My previous post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, argued the need for certain sorts of flexible and creative thinkers to respond to new opportunities and to deal with problems which have developed in our understanding of Creation or any significant part of it, such as the understanding of human origins and the reasons we are as we are. In this essay, I’ll be dealing with the need for certain types of what might be called reliable thinking on the part of all morally responsible citizens of this world. The meaning of `reliable thinking’ will be developed in the rest of the essay.
It takes a healthy mind to make serious sense of the world about us, however provisional and ephemeral that sense might be. Reality is what it is, what the Good Lord created it to be, modified by His acts and ours and those of other creatures to the extent of freedom exercised by various creatures, from the limited freedom of a bacteria to the moral freedom of social mammals such as wolves and gorillas right up to the self-aware and self-critical moral freedom allowed to human beings. The world, even insofar as we contribute to its being, dictates to us. We don’t impose our ideas upon the world which is a story being told by God. This doesn’t mean we are powerless; it does mean we, so to speak, must play the game by its rules, by rules laid down by God, by rules which must be read out of the game as it is going on.
Without memories which correspond to reality—though not necessarily memories accurate in the way of computers or of scientific recordings—and without minds which can make some sense of what goes on around us in terms of that same correspondence to reality as we know it up to that time and as we update it based upon the experiences of that time, we are confused puppies in a world grown awesomely complex in terms of huge and varied human communities and in terms of a physical universe we now are forced to deal with on terms of modern science and technology. Simple world? We have houses filled with devices designed allowing for quantum mechanical effects, hospitals with diagnostic equipment which also considers relativistic effects. We are starting to diagnose disease, and very tentatively to treat disease, by use of genetics. I’ll mention only one community problem: the American democracy, and most others, are farces in that so much is decided and perhaps has to be decided by political machines well before the voters march into the booths to choose between Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum. The reality of our political situations in the modern West is a bit different than what we pretend.
Some of those mavericks I discussed in my prior post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, need to get to work on these problems, but there are some steps we could take in the context of our current mess to at least minimize the damage we do to our own individual selves, to our communal selves, to our children, and to the rest of the world. Taking these steps will require more awareness of reality as well as more moral courage than men and women of the West have shown in the past couple of centuries.
I speak of `practical’ steps we can take, but choosing the path we step along will require abstract thinking as well as practical thinking and the application of proper habits. I’ll speak a little to the nature of abstract thinking before moving on.
The adoption of abstract modes of reasoning, which I think to have developed in a recognizable and self-sustaining form in the fifth or sixth century before Christ, has not gone so well. In fact, with the modern re-turn to barbarism as described by Jose Ortega y Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses) and others, we have perhaps regressed more than a little over the past two centuries. See Much of Our Knowledge, Much of Our Thinking, Much of Our Moral Structure Lies Outside of Us, where I wrote:
I’m not really pessimistic — in the long term. In The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega Y Gasset told us the growth in prosperity and changes in attitude freed men from parochial lives but only tainted good had come of that release from restrictively local lives. The leaders of the West failed to even try hard at fulfilling their duties to teach the wisdom of the West to these masses or to help them to mature into morally well-ordered adults in this radically new historical situation. Few, if any, leaders rose from the masses themselves to try to develop the sorts of moral characters and minds which could bring about moral order in the new communities which were growing up willy-nilly.
God’s story moves forward. The Body of Christ is forming slowly by painful processes. Some legitimate organs, such as the American government, have decayed into cancers or parasitic organisms preying upon the greater body. The human race which is the mortal stuff of that Body is only reluctantly, and under great pressure, accepting the need to mature and to grow into something not yet seen. We will move forward along with God’s story. What choice have we?
Early in the 1800s, Jefferson was claiming that the hardheaded skepticism of illiterate peasants in Europe had become in most Americans an invincible ignorance based upon “a perverse form of literacy.” The still bigger problem was the loss of any desire to work to reach higher levels of reading skills or reasoning skills or storytelling skills or general understanding of Creation or any substantial part of it. Apparently, a people who came suddenly into a prosperous state in the midst of a civilization which once existed largely in the Cathedral cities and some courts didn’t understand what a civilization is. They knew nothing of the sheer human effort of building and maintaining that civilization—most of that work occurring in the true foundation of a civilization, the minds of its citizens. The technology necessary for the physical infrastructure of a civilization can be grasped by such a people as Americans, but the moral and political infrastructure is transparent to that people. Morality, especially when it was still in its strong and traditional form, seemed as much a part of nature as the desires and needs it helps to bring into a proper order for practical as well as spiritual purposes. One particular aspect of this problem I’ve explored in depth is the need for an understanding of the world, of all of Creation for Christians. A true civilization is an attempt to live out a story corresponding to a people’s understanding of their own role in some great scheme of things.
To be sure, those who came from parochial and uneducated populations have acquired skills and understanding sufficient to read advertising copy or fill out most forms even to doing the arithmetic of tax forms; they have developed some interestingly dangerous skills to manipulate virtual objects on a screen and to drive cars or airplanes. They have not learned to evaluate the quality and reliability of information; they have not learned how to browse the shelves of a library to find at least good background books (even biased books often fill that role in a more than adequate way); they have not learned how to think in historical terms, that is, in terms of reality. The universities graduate a small number of dedicated and highly skilled historians and physicists and chemical engineers each year; the majority of graduates don’t seem capable of finding their way to good information once they are no longer guided by professors or teaching assistants. Some of those in my family from my grandparents’ generation left school at 6th grade but were capable of reading serious books, thinking through difficult lines of thought about this country’s actions or the relationship between capital and labor, and had a healthy skepticism—not cynicism.
Modern inhabitants of what was once the great Christian civilization of the West have no abilities to look into the activities of their own minds, including memory formation. We have minds and memories ready made for manipulation by marketers of the latest and greatest in junk food and gadgets and even excessive versions of useful technology. In general, modern minds are somewhat like silly putty and there is some testimony from American thinkers over the past two centuries that we proudly led the way and I’d claim we still do so. We Americans are proud of our minds of silly putty. Push the mind of an American against a cartoon image and it picks it up, colors and all. The minds of men from other regions of the modern West seem little better in this year of 2014, though Jefferson had claimed to have seen that healthy skepticism in the French peasantry when he was resident in that country. According to Jacques Barzun, the French peasants who were literate in past centuries, apparently a higher percentage than we or Jefferson have imagined, could read books beyond the skills of modern day college professors.
This is a problem, an important problem. An alarmist might look at what has been done to the American mind and other minds since at least World War I when the fathers of corporate marketing joined with Wilson to remove from the American mind the simple desire to mind our own business. There are other strands to this story, the failure of Americans to live up to the promise of this country while pretending we have done so, but I’ll only mention in passing the issues of education and desire for financial security. There are still other problems with the American mind and the underlying American moral character; I’ve discussed some of them in the past. In any case, the world was to be ours to improve as if it were a car engine to be tinkered with and made more efficient.
Serious thinkers, such as Tocqueville and Hawthorne and Melville, had already raised questions by the 1850s about the seemingly weak attachment that Americans had to any part of reality they didn’t wish to recognize. Melville had considered it to be a rebellion against God, on the part of those brave and honest (Captain Ahab) as well as those cowardly and false-faced (Emerson and Thoreau and most Americans).
I’m going to respond to a couple of recent articles about how easy it is for experimental psychologists to manipulate the formation of memories or even the recall of true memories. These experiments are, to be sure, carried out in laboratories, that is—under somewhat artificial conditions, but there is a lot of substance to this work even when it involves a bit of showmanship worthy of Harry Houdini whose tricks were, in turn, as sophisticated as these of experimental psychologists. So far as I can tell, these experiments correspond closely to the real world, however stylized and (falsely) neat those experiments are.
Ed Yong lets us in on some truly weird science in an article, Out-Of-Body Experiences Make It Harder To Encode Memories, about the effect of out-of-body illusions:
When Henrik Ehrsson tells me that his latest study is “weird”, I pay attention. This is a man, after all, who once convinced me I was the size of a doll, persuaded me that I had three arms, and ripped me out of my own body before stabbing me in the chest. Guy knows weird.
Ehrsson’s team at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm specialises in studying our sense of self, by creating simple yet spectacular illusions that subvert our everyday experiences. For example, it seems almost trite to suggest that all of us experience our lives from within our own bodies. But with just a few rods, a virtual reality headset, and a camera, Ehrsson can give people an out-of-body experience or convince them that they’ve swapped bodies with a mannequin or another person.
These illusions tell us that our sense of self isn’t the fixed, stable, hard-wired sensation that it seems. Instead, our brain uses the information from our senses to continuously construct the feeling that we own our own bodies. Feed the senses with the wrong information, and you can make the brain believe all manner of impossible things.
I’ve dealt with these sorts of interesting and disturbing experiences, some occurring because of stress or near-death experiences and some induced by experimental psychologists. The interested reader can check out Staking Your Faith on Gaps in Empirical Knowledge, Preliminary Thoughts on the Evolution of the Human Mind, So What if the Human Mind is a Product of Evolution?, and So What if the Human Being’s Mind is a Product of Development?.
In those essays, I claim that these sorts of odd events shouldn’t be disturbing or shocking in a creature who develops his sense of self by various mapping processes occurring in the brain.
In the article, Your Memory May Be Edited, we learn:
Our memories are inaccurate, more than we’d like to believe. And now a study demonstrates one reason: we apparently add current experiences onto memories.
An author, in particular, would certainly not be surprised to learn about this mixing of past and current experiences in our memories. In fact, I’m dealing with this in a novel I’m finishing up and will be putting on my website for free download—perhaps in a month or so.
The article ends with words which might indicate real problems with human beings finding the truth about anything substantial or at least real problems in remembering the truth the next day:
The researchers note that recent and easily retrievable information “can overwrite what was there to begin with.” Consider that next time you hear eyewitness testimony.
All of this is interesting and very important and likely to be well-founded—Ed Yong is very reliable and Scientific American editors are generally reliable in vetting scientific work to ensure it was properly peer-reviewed and that the authors have taken adequate measures for others to reproduce the results. These revelations about the unreliability of our individual memories are truly weird. More objectively—they indicate to me that we don’t form objective memories so much as we write our own story and the stories of our communities and even a story of our entire world and are constantly revising those stories to reflect something which impressed itself upon our memories.
But…
What is to be done?
To a certain extent: nothing different from what we’re already doing. Scientists have known for centuries our direct observations of nature cannot be taken for truth. Various disciplinary `tricks’ are used even for casual observations and measurements and instruments along with elaborate statistical analyses are more typically used. Medical clinicians and novelists and musicians and machinists have been adjusting their efforts for centuries to compensate for wrongful perceptions of various sorts. Over the centuries historians have especially made various successful and unsuccessful efforts to adjust for a variety of biases, including those prior assumptions that blind a researcher or theorist to even obvious facts or lead them to exaggerate the importance of other facts—which may, in fact, be illusions or delusions. In ways sometimes similar to those of novelists and poets and musicians and sometimes similar to those of scientists and technologists, some philosophers and theologians have also tried to adjust for temporal and spatial and cultural distortions, generally for the weaknesses and imperfections of communal perceptions as well as for those of individual organs—eyes and ears and brain.
What’s remarkable is our ability to be aware of our weaknesses and incompletenesses, our errors of omission and commission. This comes about when we are properly objective, that is, when we look for truths outside of us rather than imagining we have some entity, call it mind or soul, with a magical ability to directly find or know truths.
In the past, I’ve pointed out two important facts to keep in mind when trying to understand our human selves in light of these sorts of glitches in our perceptions and our thinking but also in light of our historically demonstrated ability to move toward significant truths. As I stated at the very beginning of this essay: “My previous post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, argued the need for certain sorts of flexible and creative thinkers to respond to new opportunities and to deal with problems which have developed in our understanding of Creation or any significant part of it, such as the understanding of human origins and the reasons we are as we are.” At the same time, I had also claimed—if not quite so strongly—that we need properly dynamic communities. There is also the need for stability in the thinking and feeling and acting of those communities.
For the individual, the strongest advice for avoiding the misshaping of your mind by external or internal factors is simply to be aware of what is going into your mind and how it settles in, to respond to reality honestly and bravely, and to make honest self-evaluations every so often. There is probably more advice to be given but I don’t think there is anyone who yet possesses the knowledge to give authoritative advice. We need to get to work understanding how our minds are shaped and how they can be better shaped. My exploration of this general issue is generating a number of essays and plans for books over the next three to four years or more, on top of the books and essays available on my websites or described there. For now, I’ll leave the reader with two references to essays I’ve published on this weblog: