There is no reality which is not mediated by perception. That does not mean there is no reality, the famous “I refute you thus”, kicking a rock, applies. It does not mean there are no natural laws, no phyics, chemistry, or even truth—or Truth. It means that we decide what reality means through a thick lens of belief. This lens picks out what is important, obscures the unimportant, and distorts everything, and most people are hardly even aware that it exists....Ian provides us with a preview of the book he is working on. Nice analysis. Highly recommended.
A New Ideology
Ian Welsh
This is indeed the epistemic paradox: "Knowledge is in accordance with the mode of the knower," and therefore human knowledge is for the most part limited in its capacity to arrive at universal and unchanging truth. While a few humans have asserted attaining it, and the record of this is perennial wisdom, there is no publicly available criterion for either confirming or refuting such claims. However, humans are driven by the desire to attain absolute knowledge and so they posit it on different grounds — reasoning from principles claimed to be self evident (rationalistic philosophy), profound depth of feeling (romantic philosophy), the authority of those held to be in a position to know (religion), or observation corroborating theory (science).
Of course, the problem is that there are many claimants and no agreed up on criteria for judgement. Therefore, the options are skepticism and relativism, or the assertion that one position is correct and the others wrong, or that different positions capture a part of the truth, which for humans is complex and emergent.
Where one stands along the spectrum that runs from absolute skepticism to complete absolutism depends on many factors, likely both innate and acquired. Individuals tend to band together with others of like mind and heart. Most people don't reflect on this and make a conscious choice. They either find themselves gravitating to compatible surroundings or are socially alienated.
But the exigencies of life force individuals to act. Thought, speech and action independent of a world view is impossible owing to the way that the brain functions and language operates. Even the absolute skeptic has to think, speak and act as if the adopted world view is operative.
This is the existential conundrum. We are thrown (Heidegger) into a world that is neither of our choosing nor construction and have to make the best of it. Most people try to adapt to it, while a few have the resolve to shape it and acquire some power to do so. They become the leaders.
Yet, in a democracy all those who are eligible to vote are put in the position of having the power to fashion their own course in concert. Thus, politics compels choice, even if one chooses not to participate. And informed choice requires reflection on values, including truth value and criteria. Thus, life in a democracy requires those who are eligible to vote to examine the issues and full examination requires consideration of one's ontological, epistemological and ethical position and how that affects subsidiary knowledge such as social, political and economic.
Most people just gravitate to a view toward which they are attracted, or just fall into the one they were born into. Only the curious or creative strike out on their own, not even realizing that too is a choice of sorts, even though not a conscious one. Or perhaps, it is an abdication of choice.
In any case, an informed choice requires preparation through education. Democracy cannot function without "liberal" education. Liberal education is education that is oriented to the breadth and depth of approach that is capable of leading to a life lived at full potential individually and socially. It is sometimes said that humans don't come equipped with operating manuals. Others say they do, but it is within and can only be found by looking within.
2 comments:
I posted this comment at Ian's:
Great post, Ian. I look forward to the book.
I put up a link at MNE here along with some thoughts this post provoked.
Moribund ideologies often die hard. Neoliberalism is one such recalcitrant ideology since it is deeply embedded through years of propaganda by those who interests it serves and also entrenched institutionally. That doesn't mean that it, too, will be superseded, event though it seems to have nine lives. Who would have thought it could survive the global financial crisis?
But the notion that neoliberal capitalism masquerading as democracy is the final stages of human social, political and economic development and that we stand at "the end of history" (Fukuyama) is nonsense, as many have pointed out.
What the next stage will look like is as yet unclear — probably because Western hegemony is on the wane and globalization is going to result in the interface of many non-Western inputs now demanding to be acknowledged. That is a positive development for cooperation over competition since the West is hyper-competitive and individualistic and other cultures are more communal and cooperative traditionally.
As life scientist and operations type Roger Erickson has been saying for some time over at MNE, complex adaptive systems automatically create emergent problems as previously emergent problems are solved creatively through indirection (Mao's "Let a hundred flowers bloom."). Thus, the scale of emergent problems is continually increasing, and successfully adaptive organisms must meet these challenges by increasing return on coordination to stay ahead of extinction.
While the solution to emergent problems may be unforeseeable, the method that nature uses to deal with emergence is well-known, and that is to create the conditions for flexible and creative response. It's called agility.
Organizational rigidity and fixity (ideology) work against this. Rather, flexibility, creativity, and experimentation are required, as well as the capacity to recognize what is working based on feedback and to amplify, leaving behind unsuccessful attempts as soon as they are recognized as such.
In this sense, the requirement for solutions is ongoing in complex adaptive systems, which all biological systems are. There is no final solution, only appropriate and inappropriate methodology as dictated by changing context. There is no information out of context. Data taken out of context is meaningless. The challenge is get the context right and then be agile enough to adapt to changing context.
Mental fixity and behavioral rigidity are obstacles to that, when what is needed is increase the degree of freedom in the engineering sense and that involves more complex forms of control. The levers and dials on a control panel that worked in the past will not necessarily work well in the present and future if adjustments are not made owing to changing circumstances.
As Hegel observed in his philosophy of history, history is the record of increasing freedom ("history has a liberal bias") but not merely "freedom from" coercion and constraint. There is also an increasing "freedom to" choose and to act, and increasing knowledge has also resulted in increasing degrees of control over events.
Finally, there is also increasing "freedom for" self-actualization and self-determination. Democracy is freedom for self-determination, since ideally democracy is freely choosing individually but also in concert the law that one lives under in society.
So the drive is evolutionary and the obstacles are largely self-created by putting obstacles in the way of the creative process individually and cooperatively in coordination with others.
To be fair, at least at the local level (in the US specifically, at least), there is a tremendous amount of cooperation and action among all so called competing ideological types. It's only at at the national level where there appears to be a lack of wholehearted consensus, and to be honest I'm not so sure, given the sordid track record of our super state of late, that distrust and cynicism of government at that level isn't largely warranted.
I'll admit that I'm more in the small is beautiful camp, as articulated by E. F. Schumacher and others. That doesn't mean that I don't believe in a significant role for central government, but just what that role consists of is open for debate. One doesn't have to be an inflexible ideologue to feel that way either. I think most thoughtful and reasonable people would agree.
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