11 Jul Embrace Contradictory-ness—It’s What We Got
July 10, 2013
When I last posted on May 29, I had just returned from Denmark where I co-taught a three-day course, ”Educational Psychology, Late-modernity and Social Therapeutics,” for PhD students in psychology at the University of Aarhus (Denmark’s second largest city). Two days later, I left for Singapore where I presented on a plenary symposium, ”Learning through Play,” at the Re-designing Pedagogy conference of the Singapore National Institute of Education. When I returned home, I got to work, play and contribute to the social-emotional “growth spurt” of the members of my Institute’s International Class in the final two-week residency of their 10-month program. Then, I spent a week at the ocean.
My mentor and friend Fred Newman taught me many things—among them, what to ”do with” the contradictory-ness of life: Embrace it. Don’t ignore, deny, repress or try to resolve it.
Traveling—for me—highlights the contradictory-ness of the world/of history/ of being human—and also how ”un-embraced” it is by most people.
Joy and pain are humanly produced side by side every moment of each day. People love the people they care about and people hurt the people they care about. Very very smart people often do very very dumb things. Many people glorify a god and demean and destroy what they believe their god created. We live scripted and improviationally. We experience being alone when we are with others. We support the radical not-knowingness of babies, by which they become socialized to, among other things—knowing and its many conservatizing consequences. We want to change and we want to remain as we are. We are a collective mass and unique individuals.
Reading through the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday (at the ocean), I found some worth-quoting reflections on contradictory-ness. They were in a review of John Gray’s The Slience of Animals, which reviewer Thomas Nagel (a world famous philosopher who wrote the classic essay, ”What is it like to be a bat?” and the more recent controversial Mind and Cosmos) called ”an attack on humanism [in which Gray] condemns this widely accepted secular faith as a form of delusional self-flattery.” As I read, I felt both author and reviewer grappling with human history’s and human nature’s contradictory-ness. Both conclude it is unresolvable, but they do it in very different ways. And that’s interesting!
At one point, Nagel lays out the contradiction by quoting Gray and then commenting:
“Science and the idea of progress may seem joined together, but the end result of progress in science is to show the impossibility of progress in civilization,” he [Gray] writes. “Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same.” One has only to think about the history of the past hundred years to see how scientific progress can proceed alongside moral and political barbarism. How can we defend the humanistic belief in progress against this record?
Gray, according the Nagel, says we cannot. We must give up the myths of human superiority and unending progress. Human nature, from which irrationality and barbarism stem, is not transformable. The contradiction of knowledge and irrationality will always exist.
Nagel also contends that we cannot change human nature. But he says that’s not where progress lies anyway. It lies in cultural development.
Any victory over our species’ destructive tendencies will likewise have to come from institutional and cultural development. We know what humans are capable of: in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong formation, they can behave monstrously. The hope for progress can consist only in the belief that there is some form of collective human life in which the capacity for barbarism will rarely find expression, and in which humans’ creative and cooperative potential can be realized without hindrance. Gray regards such hope as utopian, but it can be supported both by experience and by reflection. Moral and political progress is inevitably more difficult than scientific progress, since it cannot occur in the minds of a few experts but must be realized in the collective lives of millions; but it does happen.
I agree. But I don’t agree with either Gray or Nagel that human nature is fixed. In fact, it’s cultural development that transforms human nature. I don’t know Nagel’s philosophy well at all, but perhaps this is too Marxist for him. Perhaps he embraces contradiction but not dialectics. I’m seriously considering reading his books to find out—probably next time I’m at the ocean.
Andrew Tyson
Posted at 13:01h, 14 JulyJust read my previous post and found far too many ‘typos’ in it – my apologies. Sometimes I get so caught up in a chain of thought that I struggle to get it out coherently.
One thing that I would like to clarify in my post, which is admittedly a digression; is that I actually believe in the old sense of the term ‘morality’. i.e. I believe there actually is a certainty that we, as humans, recognize even when we deny the possibility of it; a foundation that makes binary terms like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ meaningful. This is in contrast to the post-modern position that all must be accepted as merely relative. i.e. In one place child slavery is fine for the community due to its circumstances, and in other places it is not because of different circumstances.
The worry I have with your (Mal) description of quantum thought – that dichotomies can be tolerated simultaneously until a final solution is found – is a potential acceptance that there is no possibility at all of certainty. Now, I acknowledge that we can never be fully certain of anything, for we are seemingly limited to the subjective perceptions of our physical limitations and intellectual scope. But, I have faith the the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are real in some meaningful sense. I believe that it is wrong to murder someone, or sexually violate someone, or even knowingly choose to harm someone; and I don’t think that there is any exception to that wrongness that can make it right. That is irrespective that we expect our military people to ‘defend’ our country to the point of killing other people.
Still, accepting that we are between uncertainty and certainty; means I need to be as humble as the next person. So, in that regard I admit that I don’t know what it is that provides a meaning for the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. I am not going to tell people that they must believe in exactly the same things as I believe in, because that would be hubris – to put myself on a platform above my fellow human beings. But, I suspect that all people recognize, even if only vaguely, that some things are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when they see them. Certainly, as is often portrayed in Hollywood movies and TV programs (stories from the people who reflect back to us our uncertainties, fears, and desires), criminals seem to have a great sense of ‘justice’ – in that when someone harms them, their reaction is to in turn harm the person who harmed them, but even worse – they call that ‘justice’. Although it is possible that we all have criminal capacities (even if not used); I’m sure that many people believe in ‘justice’, as they believe it is ‘wrong’ for others to impose suffering on them – and these are reflections of a reality that is universal, and in being universal, I suspect it is truly foundational, not a merely relativistic creation.
Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher of about 2500 years ago, likened human existence on this plane as being in a cave with our backs to the light. On the lit rear wall of the cave, we can see the shadows of ourselves (how we perceive ourselves and others), and the shadows of the other things that interact with our lives. I know it is a bit esoteric to consider our perception of ‘morality’ as a shadow we see poorly; but it is an analogy that seems to fit. Why else do so many people in the world agree that such concepts as justice, right and wrong, etc, exist; even against the current social context in the West of the moral-less evolutionary pressure to survive and reproduce, with the post-modern concept that our lives are merely part of a meaningless (or socially constructed meaning, at best) existence?
To end, I am certain that there is a morality whose aspects I see at times more clearly, and at other times less so; but something that underpins my life – all people’s lives – by providing the foundation for terms like right and wrong that enables them to be meaningful, not merely relativistic. I, like everyone else, just live in a subjective existence that means I am stuck between the certain and the uncertain, and I’m doing the best I can.
Well, I’ll stop preaching now. All the best.
Andrew
Tim Buchanan
Posted at 23:40h, 13 JulyThanks for the sanity. I read contradiction and immediately Whitman’s greatest fault came to mind, from those who desire stability, while Walt simply lived and viewed and felt the contradictions within in himself and his culture. I have been a fan of both Whitman and contradiction for a good part of my development. And what it brings me to I heard again from Sherman Alexie being interviewed by Bill Moyers; that binding reference of Keats – “negative capabilities.” So many basic is that understanding of the language of life.
loisholzman
Posted at 16:05h, 13 JulyAndrew, I am so glad to have been a catalyst for such a rich and thought-provoking post!
some thoughts…
What you say about morality and ethics…yes, moral codes are, in my experience, not what guide people. I prefer to think of morality as human activity that, in many, many cases, does not come after rational thought, but is rather relationally responsive.
I too am no fan of human nature but am awed by human-ness.
Metaxological is new to me…interesting! I am, however, no fan of knwoledge either—or rather I believe it is very over-rated.Your new (to me) term of being between control and understanding seems useful. It may or may not have anything to do with what I see as a different kind of understanding that isn’t tied to knowledge, but comes through activity, specifically the activity of performing (which is how we are both who we are and not who we are at the same time).
Thank you again.
If you want to read some of what I and my metnor Fred Newman have had to say on these matters, may I suggest our books, Unscientific Psychology and The End of Knowing… both on Amazon.
loisholzman
Posted at 15:52h, 13 JulyI think you are on to something, Mai. You came to the pitfalls of binary thinking from one place and I cam to it from another. All the evidence from politics to living together point to how destructive and non-developmental it is.
Mal Green
Posted at 01:40h, 12 JulyA few years ago, to break the boredom of a long flight from my home in New Zealand to the USA North-West to attend a couple of facilitated conversation events on spirituality in action, I bought a copy of the Economist – something my friends found amusing given my complete lack of understanding of economics as evidenced in my personal budgeting deficiencies. I had an invigorating week with a dictionary in one hand trying to grasp the meaning of the fascinating material that I was reading. Amongst the many incredibly informative articles on a range of topics (hardly any on pure economics, thank God), was one on quantum computing. Given that I know only slightly more about computing than I know about economics, this was going to be a hard read.
However, with the help of Google and my trusty Smartphone dictionary, I gathered that quantum computing is where an atomic processor uses multiple processes simultaneously to handle the same byte of data at exactly the same time. This creates a situation where, in contrast to binary computing in which a processor uses linear logic that only allows for either an “on – I” or an “off – O” response to a byte of data, in quantum computing, the atomic processor employs a fuzzy logic approach that allows a response to the same byte of data with an “I” at the same time as the processor is responding with an “O”. Nevertheless, apparently this conflict can be harnessed to produce better quality solutions more quickly by using multiple processes and allowing this conflict to exist between them. (This is my summary after enduring a sustained period of brain ache!).
From this I began to ponder the possibilities of quantum thinking in belief and morality. It seems to me that our default position in the areas of belief and morality is binary thinking – right or wrong, true or false. And this serves us well in the more straightforward issues of life. But, in the more complicated issues of life (such as morality and belief), this binary thinking, it seems to me, gets us into a lot of strife because of our inability to cope with a view contrary to our own “true/right” thinking. In a simplistic generalization, I wonder if sectarian violence and proliferation of breakaway groups from mainstream institutions are primarily the result of people devoted to binary thinking in the areas of belief and morality.
But what if we were to embrace what you, Lois and Andrew, have said and begin to explore the notion of quantum thinking – an approach to belief and morality that allows for something to be both right and wrong at the same time, true and false at the same time. This may open the way for a more collaborative approach to exploring issues of belief and morality (being scientifically and economically illiterate, I can’t speak for science or economics or any field outside of the social sciences) that produces solutions that establish validity and benefaction rather than proving right/wrong, true/false.
I’m not sure about all this, to be honest. It’s just an idea I’ve been pondering and these two posts above are helpful in my exploration.
Mal
Andrew Tyson
Posted at 12:03h, 11 JulyG’day Lois
I struggle when people write the term ‘moral’, because I am uncertain as to what that actually means in our modern and culturally changing society. For instance, in the past, the term ‘morality’ seems to have been referenced to some form of absolutism that was independent of either human reasoning, or ultimately belief – in idea of something foundational like mathematics – a priori. Not that people necessarily had their understanding of morality right; but that there was the possibility of something greater than the merely (incredibly) human; that had existed for all of time and was able to be discerned by those looking to find, evening if only with the certainty of having seen a shadow from the peripheral vision. But these days, morals and ethics seem to be interchangeable concepts, and just like the recent change in the meaning of misogyny since the Prime Minister of Australia used as a rebuke against the opposition leader; the terms are much weaker and thus much more open to interpretation.
Then there is the matter of humanism, and human nature. Modernism has promoted that human beings are perfectible; that we can become Gods in our own right. Post-modernism put a pin in that balloon, but follows in all the hubris of Modernism by its certainty in the uncertainty of everything. Humanism is a reaction that at least has some of its roots in the 14th Century with Thomas Aquinas, and his theorizing that God is a distant being, that he basically set up a ‘clock-work universe’ (a description that was used in a poem applauding Newton) and let it run, not really caring about how it progresses – which lead to what we now know as secularism. Yes, I know the modern form of secularism is the belief in the non-existence of God; but it didn’t start out that way.
Anyway, as I wrote, Humanism is a reaction that has come out of secularism – particularly the modern form of secularism; because if you can’t have a belief in God or Gods (Theism), then you flounder around in despair until you hit upon the idea that you can trust in yourself (a very Descartian idea – ‘I think, therefore I am’). It has all the certainty of any relativistic belief that can not be taken more than a certain distance before you try to climb up your own rectum.
Embracing uncertainty (Contradictoriness) then, as you suggest is all we have. Yet David Hume promoted that idea too; and fell over because he (as we all would) failed to have the level of doubt necessary to really cope with the concept. We can’t actually believe that the chairs and table in our kitchens are suddenly going to defy gravity and be nestled comfortably on our roof one day. Its certainly not probable; but it would be contradictory to all of our expectations.
An that is ultimately the catch – our expectations. Humanists believe they are good because under most of the circumstances they find themselves in, they behave in ways that others would probably agree are ‘good’ (within the relativistic and contradictory position that society generally agrees that term means). But, in Germany before the rise of Nazism, most German people probably also behaved in ways that we would all generally agree were ‘good’. Yet, due to both historical circumstances and unjust external impositions; a situation was created where one man could manipulate the many into doing such horrendous things as are now documented in 20th Century Western history. And I mean the average citizen got into the horrendous actions, not just the few top echelons. When you consider stories of citizens that had lived in comfortable accommodation with neighbours that were Jews, whose children played with the neighbour’s Jewish children, and went to the same schools; attended the same markets; and probably worried about the same fashions – all of a sudden are watching thugs beating their neighbours up and even killing them; and being invited to join in – and some of them did. From what I understand of the Hitler youth, to join you had to torture an animal (a pet) to death as proof of your willingness to sacrifice all to ‘The Cause’; and the animal had to be a beloved pet, not just any old stray. The Hitler youth joined by the hundreds of thousands. These days, we consider any child that tortures animals to be potential psychopaths. Is it that we all have the potential to become psychopaths; and only because of our more ‘developed’ cultural setting, we have the luxury to keep these impulses hidden – to deny the truth of human nature?
Ultimately, as I think you can see, I’m not a big fan of human nature; although I am amazed and boggled at what it is to be human? It is an incredible thing; and the uncertainty of even what it is makes it even more incredible and amazing to me – but I am not going to hold humanity up as the reference point, as the basis for how to live life. I think I am too realistic to be a humanist.
So, with contradictoriness as all that is truly open to us; it strikes me that the faith in science must fall too. For science says ‘give me a big enough lever, and I’ll move planets’; give me a little bit of empirical knowledge; and I achieve useful outcomes (like the transistor, then the itegrated chip, then the computer, etc) – and it has. But then more unscrupulous people have said, ‘see, science works; therefore it must be the ‘truth’’, and that gave people power because those that did not know how to make the magic were dazzled by those that did. And even in this time of Post-Modernism, where all else is merely narrative; Science is still ‘the truth’, the reference point, the only way of knowing – hubris!
Recently I came across, due to my brother who was a sessional lecturer in ACU Brisbane, the term metaxological. It was a term that I did not understand; but when my brother explained his use of the term, it made some sense to me. It is a lot like the concept that contradictoriness is all we have. My brother used it to describe knowledge as being ‘between’ control and understanding. You can control knowledge, in the sense of its distribution, who gets informed and who doesn’t (equivalent of power); and you can get some understanding of knowledge; but you can never actually grasp (hold) it, because it is in between our capabilities. Science is a mechanism to control; and it has been successful in many ways. Some of the traditional belief systems have been ways of understanding. For example, I read a text that described the difference of approach in this way – a Westerner (Enlightened European) comes along to a brick wall and sees a flower growing out of a crack in the brickwork. He plucks it from its crevice, thus killing it; but then is able to examine it fully to state that it is a flower. A Zen Buddist comes across a brick wall with a flower growing out of a crack in the brickwork and decides to sit there and meditate on the wall and the flower that has defied the sterility of the man made edifice to live. Which one has the ‘true’ knowledge?
So; in conclusion, I like uncertainty, I like contradictoriness, because they give us a reason to acknowledge our place in the universe – it gives us a reason to be humble. But, I also like certainty, because when I turn a light switch on, I want to believe that electrons will flow through the newly formed junction that the switch has made, on to the filament of the globe in my ceiling; and that filament will glow and make light for me to read my computer screen by, and type on my keyboard. Ultimately, this puts me in mind to suggest that humanity lives between the contradictory and the certain; and that we are neither the contradiction nor the certainty, but something different altogether.
Well, that’s my thoughts for the moment. Thank you.
Andrew.