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A person's sense of reality is established by their upbringing, their education, their experiences, their culture, society and community, their friends and family, their idols and enemies, their values, beliefs, politics and religion, the books they read, the programs they watch, the people they listen to, the knowledge they have accumulated and the questions they ask, their fears and joys, their feelings, intuitions, hunches and reactions, the wisdom of their soul, intelligence of their mind, and awareness of their body through touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing and all the other senses, by their health, their habits, their diet, their dreams, by what must be said and what goes without saying, by those things not mentioned, and to some extent, by reality itself.
The fuddy-duddy fundamentalists are no fun. A youth still discovering their world may do well to push against the edges, to think new thoughts and create new conceptions. That's where great art and ideas are born. The old ideas can be too constrictive and conservative for an optimistic young person without the information or experience to place them in context. Why can't we have candy for dinner? It's because the grown-ups are mean, they hate you, and they lack the imagination to conceive how great a plate full of candy would be.
What happens when the objective pretentions of a society come to answer to the whims of the uninformed and unreflective? What happens when our collective efforts to dwell in the same reality are stymied by conflicting experiences, definitions, protocols and ideals? The danger is an appeal to subjectivity, a defeatist surrender to incommensurable contradictions that borders on solipsism. We see things differently, therefore we cannot know the truth. I can't see your point of view, therefore I can't see you. You're so wrong as to be effectively unreal, and I'm under no obligation to grapple with phantoms.
It would have been relatively easy when things were boring. When everyone had the same information, the same experience, and the same faulty reasoning, everyone was wrong together, and there was no trouble. Divisions of caste and class were stifling to the odd outlier, but they ensured that no one pretended to know everything. As long as the priest was mumbling in a dead tongue, it was much harder to dispute his points by using the same words.
Print a copy of the good word for everyone in their own language, then tell them they all have an equal capacity to understand it, and you have created a recipe for discord. Send all human knowledge through the air into the palm of an incurious idiot who believes the ideal of equality is a measurable fact, therefore they're not an idiot, and you stand the risk of breaking down reality itself.
Undoubtedly there is an objective reality beyond human perception. It may rely on the attention of God or spirits in order to establish and maintain itself within the quantum soup, but it's there in a way that sympathetic parties can agree on. Even when different perceptions of reality conflict, the fact of their disagreement attests to some fundamental reality. The disagreement itself may be the only real thing that can be agreed upon.
It just doesn't follow from the purported existence of objective reality that anyone should be able to observe it accurately. To think so is a pleasant fiction to ward off madness. As such, a common perception of things is not presently a viable goal. It was easier when we knew less. We know more now, and we don't all know the same things.
There are in fact limits to the powers of reasoned empirical science, of logic, and of fact, but the greatest limitation may be different understandings of what constitutes science, and different valuations of that project. Something being illogical means nothing to someone who doesn't know what logic is, but then blasphemy means nothing to someone outside the religion.
It seems inevitable that we will all be very offended for the foreseeable future. It's the inevitable consequence of a fractured society that can't agree on the operative criteria of what constitutes truth. Is it fact or feeling, subjective or objective, collective or individual? At a time when there seems to be more disagreement than ever before, merely stating one's own perception of what is can be received as a personal attack, to say nothing of an attack on the world itself. It is actually the means of interpreting the world that is being threatened, a worldview that the person has come to identify with personally. The ego is threatened along with the idiom.
As long as it's the case that even the best of us are bound to some extent by our perspectives, and our infinitely divisible society is still up in the air about what we collectively can believe, being right won't be enough. Winning the argument logically is of no use if your counterpart murders you in a rage.
Understand that the people in this place have strange ideas and customs. They do this weird dance, and everyone always wears these hats. They have a litany of taboos you want to stay away from. They're good people, though, for the most part, just a little superstitious.
We must become anthropologists of each other. Beyond all differences real and imagined, we are all human. Mastering one language does not mean you can speak to all people. The more humanity fragments, the more facility in different conceptual languages will become valuable. The greater the multiplicity of perspectives, the more it is incumbent on those sure of their own ground to venture elsewhere. One must not simply refute the other, but learn the language well enough to understand how a nonsense statement sounds to a native speaker.
In the end, it may fall on those favouring the cold rigour of reason to cultivate the empathy necessary to get us through this alive.
The fuddy-duddy fundamentalists are no fun. A youth still discovering their world may do well to push against the edges, to think new thoughts and create new conceptions. That's where great art and ideas are born. The old ideas can be too constrictive and conservative for an optimistic young person without the information or experience to place them in context. Why can't we have candy for dinner? It's because the grown-ups are mean, they hate you, and they lack the imagination to conceive how great a plate full of candy would be.
What happens when the objective pretentions of a society come to answer to the whims of the uninformed and unreflective? What happens when our collective efforts to dwell in the same reality are stymied by conflicting experiences, definitions, protocols and ideals? The danger is an appeal to subjectivity, a defeatist surrender to incommensurable contradictions that borders on solipsism. We see things differently, therefore we cannot know the truth. I can't see your point of view, therefore I can't see you. You're so wrong as to be effectively unreal, and I'm under no obligation to grapple with phantoms.
It would have been relatively easy when things were boring. When everyone had the same information, the same experience, and the same faulty reasoning, everyone was wrong together, and there was no trouble. Divisions of caste and class were stifling to the odd outlier, but they ensured that no one pretended to know everything. As long as the priest was mumbling in a dead tongue, it was much harder to dispute his points by using the same words.
Print a copy of the good word for everyone in their own language, then tell them they all have an equal capacity to understand it, and you have created a recipe for discord. Send all human knowledge through the air into the palm of an incurious idiot who believes the ideal of equality is a measurable fact, therefore they're not an idiot, and you stand the risk of breaking down reality itself.
Undoubtedly there is an objective reality beyond human perception. It may rely on the attention of God or spirits in order to establish and maintain itself within the quantum soup, but it's there in a way that sympathetic parties can agree on. Even when different perceptions of reality conflict, the fact of their disagreement attests to some fundamental reality. The disagreement itself may be the only real thing that can be agreed upon.
It just doesn't follow from the purported existence of objective reality that anyone should be able to observe it accurately. To think so is a pleasant fiction to ward off madness. As such, a common perception of things is not presently a viable goal. It was easier when we knew less. We know more now, and we don't all know the same things.
There are in fact limits to the powers of reasoned empirical science, of logic, and of fact, but the greatest limitation may be different understandings of what constitutes science, and different valuations of that project. Something being illogical means nothing to someone who doesn't know what logic is, but then blasphemy means nothing to someone outside the religion.
It seems inevitable that we will all be very offended for the foreseeable future. It's the inevitable consequence of a fractured society that can't agree on the operative criteria of what constitutes truth. Is it fact or feeling, subjective or objective, collective or individual? At a time when there seems to be more disagreement than ever before, merely stating one's own perception of what is can be received as a personal attack, to say nothing of an attack on the world itself. It is actually the means of interpreting the world that is being threatened, a worldview that the person has come to identify with personally. The ego is threatened along with the idiom.
As long as it's the case that even the best of us are bound to some extent by our perspectives, and our infinitely divisible society is still up in the air about what we collectively can believe, being right won't be enough. Winning the argument logically is of no use if your counterpart murders you in a rage.
Understand that the people in this place have strange ideas and customs. They do this weird dance, and everyone always wears these hats. They have a litany of taboos you want to stay away from. They're good people, though, for the most part, just a little superstitious.
We must become anthropologists of each other. Beyond all differences real and imagined, we are all human. Mastering one language does not mean you can speak to all people. The more humanity fragments, the more facility in different conceptual languages will become valuable. The greater the multiplicity of perspectives, the more it is incumbent on those sure of their own ground to venture elsewhere. One must not simply refute the other, but learn the language well enough to understand how a nonsense statement sounds to a native speaker.
In the end, it may fall on those favouring the cold rigour of reason to cultivate the empathy necessary to get us through this alive.
