While many of our current scientific theories are admittedly impressive, they come at the end of a long succession of failures: Every past theory has been wrong. Ptolemy’s astronomy had a good run, but then came the Copernican revolution. Newtonian mechanics is truly impressive, but it was ultimately superseded by contemporary physics.
Modesty and common sense suggest that, like their predecessors, our current theories will eventually be overturned. But if they aren’t true, why are they so effective? Intuitive realism is at best a metaphysical half-truth, albeit a fairly harmless one.
Bertrand Russell writes,
In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.[1]
Such a statement would very likely be wrong because of the numerous imperfections with our perception: we see and hear only thin bands from the spectra of light and sound, and generally then only on scales that have been evolutionarily advantageous, and still with flaws. We may be cut off by our very nature from seeing things as they are.
We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.[2]
Montaigne is saying that a human being’s perspective may not merely be prone to occasional error, but limited by definition, in exactly the way we normally (and arrogantly) presume a dog’s intelligence to be.
Ordinary dogmatic Skepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge. It is summed up in Socrates’s remark: “All I know is that I know nothing.” Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single Greek word which acts as shorthand for this maneuver: epokhe. It means “I suspend judgment.”
Epokhe functions almost like one of those puzzling kōans in Zen Buddhism: brief, enigmatic notions or unanswerable questions such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” At first, these utterances cause nothing but perplexity. Later, they open a path to all-encompassing wisdom. All Pyrrho renounced was the pretension most people fall prey to: that of “regimenting, arranging, and fixing truth.”
***
And this grey spirit, yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Truth is not a single thing out there to be discovered. Instead truth must be assembled or constructed. Sometimes, it’s constructed visibly, from many different components. Other times, it happens invisibly by society, or by cultural mechanisms and other processes that can’t be easily seen by the individual. Consider the following three examples:
REALISM
We explain the success of scientific theories by an appeal to what philosophers call realism–the idea that they are more or less true. In other words, chemistry “works” because atoms actually exist, and hand-washing prevents disease because there really are loitering pathogens.
OTHER MINDS
We explain why people act the way they do by positing that they have minds more or less like our own. We assume they have feelings, beliefs, and desires, and that they are not (for instance) zombie automata that convincingly act as if they have minds. This requires an intuitive leap.
CAUSATION
We explain the predictable relationship between some events we call causes and others we call effects by an appeal to a mysterious power called causation. Yet, as noted by 18th-century philosopher David Hume, we never “discover anything but one event following another,” and we never directly observe “any force or power by which the cause operates, or any connexion between it and its supposed effect.”[3]
***
All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak disdainfully of another or give itself superior airs.
So when someone “speaks the truth”, what they are saying is actually an assemblage of their education, their culture, and the thoughts and opinions they’ve absorbed from their environment. In a way, you could say that their culture is speaking through them. For that reason, it becomes more accurate and safer to assemble truth with the help of other people, rather than just decide it independently.
The scientific method is a clear example of this. Any scientist can run an experiment and declare a discovery about the world. But teams of other scientists must verify or “peer-review” that truth before it’s safe to accept it. The truth here has been assembled by many people.
All the time, though, there is an understanding that even this final “truth” may well just be temporary or convenient, a placeholder to be changed or shelved later on. (Which should be the case, after all. Even scientific discoveries have a tendency to harden into dogma.)
If you accept this insight, then it immediately becomes impossible for any individual to have a superior belief. There’s no such thing as “absolute truth”. No one “knows” the truth, or can have a better truth than someone else. If an individual—or a group, organization or government—does claim to have truth and declares that truth to you, they are likely to be attempting to overpower and control you.
No one can claim intellectual superiority, for, as William James observed, “All of us are beggars here.”[4]
***
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident.
Modernity is all about order and rationality. The more ordered a society is, Modernists believe, the better it functions. If “order” is superior, then anything that promotes “disorder” has to be wrong. Taken to an extreme, that means anything different from the norm—ideas, beliefs, people—must be excluded. Or even destroyed. In the history of Western culture this has usually meant anyone non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual and non-rational.
This is one reason why tension still erupts between holders of “absolute truth” (say the Church) and postmodern secular societies. Or between an entity like an undemocratic government which seeks to control its populace and the internet, a truly postmodern piece of technology. This is because postmodernity has a powerful weapon that can very easily and very quickly corrode Modernist structures built on “old-fashioned” absolute truth: deconstruction.
If all truth is constructed, then deconstruction becomes useful. Really useful. If you deconstruct something, its meanings, intentions and agendas separate and rise to the surface very quickly—and everything quickly unravels.
Take a novel for example. You can deconstruct the structure of the text, and the personality of the characters. Then you can deconstruct the author’s life story, their psychological background, and their culture and see how that influenced the text. If you keep going, you can start on the structure of human language and thought. Beyond that, a vast layer of human symbols.[5]
***
Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
Belief systems and modernist structures protect themselves from threats like deconstruction with “grand narratives”. These are compelling stories to explain and justify why a certain belief system exists. They work to gloss over and mask the contradictions, instabilities and general “scariness” inherent in nature and human life.
Liberate the entire working class. Peace on Earth. There is one true God. History is progress. One day we will know everything. These are all grand narratives.
All modern societies—even those based on science—depend on these myths. Postmodernism rejects them on principle. Instead it gives for “mini-narratives”, stories that explain small local events—all with an awareness that any situation, no matter how small, reflects in some way the global pattern of things. Think global, act local, basically.
So a postmodern society, unglossed-over by a grand narrative, must embrace the values of postmodernity as its key values that means that complexity, diversity, contradiction, ambiguity, and interconnectedness all become central. In social terms that means a lack of obvious hierarchies (equal rights for all), embracing diversity (multi-culturalism), and that all voices should be heard (consensus). Interconnectedness is reflected in our technology and communications. In the 21st century anything that cannot be stored by a computer ceases to be knowledge.
There are pitfalls, however. Runaway postmodernism creates a grey goo of no-meaning. Infinite consensus creates paralysis. Over-connection leads to saturation. Too much diversity leads to disconnection. Complexity to confusion.
In the midst of all this confusion and noise and diversity, without a grand narrative, who are you? Postmodern personal values are not moral but instead values of participation, self-expression, creativity. The focus of spirituality shifts from security in absolute given truth to a search for significance in a chaotic world. The idea that there is anything stable or permanent disappears. The floor drops away. And you are left there, playing with nonsense.
***
Alfred Korzybski, the primary thinker behind the general semantics movement, held that human knowledge is limited both by the structure of language and the human nervous system. Instead of access to direct knowledge of reality, people have perceptions and a set of beliefs that society has confused with direct knowledge of reality, thus many people confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself. The basic principles of general semantics:
- A map is not the territory.
- A map does not represent all of a territory.
- A map is self-reflexive in the sense that an ‘ideal’ map would include a map of the map, etc., indefinitely.
Applied to daily life and language:
- A word is not what it represents.
- A word does not represent all of the ‘facts’, etc.
- Language is self-reflexive in the sense that in language we can speak about language.
Dr. Leonard Orr, the founder of the Rebirthing-Breathwork movement, says that within every one of us, there are two people—one is a thinker; the other a prover. The thinker, who sort of roughly corresponds to your conscious mind, is that part of you that thinks up ideas and generates possibilities. The prover, who sort of approximates your unconscious mind, has the job of collecting just the right facts to support whatever it is that the thinker thinks.
Orr’s Law is as follows:
Whatever the thinker thinks, the prover proves.
We view the world through the filter of Orr’s Law[6]. So as soon as we get an idea that captures our imagination, there’s a part of us that immediately begins searching for any facts that support the idea, and filtering out any facts that don’t. The problem is that unless we carefully examine the ideas before our minds, we are liable to interpret the events of our lives through some rather odd filters.
***
Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence
Ever since the dawn of civilization, humans have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. We have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know where we came from and why we are here.
The poet John Keats calls the ideal state of the psyche as negative capability — the ability “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”; the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity. Caught between the opinion culture we live in and our deathly fear of being wrong, we long desperately for absolutism, certitude, and perfect truth. It is the cult of precision and knowledge at the expense of abstraction and beauty that inspired Keats to advocate for comfort with uncertainty and nimbleness amidst changing context, a skill also advanced by Rilke[7].
As for me, I no longer believe in anything. I know only certain things—little things, not the nine billion names of God—from experience. When you want a good laugh, you will find me in fine state: fat and sleek, a true hog of Epicurus’s herd. But I have no beliefs, only hypotheses and suspicions. Beliefs get in the way of learning. Belief is for ghost stories and R. Kelly songs about flying. Go for testable hypotheses followed by careful observation, data collection and refinement of said hypotheses based on our current level of ignorance/knowledge on the subject at hand. But never fall in love with your hypothesis.
As we are told in the Vedas:
“Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names”
To have anything really profitable to say about anything and stamp it with a truth label, a thinker must possess more than one kind of intellectual sophistication and brio.
—
[1] Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
[2] Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, The Complete Essays of Montaigne (1958)
[3] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume’s Problem of Causation has remained unsolved for 250 years and this lack of certainty, at the very heart of Human Scientific Knowledge, has greatly prejudiced our belief in the possibility of Metaphysics and the certainty of Science, and has ultimately led to the extreme skepticism (Postmodernism) of our currently troubled and confused times.
[4] William James Sidis, Chapter III: The Problem of Being, Some Problems of Philosophy (1911). His last and most important book, incomplete and published posthumously
[5] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949)
[6] Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising (1983)
[7] Rainer Maria Rilke, “[B]e patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
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