Sharpened Engagement

I originally meant this letter as a comment to Peter’s Engagement post.  But since he scolds me every time I meaningfully comment instead of using a new post, here it shall stand on its own:

Dear Peter,

In the past few months, we have witnessed your struggle to find your place in the world.  It has been a long winding road; with partial sidewalks, Mordor-style industrial neighborhoods, and a profound sense of dislocation – wherever you happen to be.  In prior essays, you blamed urban planning for the ills of the world – but we know that you know that it isn’t as simple as that.  Planning can help make our cities a more human place to live, but planning in itself cannot decide what is ‘optimized’ in our social development.

In the Engagement essay, you clearly say that you desire to participate ‘in the world as it is’; in its messy, contested and often confused state of being.  Yet your efforts to adapt to San Antonio show that living in the real life is not ‘pain free’.  Maybe you are an ‘existential masochist’ and don’t mind a little pain, if it has a greater purpose.  Maybe the sharp edges that drive you crazy are the same ones that make you feel alive.  Maybe you want to belong ‘in the world as it is’ because it is imperfect and needs you to nudge it toward greater excellence.

Forgive me dear friend, but I have to ask you to dig deeper.  You wrote the last essay to discover that you think: we got your stream of consciousness.  But I’m asking you to sharpen your views.  And since you took my private words and used them publicly as your springboard, you will now get my pointy comments in public! (Wink – I know you can take it – you might actually prefer that, as this site is a testament to your commitment to live publicly.)

You say: “I want to make the world better”, and to do so, “I live as I do”.  To me, this means that you wish to change the world from within its existing structure.  For example, you have been seeking a job in a large organization where, by the virtue of your position, you can make decisions that have positive externalities for thousands of people.  However, you know as much as anyone that organizations have a life of their own, one that dictates to a stronger or lesser degree the range of acceptable behaviors for their human members.  In some circumstances, one is merely a cog waiting to become obsolete as artificial intelligence is catching up.  In others, one has some power to affect how things are done.  In most cases though, changes are incremental; given enough time, consecutive nudges can amount to a change in direction.  But their results will start small and take years to come to fruition; and can reversed at any time by others.  I’ll use the analogy of a boat at sea: in this scenario, you seek to convince the captain to steer a slightly new course.

I too want to change the world – I hope that as much is clear by now.  But I am the wave, which also nudges the boat off-course.   I cannot be the wave and be in the boat at the same time.  Marshall McLuhan, a visionary of communication sciences, says in his book ‘The Medium is the Massage’: “The poet, the artist, the sleuth – whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well-adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends.”  That is my purpose: to sharpen perception.  And yes, my actions are creative by nature: I am using materials, either wood or words, to make something new, something that was only ‘potential’ before and that now can exist ‘in the world’ because it has been painted – either literally or figuratively.

But we both engage.  We both act.  There is no ‘changing’ anything without being the cause of some effect.  And to ‘be the cause’, one must do something: one must be an agent, as in ‘having and exerting agency’.  It is always the ripple effects of our actions that ‘change the world’, in either small or large ways, most often in unanticipated ways of unknown magnitude.

You say: “I want to change the world through action, not through creation or through control.”  I understand your desire to refuse ‘control’ as a mean to change the world.  You do not believe in dictatorship, even if you could be the benevolent one.  To pursue our analogy, you wouldn’t want to become the ship’s captain: that would be controlling, and somehow you prefer the politics persuasion.  You also are enough of a realist to know that to gain the highest seats of power often requires the very politicking that corrupts an otherwise moral soul.  It’s unclear if you think that a) it wouldn’t be worth the effort given that even presidents don’t have as much ‘control’ as we think, b) it would require unacceptable compromises to your values, or c) that you believe that even benevolent control would prevent the emergence of the type of world you wish to see emerge.

Where I’ll question you harder is that you feel you “…can’t walk away from daily life as lived by ‘most people’.”  Reality check here: ‘most people’ do not fly every second week to go see their son in another city.  You are not ‘most people’: never were and never will be.  Their isn’t even such a thing as ‘most people’, only individual people who happen to have similar but not identical lifestyles, concerns and values; landing somewhere on a Bell curve of financial independence and intelligence, and somewhere in the pyramid of gender, age group and ethnicity.  You can directly engage with individuals, but not with the aggregated representative ‘people’ of a nation.

But you clearly have very ambivalent feelings toward “…rejecting anything that another person accepts completely as their own truth.”  This sentence is really hard to unpack!  You lean toward accepting human people’s beliefs because you accept them as people; and since their beliefs are the result of ‘who they are’ -in terms of life’s circumstances- than beliefs and people are not so different.  I don’t think that this is quite true.  You might be confusing a person’s goodness -inherent to being a living human being- with their ‘own truth’: their beliefs and ideas, which are socially constructed to a large degree (and hence not inherent within humanness in anyway).

In my humble opinion, humans are good insofar as they love (each other, their pets, bowling, whatever), and that goodness is not in anyway dependent or correlated with their beliefs.  [A belief in love as fundamental to human nature might help bring about more goodness, but that is a tangent here].  Since everyone loves at least something (and hopefully someone), I believe that, in your acceptance of others, you might be confusing the ‘loving subject’ with the ‘object loved’; in other words, you are confusing the goodness of a person with the validity of their beliefs.

Even in my radical independence, I never reject the inherent goodness of an individual.  I even respect his/her agency in deciding what they accept as their own truth.  It is true that I tend to respect individuals more deeply if they demonstrate to me that they are aware of their choices: in other words, that they are conscious of loving what they love for x,y,z reasons.  Even if the conversation ends with: “It is just how I am”, I still immensely respect that they have gone through the thought process of deciding what ‘it’ actually ‘is’.  But while I accept the right of all individuals to believe what they want (and that it is ok for them to hold ideologies different than mine), if those beliefs have externalities on me, then I have the right to consent to be subjected to those externalities or not.  [Eventually – I pray- we will find a way to deal with externalities that is a little more sophisticated than ‘the strong get away with whatever they can get away with and the rest are voiceless’ – still working on that!].

But in your essay, this is not quite what you are talking about.  You say that you refuse to reject “…anything that another person accepts completely as their own truth.”  If this were true, it would mean that you embrace intolerance with the same gusto as tolerance; hate as much as love; singular pursuit of wealth as much as the pursuit of any other values.  That is a very tenuous position to hold: maybe you would like to explain more of what you mean.  Food for thought: to give validity to someone’s own truth does not require that you embrace that truth as our own.  You can understand – through empathy – someone else’s truth and consider it valid, rational even considering their life’s circumstances.  But you are saying that because someone has embraced some truth – someone you love and respect presumably – that this truth must somehow have some truth to you too.  Maybe, but not necessarily, and certainly not always.

But back to your essay, you say: “If we are going to change the world, we have to understand the entire nature of the system.”  On that, I agree.  Neither you nor I can just look the other way.  I have been going to the city of Toronto once a week by train for a writing class.  Doing so, I feel more connected with the world and I am happier as a result. So of course, engagement with the world is important; it is essential to be a part of it if we are to be the cause of changes within it.

When we select a place to engage from (a job, a volunteering position, whatever social role we chose to play), we choose both a ‘vantage point’ from which to see the system and a position from which to affect it. (Note that, in that position, one is also subject to be affected by that system in ways particular to that particular position: it’s a two-way street of influence.)  This choice is more or less constrained by our capacity for social mobility.

So while I agree that we must engage, which also means choosing a ‘vantage position’, I am just extremely mindful of the system’s capacity for subverting me; a ‘me’ that I fought so hard and long to discover.  Personally, I am walking a very fine line; with as much exposure to the world as possible – to understand it in all its glories and shadows – while at the same time, not so much that it will ‘take over me’, either by throwing me emotionally out of whack or by simply demanding so much of my time and energy that I am forgoing the opportunity to be ‘me’.  Since I am very sensitive, my ‘sweet-spot’ is to remain somewhat from vortex of the system.  I am better off in a position where I can see the undercurrents rather than being in the middle of the choppiest water.  I would lose too much perspective.  You seem to be better suited to the fight, able to resist the pressure-cooker environment.  But you are still vulnerable to losing your view of the world if you let the system submerge you .

This is why it is so important to write.  Our writings reflect our thoughts: as essay writing is both a mirror of and a window into the world.  As long as you have the energy to leave your testimony here and elsewhere, as long as you are not emotionally crippled by what you see, then by all means: go out and explore.

Yet I believe that you and I have been blessed with the canny ability to, using McLuhan’s word, “sharpening perceptions” both our own and those of others.  This is what you do when you ask the questions you do.  You know that asking questions is a better way toward an ‘eureka’ moment than being told ‘what is right’.  You know that people want to discover more, and be guided in their own journey.  By nudging, influencing, downright living with and amongst, you are co-creating the ‘rolling now’ (the present that keeps on unfolding; the one and only moment in time and space that we all share).  This is indeed spectacular, brave and maybe a little reckless – but certainly not dumb.

You say: “Most of us will struggle with the challenge to discern.”  Yes, that is true.  But it is also true that we can make ‘awareness’ our life’s goal.  We can choose that it is worthwhile to understand the nature of the system, to uncover our human nature and to glimpse how we – within this complex system – interact, how reality emerges, how ideas create feedback loops, and then to use that knowledge to nudge, influence, downright revolutionize.  It is also true that “we’ll struggle with the magnitude of the challenge” of both understanding and creating the good.  But as long as we choose not to give up (or in), as long as we do not turn our back on ‘the world as it is’, and as long as we maintain our relations with it (the world) and within it (with others), we are engaged and full-fledged change-agents !

And there is no knowing before hand who and which of their action(s) will change the direction of our world ship.  Is it going to be the inside man or the wave?  Probably both at once, and that is perfectly all right !