fully assimilated into the Empire and Greek scholarship had resumed its place of cultural prominence. The intervening years had, from his perspective, not happened – but Bowersock more or less implies that he wasn’t wrong. Hellenistic authors had been quiescent during the long period where its political and military power was declining in the face of Rome.
The third element of this mental exercise came in reading another review, this time of The Capital by Robert Menasse, widely regarded as the first truly literary novel of the European Commission bureaucracy. Menasse, an Austrian, draws heavily from another Austrian novel, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, about the imperial bureaucracy of Vienna in the waning years of Franz Josef’s reign before World War I. Menasse is described as having a particular affinity for novels set in places that are about to collapse or encounter some transformation, which made me smile because I love that too; The Man Without Qualities is one of my favorite novels, and the genre of “fiction from worldviews that are about to die” is enormously rich: the Palace Walk trilogy set in Cairo in the 1920s and 1930s, anything from Soviet samizdat literature, the decadance and nostalgia and raw confusion of end-of-Raj British Indian literature. Menasse’s new novel, writes the reviewer, Fintan O’Toole, is set in much the same mold – but the difference being, the transformation or collapse hasn’t happened yet. But it will. We all know it – we just don’t know who the victors will be.
In Brussels, the EU will be reshaped by Brexit and by the growing pressures of resurgent nationalism that the Union was meant to hold at bay. Here in North America, I would argue, we’re dealing with the same thing (certainly in the US, although a week and a half after the Canadian election, it feels like nothing got solved north of the border either). Trump’s upcoming impeachment, combined with the 2020 elections, weekly environmental catastrophes, and an economy humming along for reasons no one at all can explain as to why, make for an overarching feeling of being on a precipice – but not knowing at all whether you’ll fall, you’ll pull back, or jump off and fly. The Man Without Qualities was written in the 1930s, when Musil knew how it all ended; we’re living in the same environment but we don’t know what happens next.
And with that, I would argue, we are entering into a period of silence much in the way that the Hellenistic world endured while the remains of Alexandrine conquests slowly wound down. The noise from the internet – from the squabbles between far left and far right – are just that, white noise that no one will remember because no one seriously believes either side will “emerge victorious” so as to own the historical narrative. But the center is dead and the “new new” is still over the horizon. We don’t know if it’s a technological hell or a utopia, or if climate change will render all other discussions moot – we can and do have less confidence in what the world that my son will live in will look like than ever. So serious thought and discourse has slowly, quietly, disappeared, with bureaucracy in the background, silently keeping the existing machine running, and all of us looking around us, trying to find the Romans in our midst.
In such a place, though, individuals continue to do their best. Being aware of historical context and the crisis of the moment is actually a distraction for most people, and indeed doesn’t necessarily help us decide what to do on a personal or local level: where should my son go to middle school? Should I take that new job, or move house, or buy a new car? Should I stay in my marriage and work on it, stay and muddle on, or leave? Should I muddle through a job or career going nowhere, but it pays the bills, or should I take a risk and pursue that dream of mine to be a veterinarian? Who should I vote for for city council, or legislature, or parliament, or president? Some decisions are mundane l, and will do little (not nothing, but not enough to care) to change the world. Others have a greater impact but it will still be at a distance – my vote for city council will not change Seattle, even though the city councilor who is elected for District 6 may very well change it with his or her vote. But the collection of those choices that define and describe my life mean something, both directly to the people whom I impact but also as a record for the future in understanding how their world came to be.
It’s that, I think, that has finally come together in my mind as to why I’m so fascinated by oral history and why I think it’s so noble. It’s not a replacement for traditional, textual history as I learned it and practiced (or rather, still practice) it. It’s an essential record of those who lose their voice in traditional history. When I was being trained as a historian, oral history was often thought of as a way to capture historical information that otherwise would have been forgotten because the carriers of that information were either illiterate, or unable to gain access to publishing or recording due to class or race or other barriers. Historians could capture physical artefacts of the lives of such individuals or groups, but the ability to record their voice suddenly opened up the ability to record their thoughts in a way that, before Edison and his amazing recording and speaking machine, was the exclusive province of the educated elites.
Much early oral history – including the early work by the Works Progress Administration, in conjunction with photography work by Walker Evans and others recording the visual record of the dispossessed – focused on those who had, in essence, lost the game of life. The winners wrote essays and stories and first person textual accounts and, in their jobs in government or the military or in finance or the arts, created what we’d call “primary source material” for traditional historians. The losers, unable to write or excluded from the means of recording their thoughts by elites who didn’t care to hear them, were stuck until someone came along with a reel-to-reel and a microphone and asked them to tell their stories.
What I think, though, is that oral history has another role to play, particularly important in a space and at a time where everyone, I think, worldwide, has a strange but shared sense of being on the cusp of massive, radical change, but being unable to identify who or what the “winners” will be. We’re all stuck; what we write and say feels contrived, feels pointless when we know there will be something much more relevant that will replace all of this in just a little while. In the pejorative language of my instructors in regular history, we’re all losers now – and thus the natural ground for oral history. But the oral historians – with their recording devices and microphones and with a fundamental respect for those who cannot write, be it because of lack of a ability or lack of will – can pierce that malaise of expression at every level. They honor the individual in their own fundamental existence, as themselves, without demanding that the individual contextualize themselves. Their voices and their lives are the information to be valued, not their output or their context or their impact. Tell me about why you decided to change careers at age 30. What was it like when you moved across the country. How did it feel to be a single mom so unexpectedly. Tell me what it was like to be you, while I press “record” here.
I don’t know how my father’s recorded story will be used in the future. I hope my son will listen to it and get to know his grandfather in a new way, when my son is old enough, which will probably be long after my father is gone. I know I’ll use it that way too, but I also have a sense that some time in the future, there will be people – or whatever happens on the other side of the transhuman divide – who will want to understand why homo sapiens did what they did just before the Great Upheaval. And not just “why” they did whatever led up to the Great Upheaval, but what, really, they had done, day to day. They’ll have an insane body of data, assuming the data farms survive, but if they don’t have the stories with voice, with cadence and rhythm, and with a record of the questions that inspired the stories to turn, they’ll have a gap that will be obvious and fatal to learning any real lessons. Bowersock’s essay hints at that in a discussion of time: it will be as if there is a gap in time, and what emerges on the other side of the gap is so unrecognizable compared to what seemed to exist before the gap, that any sane person will say, the story has been lost.
In a strange way, the ancient Near Eastern people watching their societies wane had it easier, existentially speaking, than we do: they knew the Romans were the emerging power. We don’t; the People’s Republic of China, arguably “the” emerging geopolitical force in the world today, seems just as fragile and susceptible to collapse as we do. And while The Man Without Qualities described pre-war Vienna with a kind of irony, in that the author’s narrative voice clearly knows things aren’t going to go well for the Hapsburgs, even in that world, contemporary records generally thought that whatever happened, rich Europeans capitalists would continue to rule the world. They got it wrong, but that’s part of the brilliance of the novel: they thought they knew the answer. We don’t even have that confidence today: no one (except crackpots) pretends to think there is a clear sense of what the future may hold. Which should make the historical record of what it is to exist in a time of nearly cripplingly infinite potential future outcomes so interesting: how do people live in such an environment? After it’s all settled out in 10 or 25 or 50 years, it will all seem so obvious – but it isn’t to us, and the record of how people who are faced with such uncertainty both live with it, create the change, and then react to the certainty when they have created it is, in fact, the baseline metastory that history seeks to tell. Without our voices, it can’t tell that story.
Due to technological limitations, we will not be able to reconstruct an emotional or anthropologically valid picture of what it was like to live in the eastern Mediterranean during Hellenistic times, and thus we can’t really know why Rome emerged in the area the way that it did, collapsed eventually the way it did, and led to the world we have today. But I have a sense that, between fiction that can sense immanence and oral history which can maintain the record, our successors in this world will be able to understand us better. I’m hopeful that they’ll care, but even if they don’t, I think it’s good and appropriate to not erase these strange and curious times of ours from the record.
I am a bit curious as to what my dad will say. If he and the the oral historian finally get some time on the calendar, it will be good to know that our collective consciouness and history will at least have one complete record. Hopefully her daughter will let the oral historian get on with a few more.
An earnest response
A lot of people have been bemoaning my cynicism recently. My typical, overused retort is that “I’m not cynical, I’m realistic.” I say “realistic” because I believe people will act consistently over time, and furthermore, that in an inconceivably complex but still comprehensible world, people’s choices – and thus their tendency to make similar choices in the future – can be extrapolated from a sufficiently large set of observations of their current state. But I’m also willing to learn, to change, and to be disproven. That to me is realism – or pragmatism, to use the word favored by Charles Pierce and William James. But it consists of two parts; which I think is misunderstood, at least with me. That is, both the observations which lead to a given set to expectations about future behavior, and the separate but just as important willingness to continue to observe, make adjustments, and throw away prior expectations, are equally important. Viewing me through the light of one without the other misses the point.
Still not there
I suppose I’ve always wanted to write a prose poem. What I’ve been trying to write here, in all its all, is just that, but I know it’s lacking, even across time and space and in the spinning gyre that is my work. A prose poem would evoke the autumn sky I see when I look out the window of my apartment, would capture the sing song pitch of my son as he interrupts my work, would find a way to bring the scent of bacon and overripe pear and coffee and gin to the page. But I can’t write a prose poem. I can only write. And prepare the bath for my son, warm air rising as he yawns on the couch, trying to delay the inevitable, the sound of radio baseball and thunder outside. My prose poems are long and wandering, and I can’t find the source. I still want to write a prose poem.
Investigation into Peoplehood
“We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…”
– Preamble to the American Constitution
We — Mark, his guest, Peter and I — enjoyed a leisurely weekend together. We ate amazing food, drank cocktails and shared our thoughts regarding the political and cultural climate of our respective countries. While we walked the beach, soaking in the last remnants of summer, we found that in each of our homelands — UK, USA and Canada — chasms are deepening about what the ‘People’ desire for their future. In the UK, the People want Brexit. In the USA, the People voted Trump into office, electing him in part because so many voters resented the Establishment or didn’t bother to vote. While Canada has remained immune to the rising wave of right-wing nationalism — until now at least — we are no stranger to identity politics: we play them since Trudeau’s father was in office in the 1970s, when Quebec’s nationalism was in full swing!
From an economic perspective, these events express the People’s desire to bring back the past. A slogan such as “Make America Great Again” — as powerful as it might be — cannot roll back the systemic changes brought on by globalizing technologies. Nor, for that matter, a separation from the European Union. Even though leaving the EU is a more tangible and consequential change in the political fabric of a shared social reality, such a reversal of policy still can’t bring back the heyday of industrial production in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. It is noteworthy that both Peoples, more or less explicitly, blame immigration for the decline of their relative superiority.
For who is the ‘We’ we keep referring to? The People used to mean “a group which shared a cultural and linguistic common past, usually inhabiting a particular geography and interacting extensively, thus developing and sharing a particular set of values”. In the last few centuries, this ‘We’ most often revealed itself through nationalism and attempts to exercise cultural hegemony over minorities.
Initially, the hegemonic impulse seeks to convert as many People as possible and therefore expand this cultural ‘We’ to be as large as it could be. In the Age of Empires, strength was a pure numbers’ game: how many square miles, how many soldiers, how many gold mines and share of global GDP. In the Age of Media, it is no longer necessary to administer a country to dominate a population: it is much more efficient to co-opt the People into ‘willingly’ adopting the culture of the dominant ideology.
In reaction, people discover that ‘We’ are not as similar as the Empire wishes us to be. The wave of decolonization revealed that People desire sovereignty over their own lives, laws and ways of living. The right to self-determine — stemming from the inner drive for embodying freedom — is deeply engrained, both at the individual level and in the collective imaginary. Thus, you get fights for independence like in Quebec. Those events, playing out through our political institutions and processes, show that ‘We’ may crystallize at a regional level, where the group can be more clearly defined.
In the Age of Media, this process occurs more subtly. People realize that ‘We’ are not reflected in the dominant culture, that ‘we’ no longer (or never could be) recognized ourselves in the portrayed ideals. This realization creates a sense of alienation. But since ‘We’ can’t pinpoint exactly what is wrong, ‘We’ need to point to an ‘Other’ as the cause of our troubles. And while we’ve now defined ‘Us’ by locating who is ‘Them’, we’ve lost sight that the problem might not be about the People per se but about how the Media intermediates our relationships with each other. Or maybe it was the ideals, which were never professed by the whole People but merely represented its powerful elite.
Characteristics other than nationality can also form the basis of People’s identities. In the 19th century, Marx revealed how the workers became a ‘class’ which should oppose the bourgeoisie. In the 21st century, the Bankers (and Economists) have replaced the Aristocracy as the Elite, holding economic and political influence (in part) because they can articulate their interests more coherently than other groups in society. For the group — ‘We the People’ — necessarily needs a way to communicate. At first sight, it appears as if the group needs characteristics around which to coalesce. And indeed, any group needs to — eventually — articulate what they stand for or against. But it’s not like there is a committee somewhere holding meetings! Nowadays, no one ‘controls and commands’ how the group thinks of itself! What the group most needs is ongoing interactions such that ‘what matters’ can progressively emerge.
Historically, these ‘identity’ groups were constructed through simple proximity and ongoing interactions. They were also built over generations. Now that our World is so small — through easy exchanges of People, goods and information — the ‘We’ is losing specificity in the local environment and yet has not fully emerged in the global cosmopolitan sense. ‘We’ have not yet pledged: “We the People of the Earth, in order to live in Harmony with our Environment…”
For it seems a natural human tendency to ultimately want to define ourselves around a ‘We’. We want to belong to a group which intimately represents us. Within that group, ‘We’ want to be affirmed in the gaze of the Other, to know that we truly exist because we are seen, acknowledged, and recognized as an important member of a community with whom we share a common outlook on life. We also want to learn from the group how we should behave, what is valuable.
As I took the plane to join Peter and Mark at the Boston Airport, I felt a profound need to escape the vacuum of my self — of my condemnation to be free as Sartre puts it — and to find shelter in the comfort of the ‘We’. As part of a People — a group as small as 3 souls — I sought to express my uniqueness without the burden of having to stand alone. I expected my weekend with Peter and Mark to celebrate my belonging to this very select group: the writers of the Essence of Water! Which it did, yet also left me with a profound realization.
In most social interactions, ‘We’ intuitively assume that Other minds function similar to ours. By that, I mean that ‘We’ interpret Others as analogous to ourselves and approach them — implicitly or explicitly — seeking a reflection of how ‘we’ think. Historically, before air travel and mass-immigration, most local-ish groups shared a similar enough socialization and culture that ‘We’ could recognize our worldview in almost every Other we would meet in daily life. Indeed, the conceptual framework ‘we’ use to make sense of the world is learned intersubjectively — meaning that ‘whatever we believe about the world’ exists in multiple minds and is re-enforced by the acceptance of the group. The ‘existence’ of a worldview isn’t a physical reality that can be pointed at and studied. A worldview’s power is to be shared, ‘believed’ and hopefully considered unquestionable by as many ‘carrier minds’ as possible.
This ‘We’ coalesce around an implicit yet widely shared understanding of how ‘we’ are to understand and interpret the world — aka a worldview. Thus, a ‘worldview’ is the core characteristic of a ‘People’. Commonalities of race, language and lifestyle are often embedded into the narrative of the worldview, often acting as ‘indicators’ or ‘signals’ that one shares a particular worldview. Like wearing a cross might (and historically did) mean belonging to the Catholic Church. Or a street gang member wearing ‘blue’ to express their hatred of the ‘red’. We often use external characteristics to differentiate between allies and Others. Yet ultimately, what we ‘screen for’ is a shared worldview.
To diverge from the collective worldview has always carried the risk of exclusion from the group because the group selects its members according to mental ‘outlook’. Our conceptual scheme/framework is one of the most crucial components of our ‘identity’. ‘We’ want to see ourselves — exhibited as how we think — ‘affirmed’ in Others. Thus, we seek to surround ourselves with individuals who experience and think about the world in a fundamentally similar way. It is a ‘natural’ human behaviour in the sense that it brings us pleasure and comfort. As I recently read in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, rejection of the collective worldview — in its extreme form — can lead to insanity because to ‘dislocate’ from a conceptual worldview is to come to believe in concepts so fundamentally different that an individual can no longer be understood by Others.
I’ve come to believe that our mental health is in part based on belonging to a group that shares our worldview. That basic approach to ‘reality’ need not be dogmatic. A worldview can be a belief, or a practice, or even an attitude. It need not be explicitly verbalized. But any conceptual scheme needs some fundamental tenets, such as ‘belief in the human dignity of all’ or ‘the existence (or non-existence) of a deity’ or a particular definition of ‘what the purpose of life might be’. I’ve come to realize that a worldview can be pretty much anything: it can be based on traditions, on reason, on intuition. Moreover, its ‘success’ is measured only in its ability to reach the goals it posits as part of its guiding principles. Ie. what is deemed important and ‘successful’ for a particular worldview are selected/promulgated as part of that worldview. It’s a circular process. And self-reenforcing insofar as it gains power the more widely it is shared.
I’ve found, in my own life experience, that an individual can develop a unique approach to ‘what the world means’ to them. Their idiosyncratic worldview might even be more ‘successful’ in reaching its defined goals — its embedded telos. But living with an individual worldview is lonely.
Identifying one’s values and worldview in Others actually reduces a kind of ‘existential anxiety’ because part of what ‘exists’ as a self is one’s conceptual worldview. In other words, ‘How I perceive myself and the world’ — because it is already a mental abstraction — comes into fuller existence when an Other can perceive it as well. When a worldview escapes the subjectivity of one mind and enters the intersubjective realm of many minds, it somehow becomes more ‘real’. For there is something inherently relational in how we come to understand ourselves and our beliefs. Thus, expressing and discussing our worldviews — the unique bits, the common and the over-lapping parts — helps us, not only to identify who the ‘we’ is and what ‘it/we’ think about the world, but makes us feel an engaged participant in that group. And remember, we long for the safety of the group.
I found our group to be different than any I’ve ever belonged to. First of all, the ‘We’ of Peter, Mark and I emerged around our individual commitment to reflect on the human condition amidst a noisy world. We write about philosophy so that we can think about philosophy. Through this process, ‘we’ question what a life well-lived is and suggest hypotheses as to how ‘we’ have embodied it in our own reality. It is self-interested insofar as we believe that an examined life — even partially or sporadically — is one lived with greater rewards and more profound pleasures. For example, since we must eat to sustain ourselves, why not be mindful of taste, texture and quality at every meal? Why not perfect the recipe for Madeleines? We live intentionally because the goal of life — if a universal goal exists or can ever be articulated — is definitely not to ‘fill the time’ between now and our death!
Thus, the ‘We’ of Mark, Peter and I came together — at last! We cooked amazing food, soaked up the sun, (some of us) braved the sea but we all savoured oysters and lobsters. We started to get acquainted with each other — in real life. Unbeknownst to me, the raison d’etre of our group shifted below my feet. I wanted to know ‘Who are We?’ as a group — as the writers of the Essence of Water, committed to a mindful and reflective life — and to feel that I belong to that particular group !!! What I found was a few human beings, figuring out ‘Who are we for each other?’.
Through dialogue, I tentatively explore those relationships. In our newly-formed mini-community, while we shared some common characteristics — all of us being privileged and highly educated — our sense of belonging stemmed mainly from our attitude toward life and not any outwardly identity-driven characteristics. Mainly, ‘we’ are all engaged in the process of intentional living. But clearly, the pursuit of a well-lived life can take many forms! For while we are still more or less engaged in the same questioning process, the answers we find are significantly different. No better or worse, just attuned to our personality and unique life circumstances.
Our collective ‘vibe’ wasn’t about what we can ‘do’ for each other (or even collectively together) but on a commitment to merely ‘be’ in the presence of others. Huge difference! This was a unique experience because such encounters require a familiarity that usually emerges from physical or social proximity: from having similar lifestyles, a similar profession, a similar educational past or a set of cultural experiences. Mark and I — outside of reading each other’s texts — were newly met strangers!
I had anticipated a celebration of a group, the formation of a ‘We’. Instead, our week-end became a subtle exploration of personal diversity. Whereas I had wanted to focus on our similarities, I found myself deeply different from my counterparts.
It started immediately on the way back from the airport. Shortly after (or before) talking about Stephen Jay Gould (who I had never heard off), I confessed that I have not yet acquired my cynicism. According to Peter, who confirmed my statement, it’s quite unusual — especially compared to a Brit who lear their cynicism quite early in life. In the UK, cynicism “… is steeped in the tea!”. Mark indeed expressed astonishment. For his part, Peter shared a profound ambivalence, describing himself as a reluctantly accepting that cynicism indeed prevails in society today.
By the word ‘cynicism’, I mean the worldview that people in society act selfishly, seek benefits for themselves (money, power) especially with the least amount of work possible (what economists call rent-seeking) and ultimately, with limited or nil regard to the consequences of their actions for others or the collective. Being a cynic implies that we approach Others with skepticism of their expressed intentions (especially altruistic ones). Those adopting this worldview morally justify it by the ‘fact’ that, since everyone else is deemed to do the same, any move “is part of the game!”, where ‘success’ is defined merely by the reaching of one’s goals.
To me, this attitude is profound a ‘win-lose’ model where social status and even self-worth is defined ‘relative’ to Others on the social ladder. It’s not that I don’t understand that People act in self-interest. It’s simply that I do not view (or experience) the world through that lens. I can’t. I refuse to believe that it is ‘normal’ for human beings to be so individualistic, even though I can rationally see that it is the current social ‘norm’, especially in business and politics.
But surprisingly, ‘cynicism’ is one of those words with a very rich history! In ancient Greece, the Cynics were those who rejected all conventions and instead advocated the pursuit of virtue in accordance with a simple and idealistic way of life. (Wiki, Cynicism) Well, that describes me quite accurately!!! Maybe I’m a practicing cynic — part of the resistance, showing an alternative way to live. There might be two sides to every concept after all!
Don’t get me wrong: I think that I understand Mark’s and Peter’s point-of-view — and I certainly don’t judge them for our diverging attitudes. Mark’s whole-hearted acceptance of cynicism — as the structuring modus operandi of how people behave in society — doesn’t imply that he unreflectively adopts this attitude in his own life. He still has choices, which I believe he executes quite willingly. He doesn’t need to adopt the prevailing worldview to share it cognitively. In fact, his awareness of Others’ self-serving tendencies might allow him to best anticipate their reactions, enabling him to fulfill his chosen goals — whatever those are.
Peter struggles. I think that he’d want the worldview to be different because he understands that it could. But since it isn’t, maybe selfishness is in human nature after all. Yet since Peter can’t adopt (or more specifically, chooses not to be co-opted by) the prevailing attitude, he lives in constant dissonance. He cognitively understands Others, yet he himself behaves differently and is not understood by the Others he co-exists with. Obviously, ‘understand’ exists on a continuum and it is rarely all white or all black. We always find small islands of people with whom we can exchange meaning. But how small are such islands, and how fierce and impenetrable is the surrounding sea, will necessarily affect our feeling of belonging to the greater ‘we’.
For my part, I’m not sure to what degree I ‘understand’ the self-serving ethos, because I fundamentally disagree with its values and end-goal. I’ve taken a position — against — which means that I’m no longer cognitively flexible to switch at will between two fundamentally different cognitive schemes. I’ve refused the ‘play by the rules’ merely because these are the rules of the game. As a result, I’m playing a different game. While Peter confronts the prevailing worldview from within — and bravely stands differently on the well-established turf of the ‘self-serving People’ — I behave as if the world was already not cynical, as if People have embraced their universality as ‘One Humanity, One Earth’. This ‘fake-it-till you make it’ approach has disconnected me from the prevailing ‘social reality’; for I do not share the cynical intersubjective ‘understanding’ of how the world functions. Therefore, I’m an outsider to the prevailing worldview.
Again, it isn’t so black and white. From where I stand, at the margin of that big ‘world-melee’, I can comprehend intellectually what is going on. I see the trends, the news; I can stay informed. I just get emotionally all worked up! I’ve repeatedly tried and failed to belong to groups whose ideals I don’t believe in. In other words, I don’t wear the armour very well. I find it too constraining. Anyway, it’s been my life-journey that I end up exploding from within and destroying all that I’ve built on false premises. Hence I realized that I could fight against the current, getting exhausted trying to affect the tide, or simply ‘be’. In stepping aside, I’ve given myself space to live by an alternative understanding of ‘what reality is’. Yet, this has also caused me to be an alien to (and feel alienated from) Others. It’s a price I’ve been willing to pay, but it is still a toil.
This is how I got to where I am today: searching for a ‘we’ to whom I belong. I’ve searched hard and for so long that I can’t help but send radar ‘pings’ into the noosphere. In flying to Boston, my hopes were high — probably unrealistically so.
Over a lovely weekend, I made new friends and ate so well! Feeling awash in mutual acceptance and respect, I could be authentic, perceptively open. We talked about both serious and mundane topics. What I discovered was the depth of our diversity. For human diversity is not merely about where we grew up, our interactions with family and colleagues, our formative experiences, it’s also about our values and worldview. Since Mark, Peter and I share a commitment to intentional living (a guiding value), I expected they might share my worldview. I don’t think we do — though to verbalize how our attitudes and beliefs differ would require more ongoing interactions.
We certainly did — cognitively and through empathy — build a bridge of understanding between our individuality, because we cared enough about each other to get to know each other as unique Others. But we didn’t merge into a ‘we’. ‘We’ didn’t even attempt to. We tried to ‘be’ — each as our own — ‘together’. This seems so simple, but it ain’t easy, for it requires being receptive to subtle differences and, even harder, a commitment to stop ‘projecting’ our worldview onto others. We are not analogous, and yet our differences need not be threatening. And we achieved a sense of collective peace with our sense of diversity because we were able to communicate. Moreover, maybe the result more communication would actually result in a narrowing of the differences between our worldviews, not to an identical dogma but to a set of shared values.
This weekend left me seriously wondering: who is this ‘we’ to which we aspire to belong? In the ‘self-serving’/cynical worldview, there is an embedded ‘we’. For even though the worldview is extremely individualistic, it still assumes that everyone else behaves accordingly to it. Therefore, it is somewhat stable. Life gets messier when ‘we’ realize that it is false! Some altruistic individuals are really altruistic, acting either unselfishly or seeking a synergy between their own goals and that of the community. There are alternatives. One is not morally justified to jump off a bridge just because everybody else does it.
We are at a point in our cognitive evolution where we — humanity as a whole and possibly each individual personally — either analytically or intuitively know that ‘we’ no longer share a common worldview. We can’t deny the evidence coming from all around the globe! We live according to different values, different paradigms, and they constantly clash. In the intimacy of our inner self, ‘we’ are confronted by this absence of ‘we’ yet still long to congregate, to belong. The more anxious we get about not knowing who the ‘we’ is anymore, the more we seek the safety of the tribe — even an illusory one.
With the degree of freedom we have today, with the countless opportunities we have for being, experiencing, and holding beliefs according to our own ideals, ‘we’ are losing touch with that equally important need: to belong to the intersubjective ‘social reality’. The more unique each of us gets, the fewer characteristics we share by default, the more we need to communicate in order to understand each other. FYI: This trend is accelerating.
==> Here I mean genuinely communicate: through ongoing interactions based on a receptive and non-interfering attitude — not just shouting louder at each other in the hope that forcefulness will prevail.
I don’t know where this leads, but I’m investigating. For it seems clear to me that ‘we’ need a sense of who the ‘we’ is before we can collectively achieve anything.