If you’re going to complain about unethical, illegal, immoral, belittling, harassing, or otherwise obnoxious conduct then make you do it anonymously. If you personally are the victim of this conduct then make absolutely certain you are not in any of the same social groups or networks as those causing you the trouble before you go to the higher authorities.
There is a reason for why all of those hotlines for reporting crimes, thefts, and other unacceptable actions all assure anonymity.
Whistleblowers are “NIMBY People”.
NIMBY — Not In My Back Yard — describes how we all feel about police stations, fire brigade detachments, commuter-train stations, and any number of public amenities which make our communities better places to live. We all want to be near them. We just don’t want them to be too close to us. We want these facilities to be close enough to us so we will get the full benefit of their existence, but far enough away so that we don’t have to put up with the traffic and the exposure caused by everyone else making use of these options. We want maximum benefit with minimum risk.
Whistleblowers. NIMBY people. We all want corruption exposed, bullies denounced, criminals reported, incompetence revealed, and powerful people kept wary of abusing their power. But we don’t want the people who carry out these socially beneficial actions too near us personally.
This is reasonable. If we are taught that only those among us who are without sin should throw stones it follows that each of us has one or two things we would rather not be generally known to the world. We don’t mind so much when whistelblowers are going after people who are causing trouble for us personally but we also worry just a little that one day the whistleblower’s attention may be directed in our direction.
A whistleblower like this — who complains about a personal difficulty — can be written off as a whiner who can’t accept the same kind of harassment and abuse which the older members of the group had to endure. These people may not have “the right stuff”.
There are other kinds of whistleblowers.
Whistleblowers are also possibly not “team players”. A team player is one who is loyal to the team whether or not it is personally beneficial or whether the team is engaged in illegal or unethical conduct as a group. Honest people who work in companies where dishonest things are taking place are in a triple-bind. They can, first, try to benefit from the dishonesty. If many are taking bribes then taking bribes is not going to cause any of out workmates to expose us. Also, if we don’t take the bribes they may start ridiculing us as seeing ourselves as “superior”. We also become threats because we may have the information necessary to expose the wrongdoing without personal harm.
International Law accepts that people do not have to follow “illegal orders”. The consequences of disobeying an illegal order may result in execution for disobedience but eventually a war crimes trial will show you to have been virtuous.
Loyalty to the tribe or group is an essential aspect of human survival. If you are hired into a group which presents itself as ethical and productive and if after a short time you discover the group is deeply corrupt, you are often told to “go along to get along”.
We are all aware of the fact that whisteblowers are not as likely to be hired by other employers as well.
“Why did you leave your last job?”
“I noticed my workmates were corrupt, lazy, and stupid.”
“Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”
A third reason for blowing a whistle is the failure of the group or corporation or tribe to live up to a “higher” set of standards. This situation arises when the whistleblower personally examines the “spirit” of the laws and finds the group to be in violation of them.
First: we can look at the case of Australian physician Caroline Tan.
Caroline Tan was effectively blackballed in the profession of medicine and her career was ruined. Why? Because very early in her first job she was asked for sex by a senior physician. She not only refused but she made her complaints public. Surgeon Gabrielle McMullin states her views this way: “What I tell my trainees is that, if you are approached for sex, probably the safest thing to do in terms of your career is to comply with the request.
“The worst thing you can possibly do is to complain to the supervising body because then, as in Caroline’s position, you can be sure that you will never be appointed to a major public hospital.”
Caroline Tan blew the whistle and her future career at the same time.
It is highly unlikely that every major public hospital in Australia is staffed by sexual predators who don’t want Caroline Tan on staff because she will report them next. Neither is it likely that her sex or the nature of her complaint were totally determinative of her fate. What makes her case so egregious is the realisation that even something which in some ways is the moral equivalent of rape is not enough to justify whistleblowing. Even this excuse is not enough to gain forgiveness.
Roger Boisjoly was a mechanical engineer working on the Space Shuttle project. Part of his professional responsibility included assuring the safety of the booster rockets which were used to put the craft into orbit. Boisjoly determined that the Space Shuttle Challenger launch should be delayed because the overnight temperatures were so low some of the o-rings on the boosters could fail to provide an adequate seal. He desperately tried to prevent the launch but failed. A few minutes into the flight the o-rings on a booster section failed and the Challenger was destroyed with the loss of all lives. Boisjoly’s attempts to prevent the launch subsequently resulted in his being fired from his position. He never again was employed as a mechanical engineer.
Technically, Boisjoly exceeded his authority when he tried to prevent the launch. Since he had given his recommendation to his superiors and they had approved the launch his professional responsibilities had been discharged. His error was apparently to overstep his rank and to show disrespect for the chain of command.
Edward Snowden’s case is widely known. He discovered the National Security Agency was violating the US Constitution in the way it was collecting intelligence from electronic surveillance measures. Because he had sworn not to divulge the things he learned at his job with the NSA he is regarded by some as a traitor. Because the things he divulged were violations of the US Constitution which takes precedence over the specifics of the NSA’s regulations other people see him as a hero.
The exact constitutionality of the laws Snowden felt were violations of the Constitution has not been finally decided. Only if Snowden goes on trial for treason and only if his lawyers argue the laws he broke were themselves unconstitutional will this interpretation ever be resolved.
What Snowden did do, however, was to place himself in the role of Constitutional Authority. He exceeded his own personal authority.
International Law as interpreted by the International Court of Criminal Justice seems to suggest individual soldiers on the battlefield are legally competent to know if their orders are violations of the principles of the Geneva Convention.
Snowden’s detractors apparently do not believe that individual computer experts working for the NSA are legally competent to know if their job actions are violations of the principles of the US Constitution.
Snowden is still living in exile in Russia and will almost certainly be deported to the US where he will face trial and imprisonment should he ever find himself back in the USA. Even if he avoids conviction and imprisonment it is unlikely he will ever work in a “position of trust” again.
Three thought experiments can now be carried out: one for each of these cases.
Let’s assume that Caroline Tan actually complied with the sex-request, went on to become a successful hospital administrator, entered politics, and then found herself named as Minister of Health. Let us further assume she then gives a speech in which she confesses her submitting to sexual blackmail, names her assailant, and demands that massive legal and cultural changes be undertaken.
She would no doubt get many offers to speak at graduating classes for medical students, be asked to write a book, a movie deal is not out of the question, and perhaps even a national medal will be awarded to her in the future.
The Prime Minister will express outrage and may promote her to being the Minister of Justice so she can be better able to make the needed changes.
A Roger Boisjoly thought experiment can be less dramatic. Assume Roger is a senior official in the same company, not part of the direct line of responsibility for approving the launch vehicle’s fitness, but of higher corporate rank than the senior engineer. Let us further assume Roger knew enough to spot the potential danger and call of the launch. Much annoyance at the delay and the cost. Roger will be called in to explain himself. Expensive experiments will be carried out. Roger’s concerns will be deemed “plausible” and a redesign undertaken. Roger gets promoted. He may even get a medal.
Edward Snowden can be given a role in a Tom Clancy novel. A Congressional hearing is taking place. Snowden’s concerns are made known to a senior member of the Washington political establishment. Snowden is given a subpoena, given immunity and testifies. Everyone is shocked. Snowden becomes a hero. He is elected president.
What changed? The rank, the power, the authority of the person blowing the whistle.
The takeaway lessons?
First: Virtue is a luxury. It is a privilege. Sepp Blatter won a fifth term as FIFA president. He is in a position to punish those who wanted to remove him from his post.
Second: If you wish to make serious criticisms of the rich and powerful you must be at least as rich and powerful as those you offend. You should also have sufficient means to allow you to live the rest of your life without having a real job.
Third: Not all whistleblowers are ultimately justified in their complaints. A few may mental-health issues and others can be honestly misinformed. The ones described above are sympathetic and otherwise normal members of society.
Whistleblowers are ambiguous figures in society. Everyone knows of injustice, inefficiency, incompetence, corruption, harassment, bullying, and similar things taking place around them.
Sometimes the phrase “it’s not my problem” is appropriate. Sometimes we are well-advised to stay out of the fray for reasons of self-protection. What we also know is: if nobody ever complains about anything then progress will grind to a halt. We need whistleblowers to play this role.
Just not too near us.
I wouldn’t hire a whistleblower.
Would you?
Which brings us back to the problems we all face. The world is imperfect. Crime does indeed pay.
To recall the words of Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue as found in the Peloponnesian War:
“The strong do as they please. The weak endure what they must.”
This applies to Whistleblowers as much as anyone else.
Postscript: The three different types of whistleblower presented above are adapted from the three kinds of appeals made in Classical Rhetoric. The three levels of emotional appeal are “emotion”, “tribal concepts of character” (ethos), and “logic”. They were first discussed in detail by Aristotle in The Rhetoric..
Worldviews tell us how to label everything we see in the world and worldviews also tell us how these things relate to each other. Worldviews classify our perceptions and connect those perceptions with causal explanations. They tell us what is normal and what is abnormal.
Every creature which has a cognitive map has a worldview. Some worldviews are very restricted in their categories and their complexity. Other worldviews apparently encompass all of everything and even go so far as accounting for why there is something rather than nothing as well as the meaning and purpose of existence itself. Conscious life would be impossible without a worldview. It is the worldview which structures consciousness as we understand it.
Worldviews provide more than reasons for our primary emotions like fear or surprise, for humans the worldview provides us with our social identity and our concept of appropriate and inappropriate conduct. When someone is praised for a life of service to others the praise is for playing a role which is virtuous in a specific worldview.
Other worldviews could regard such roles as naïve, irrelevant, or even treasonous. It is only from inside the constraints of a worldview that negative evaluations such as hypocrisy can be defined. Hypocrisy is not much more than inconsistently playing a particular role. Defenses against the charge of hypocrisy usually involve changing the context of a set of actions in order to make that which was hypocritical (i.e. inconsistent with a set of role expectations) a coherent pattern of conduct and therefore not blameworthy.
When someone asks us to “see it from my point of view” we are being asked to adopt, to “simulate”, a worldview distinct from our own. We can feel “empathy” for the physical distress of others because of the actions of our mirror neurons. Or so we are told. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron Is it reasonable (within our worldview) to extrapolate the idea of empathy to include more complex features of other worldviews? If we can “feel” the physical pain of others can we also see their worldview, their reality? Can we go so far as to judge those other worldviews not just as being simply “different” from one another and our own, but also according to some external (to all worldviews) standards and thereby claim some worldviews are better than others?
The attempt to communicate different worldviews to others may be the genesis for art itself. Communicating “problematic worldviews” is something which takes this attempt to its next level. One of Escher’s most famous pictures is The Waterfall. When we look at it nothing at first bothers us. It is only when we try to imagine this picture as a real-world building that we have trouble. The picture has enough cues relating to light and shadow to give us the illusion of an actual building. It is only when we try to reconcile this building with our experience of life in the three-dimensional world the trouble begins. At most of the interior locations there would be no clues to a bigger problem. Trying to understand the “gestalt” is where we have problems
.
Over the years adventurous souls have taken up the challenge and tried to construct a three-dimensional object which when viewed from a carefully chosen unique point will make this drawing an accurate depiction. There’s an almost “utopian” psychology at work here: “this is the way I want the world to look and I’m going to find a way to achieve it.”
It may be a bit of a stretch to link the desire to find out of this two-dimensional picture could be, in some way, consistent with the world we take for granted, with the mentality of those who want to go in the other direction and convert the world we take for granted into something more pleasing a particularly located perceiver.
We have on one hand “what position of privilege can afford this view?” and on the other “is there a position of privilege which will give a utopian vision?” The same creative and imaginative capacities are required for both. Only the motivations differ. There are two general kinds of utopian visions: one is static and it imagines a perfectly ordered society in which all people are where they should be, doing what they are best suited to doing, and liking it. Rather like a clock.
The second kind is dynamic: the patterns of this world are either changing from one very pleasant configuration to another or the patterns are “progressing” from a previously less pleasant state through better and better ones until some kind of perfection is attained. One problem with utopias is how different they are from each other. Another problem shows up when someone group appears in your life and wants you to be part of their perfection. Call them ISIS or call them The Borg or something else again, it’s likely we don’t want to join. For those who do get caught up in the quest for utopia they can spend a great deal of time and effort on the project even though they rest of us just stare in amazement.
Escher’s Waterfall can serve as a minor illustration of this. As with other Escher images there are people who express their creative imaginations by constructing three-dimensional objects which look like Escher’s two-dimensional renderings. The single proviso is that of viewpoint. When viewing these three-dimensional structures it is necessary to be at one and only one point. Anywhere else and it does not work.
The following video shows how this works.
To me this two-dimensional image can also serve as a representation of worldviews. Escher expected us to see the picture from “outside”. What about the worldview of the people who live “inside” the picture? Each of them, wherever they may be, are in a space which is locally stable and predictable. Unless they pay careful attention they can navigate their entire world and not encounter the confusion we experience when we look at this two-dimensional rendering from a consciousness adapted to surviving in a three-dimensional space. In our culture we all tend to think of ourselves as being “rational” while those who disagree with us are often “irrational”.
After all, nobody holds a belief if he or she thinks it is incorrect. “I believe this to be true because I believe it is not true” really doesn’t make much sense. Related to this is the acceptance and even obsession with those transformational periods which arise when we replace one worldview with another. These are sometimes called “conversions”.
Conversion experiences can be instantaneous or unfold over long periods of time. What they represent is the taking on of a worldview which is consistent, pervasive and different from the previous one. Conversions can be partial or complete. Partial changes usually involve improvements in evidence. One example could be someone who is persuaded of one viewpoint regarding the Climate Change controversy and switches from one side to another because of the introduction of new facts. The laws of nature and the quality of the existing information do not have to be challenged. The change comes because new facts lead to different conclusions.
A second kind of conversion arises when categories originally believed to be distinct or different are found to be related. This usually involves finding a boundary between the categories makes proper classification difficult. Another Escher picture can show this symbolically.
sky and water i
At the extreme top and bottom it is fairly clear we are dealing with the bird category and the fish category. In the middle we can’t be sure. Is this a “boundary layer” or a region of “emergence” where one category is transforming into another? By asking about “emergence” we are introducing “change through time” — causality — into our considerations. The second kind of conversion results from changes not just in how certain observations are classified or changes in how an influence will flow through time. In the “Sky and Water” picture we need to ask if the boundary layer separating fish from fowl is a transition zone for individuals going through their normal cycles of existence or if the creatures in the middle are a distinct species, or something else.
We may have to rethink our ideas of permanence and change. Doing so leads to what philosophers of science call “paradigm shifts”. In either case the boundary as depicted in “Sky and Water” is “fuzzy”. Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzy Logic don’t concern us as much as they should. Traditional logic always assumes the ability to know where the boundaries lie and how to classify the phenomena of the world properly. In our daily lives we have two related problems. the first one relates to whether we are in fact using the correct categories at all.
The second one is whether we have assigned our observations to the proper categories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic Difficulties in making the correct classification arise both from inadequate measurement or observation data (the relatively easy one) and from having a classification system which is entirely inadequate for the observations we make in nature (the harder one). The first of these problems can be illustrated by a figure from the Gollin Test:
It’s almost certain we won’t get the first one. The third one is fairly straightforward. http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Incomplete_pictures_test The second kind of classification problem can be illustrated with a figure which caused Wittgenstein a lot of trouble: The DuckRabbit.
1024px kaninchen und ente
Gollin’s students can only be grateful he did not try to test his students by showing them incomplete versions of this figure. The situation can be made a bit more interesting if we combine the idea of emergence If we combine the problems of boundary layers with those of the DuckRabbit things can get even more confusing. Here is a picture of a sailboat.
Yawl
Using photomosaic software (http://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/) and the pictures of airplanes thoughtfully provided by the author of this software, the following image was produced:
Boat From Planes
From a distance this looks like a fuzzy picture of a sailboat. Zooming in on the image shows it is entirely composed of images of aircraft. We could just as easily have made a large picture of a duck out of rabbits or a Duckrabbit out of rabbits which were made from ducks. Is there a “boat-airplane” boundary here?
Boundaries which are around us all the time are built in to our explanatory systems and our viewpoints. There is the “quantum/classical” boundary, the “animate/inanimate” boundary, the “conscious/non-conscious” boundary, the “yin/yang” boundary, and in political terms we have “left/right”, “believer/infidel” and the various categories which divide people into races and ethnicities. There are many boundaries which separate the “parts” from the “whole” and usually we effortlessly shift from one focal point to another along the continuum without really noticing it.
Those of us who have used cameras are aware of the related ideas of “focal point” and “depth of field”. Worldviews have analogous features. Each worldview has a “central” or “primary” unit of analysis. In social terms, it may be “the individual”, or “the tribe” or some pattern of “ideal structure” as in utopian ideologies. Each of these “units” is made up of sub-units. Some people see only the unit which concerns them. Such individuals are so concerned with the “here and now” and the expression of “individual rights” that ideas of ancestral reverence or concern for the future are only given a hand-wave at best. This can be likened to the “depth of field” of a worldview.
Some worldviews have very shallow fields of attention. The point of view is chosen to eliminate any foreground and the depth of field makes the background almost indecipherable.
Other worldviews present us with much greater depth of field and so may appear cluttered or confusing. In a photograph this has its uses in broad vista landscapes but otherwise it’s not all that useful.
We have two aspects of “context” to deal with here. One is determined by the “angle of view” (the wide-angle versus the telephoto lens feature) and the other with the “depth of field”.
Artworks are not so constrained and in paintings we encounter a different way of presenting a worldview. Pieter Breugel’s “Dutch Proverbs” illustrates this well. Proverbs are parts of a worldview and their depiction in images makes an iconographic representation of a set of lessons.
It would take us too far afield to speak more of icons and iconography here but we should note their importance at the very least.
Sometimes our worldviews are tightly constrained both in angle and in depth. Sometimes they are deep and wide. Sometimes we see the categories of our thought emerge from murkiness to clarity. Sometimes we see the categories of our thoughts presenting us with a contradiction when we try to fit our perceptions into those categories.
When these things happen we sometimes change our worldview. At least a bit.
There is a third kind of conversion or transformation of worldview. Some individuals are wholly taken by a particular outlook or definition of reality. Psychologists refer to such outlooks as “totalizing worldviews”. Years ago Robert Jay Lifton wrote about the “psychology of totalism” when discussing brainwashing.
In the time since the publication of this book the idea of an all-inclusive worldview has been extended to include other outlooks.
Totalizing worldviews have gotten much attention from historians and psychologists who seek to understand how people can use one key to open all locks. Marxists use “class”, feminists use “patriarchy”, jihadis use the rejection of “sharia”, and conspiracy theorists can see the Masons, the Illuminati, space aliens, and so on as the real causes of all human misery. When one author or another decides to write a book, or present a documentary, seeing human history “through the lens” of race, sex, religion, geography, reproduction, economics, or any other monocausal determinist perspective (any other “one key for all locks” analysis) we are being presented with a “totalising worldview”. At the risk of offending people like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, and those who agree with them here is a picture which may also represent a “totalistic worldview”.
This picture represents the “universe” as seen outside both space and time. Or, at least, outside the “space” and “time” of our day-to-day worldview. Somewhere in there we are supposed to find the answers to questions related to meaning, purpose, and morality. The answer may be to say these concepts are meaningless and the questions irrelevant.
People who don’t like those answers may well reject the worldview itself. How do these issues connect to The Waterfall? Artworks like The Waterfall are transgressive. They are not transgressive in the contemporary sense, the sense which is nothing more than the systematic violation of the rules of social decorum of traditional Western Culture as advocated by the likes of de Sade and Foucault, they are “paradigmatically transgressive” because they confront the viewer with the prospect of seeing the “sexual transgressives” not as people who are breaking the boundaries of their own captivity for freedom, but as those who exchange one prison cell for another.
This picture lets us enter into the world of those inside the two-dimensional world and navigate through it seeing only minor changes in consistency and coherence. These changes are too slow and too gentle to trigger any psychological shock. We can then see it from the outside and wonder if such a “lower dimensional” region could ever exist in our more complex world and if it could would we find it hauntingly attractive or something which is difficult to build, very hard to maintain, unattractive to look upon and a violation of the laws of nature as we understand them.
Turning this two-dimensional vision into a three-dimensional world in which real people would have to live can serve here as a simple analogy for utopianism and for the three-dimensional devils which may lie in hidden in its two-dimensional elegance. It can also help us grasp how human intelligence actually makes us more susceptible to certain kinds of utopias than others. The kind of utopia we’ll be likely to accept without much questioning is probably related to the kind of fiction or fantasy we find most appealing. Those of us who, quite reasonably and intelligently, know that warp drive, medical tricorders, and replicators are just a few years off in the future, see a very different human prospect than do those misguided dystopians who have all three Director’s Cut versions of Blade Runner.
Living with Multiple Worldviews Very few systematic studies have been carried out by those who accommodate themselves to a number of different groups. These individuals are often the subjects of novels and plays which explore the phenomenon but there is usually some underlying justification for these apparent deceptions. Perhaps the person is a spy or a social climber or just doesn’t want to upset the rest of the people in each group.
Between these two groups – those who have a single worldview which pervades every aspect of life and those who see themselves as actors playing multiple roles in multiple contexts – there is a less obvious but more numerous population of those who neither have a fully integrated worldview nor do they have a sense of themselves as an unconflicted single individual playing multiple roles which may themselves be inconsistent from a broader social perspective. These “in-between” people often passionately defend certain actions which are (to the external observer at least) incompatible with the beliefs these same people also passionately defend. Many beliefs are defended as absolute and universal. The defense for these beliefs is usually abstract and devoid of any reference to practical details. Sometimes the requirements of daily life makes the absolute and universal both negotiable and contextual.
Partially Rational Worldviews Partially rational worldviews come in two forms. One form exhibits an adherence to a single set of convictions which could be, but is not, apparent in all aspects of life. The second form appears when a person has a distinct worldview for all aspects of life but there is more than one worldview and they are not compatible with one-another – at least not at the level of logic available to an outside observer. “How can you say you are a libertarian and support hate-speech laws?” The closest most of us come to accepting a different idea is usually prefaced with the phrase “I can appreciate someone with your perspective may see it differently”.
This should not really amaze us. We all do it all the time. Sometimes we do it unconsciously, as when we are under group or emotional pressure. When this is the case we tend not to notice as much and later we will often “rationalize” our actions. There are other times in which we can move in and out of roles and rationalities effortlessly and in complete conscious awareness. We do this every time we talk to fellow fans of life in a fictional universe. We can even say things like ” you know they don’t have transporter technology in the Star Wars universe!” without any sense of psychological disorientation.
For some of us, it is the “Star Trek” universe in which warp drive, matter transporters, the prospect of humans and Klingons procreating without technological intervention, sentient clouds of interstellar gas, and so on are not problematic. Others in our circle may be fully conversant with “The Buffyverse” and all the demons, vampires, and supernatural dimensions of existence which make up reality. The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Game of Thrones, and many others all allow us to deal not simply with different cultures but with different laws of physical reality and different ways in which the natural and supernatural worlds interact.
It’s not just that fiction, science fiction, and fantasy allow us to imagine a reality and its contexts different from the one we live in “normally”, it is also the ease we all have in moving from one to the other and — we hope — keeping them all separate from each other and most importantly from our “real” worldview. Social scientists describe “socialisation” as learning to “play the right roles in the right contexts”. People who are going to be good con-artists or imposters are expert at playing roles to which they have no “legitimate” claim. When immersive technology (holodecks?) becomes more refined and more accessible we may be able to pick the rationality we wish to inhabit.
At least for a while.
A lot of us (all of us?) live in worldviews like this: we can justify (rationalize) every one of our decisions and conclusions. If we have a “totalizing” worldview we can even fit each of these “ground level” decisions into the same set of “abstract level” principles. The problems only arise if we stand far enough back so we can see everything at once. Only then do we start to wonder about what’s going on in our world. Most of us live with the idea of being “consistent” or at least not “hypocritical” when we deal with the issues of daily life. It’s true that we all have to take “context” into account and we have all probably heard the adage “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.
There are limits to this. We may be willing to accommodate the customs of Rome, or Riyadh, or Pyongyang, if we find ourselves there as visitors. This willingness to avoid active rejection of the host country’s values and customs does not go both ways. Where does this leave us? At sufficiently high levels of abstraction we wind up with the platitudes of post-modernism and cultural relativism. Since there is not absolutely correct answer we may be faced with the conclusion that since all answers are incorrect then all answers are equally incorrect. Therefore all worldviews are equal. The logic error in this conclusion should be obvious to everyone.
At a sufficiently high level of abstraction all living things are equal. This does not mean camels are equal to penguins in all meaningful aspects of their respective existences. The “meaningful aspects” bring us to the matter of “levels” of abstraction. If there were no meaningful distinctions to be made amongst the various living creatures on Earth then the Linnean System of taxonomy is a waste of time. Political correctness may say all cultures are equal but political science says otherwise.
To spend a romantic weekend with someone other than your “significant other” and then explain to your miffed spouse “there is no reason for you to be upset because all people are equal” is unlikely to work. I do not believe empirical evidence is needed for anyone to affirm this conclusion. At the levels in which we live our daily lives and from which we take our meaning, our purpose, our pride in ancestry, our hopes for the future, and consequently our ideas of what it means to be a valued (“rational?”) member of society, nobody at all believes cultures are equal.
Cultures that must live together need to find some common ground for shared rationality. In our age science seems to be the most universal but also the narrowest. Unless we allow for the “totalist” kind of scientism sketched above we cannot expect too much from science alone. When we include language, shared history, and religion as additional levels we will add complexity, meaning, and the other well-known features of “high culture” but we will also introduce differences. Some of these differences will be relatively minor. Others will describe worldviews which are very close to being completely incompatible. A highly controversial but still very likely true discussion of this level of inequality can be found in Samuel Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilizations” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
Art and fiction give us ways to appreciate the fact that other people live in social setting which are different from our own and entirely able to meet the needs of those who inhabit them. Perhaps not all of us were born into the worldview we believe is most congenial to who we are. Perhaps we think those who live in other worldviews are misguided and should be compelled through whatever means to adopt a superior approach.
What is clear is this: if there is one single overarching rationality, one single overarching truth which is going to integrate all of the worldviews by showing how each of them is a part of some greater whole, we must be prepared to learn about each other.
So can we sum all this up with a few take-away rules or guidelines?
We can. And they can be grouped into three overarching categories.
The first is the point of view from which the worldview is seen. Varying this allows us to appreciate perspective, the boundaries that make for local rationality.
The second deals with the perceiver: with us. With how we choose to see the world from out given point of view. This allows us to explore the matter of selective perception, of willful bias (even if we are given a different viewpoint to consider) and therefore with the psychology and cultural components of the viewer.
The third deals with what is best called “intuition”. What exactly is it and how does it differ from the previous two?
These will be stated briefly. Much by way of elaboration will be said later. For now the basic ideas can be grasped.
The Point of View
To illustrate the idea of a Point of View we looked at the Escher Waterfall image. As a two-dimensional image it is somewhat perplexing but only to those people who want to put it into a three-dimensional context. We can use this as an analogy to the way we look at the world around us. The first thing we need to decide is “how many dimensions are there in our worldview?”
When we look at the picture we know it is in two spatial dimensions. We experience the problems we do when we try to put it into three dimensions. The analogy here is in the form of asking “how many dimensions are there in our understanding of the world?”
This is a bit more involved than it at first appears. If we look at the physical world we not only have the three spatial dimensions of X,Y, and Z; we also have “time” and then we have to consider such forces as gravity and electromagnetism.
When we contemplate our “human” worldview we need to add some extra dimensions: these days dimensions like “race”, “age”, “sex”, “religion”, “education”, “occupation”, “income”, “marital status”, “sexual orientation”, and so on figure into the “social dimension” of our world.
In addition to these “existential” or “socially constructed” dimensions which determine our position in the world, we also are given by our culture and our own experiences and reflections a sense of what the context of the world itself happens to be.
This context is exemplified by how we understand the meaning and purpose of life, of creation, and of our experiences. Is the universe a cosmic accident? Is it a divine creation? Does it have an emerging purpose? Was it created with a purpose already determined? Are we cosmically important as individuals? Will we be judged by history or by some set of standards which are eternal and divine? Do all things happen for the best? Is Evil real? Were we born to lead or to follow? Were we born into a group or tribe which has a special purpose to which each member of the group should dedicate his or her actions? Is the future of the universe a matter of choice or is it inevitable no matter what we do?
Regardless of how you answer these questions, if they have occurred to you at all then the answers you give to them is part of how you see the world. The answers other people give to them is how they see the world. If the answers are important enough then wars can and do result.
Looking at the world involves three major features. First we look at the world using the dimensions of perception available to us through our senses or our experience of life. Second, we focus in on a particular level of abstraction or attention, and third we see either the wide view or the narrow view.
The level of attention needs a bit of clarification here. In some discussions we are presented with “feelings” and in general the emotional responses involved. Such cases are common enough in situations when it is believed there is no wider lesson” to be taken from the event. Athletes often recall with mixed emotions their best coaches. The coaches will often ignore the present physical pain and discomfort of the athlete. In some views this is abusive. If the objective is to have the athlete become a world-class champion then the suffering is justified with the “no pain, no gain” mantra. The context of our viewing may be “here and now” but the context of the training is longer in time span and wider in social context.
When contemporary news reporters tell us that tens of thousands of refugees/migrants from Middle Eastern Countries are seeking asylum in Europe, the news reports invariably deal with the immediate and real distress of those people on the boats. The historical context: what cultural values are the root cause of this exodus? and the future development context: “what will be the impact on the European cultures if significant numbers of people with vastly different cultural understandings move in?” is never discussed. The worldview of the news media seems to be “now” in the time dimension and “emotional” in the level of analysis.
Other levels of analysis include “culture”, “geography”, and so on.
When environmentalists are confronted with the question of introducing alien birds, carnivores, herbivores, fish, insects, and plants into an ecosystem the result is “long term impact studies”. No news media reports on the improvements in the lifestyle for the alien entities will be observed. No discussion of the “moral duties” owed to the lifeforms.
Such analyses will be scientifically logical and wide ranging in both time and space implications. These analyses will also be informed (probably explicitly) by a “conservationist” morality. Diversity, we will be reminded, cannot be protected without robust and meaningful boundaries. If we want this ecosystem to be available to our grandchildren we must diligently and resolutely defend it now.
The dimensions, the levels, and the timescales we use for our “rational” analysis of “physical ecology” is very different from the one we use for our “rational” analysis of “socio-cultural ecology”.
Why?
The Viewer
The person doing the viewing also has some dimensions to add to the perceptual mix. First we may want to consider some generalities. Are we dealing with someone who is eternally going to see things in the worst possible way? Are we in the presence of a conspiracy theorist? A paranoid? A Pollyanna who cannot help but seeing the world in the best possible way?
Social psychologists talk about “The Big Five” dimensions of personality. The acronym is “OCEAN” and it represents “openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism”.
Personalities are very individual. In addition to our personalities we grow up in a cultural context in which we are given “ego ideals” or “role models” or other kinds of inspirational figures as people we should “be like”. Even if we have are active and curious by nature if we are in a culture which is basically lazy and willing to live without asking questions then we will adapt to this. We may dream of running away and living in a place where it is easier for us to “fit in” but we will always know what the “national character” of our initial reference group expects of us. This, too, will be part of our worldview.
National Character is a controversial area of study. It runs the risk of “political incorrectness” because it carries with it the idea that some cultures are less able to live in harmony with those around them than are others.
We have all wondered about who we would be if one of our other attributes (race, sex, etc.) were otherwise. We have also all wondered who we would be if we had been born into a different society. “What if I were exactly who I am right now, but instead of living in this society I were living elsewhere?” This kind of question puts the “individual” into a kind of dialogue with the “national character”. When we look at a social or historical situation we will sometimes react personally or sometimes we will be able to say “people from these two societies will interpret the events differently”. The point of view is also shaped by culture.
To a certain extent it is this “viewer” dimension which will also influence both the “angle” and the “depth of field” with which we make our observations. We may concentrate only on “the big picture” and ignore the minor details. The fate of the individuals matters less than the fate of the tribe. We may concentrate on one level to the exclusion of others. Our personal emotional states may not matter as much as doing our cultural duty. We will subordinate our personality preferences to our cultural demands. We may denounce members of our family for having expressed politically incorrect sentiments. We may obey legal orders we believe to be immoral. Or we may disobey them for the same reason.
Intuition
When I first discovered the Mandelbrot Set and began to explore its visual properties I was amazed at how much variety there was to be found.
After a short while I started to recognise patterns and even began to anticipate what kinds of patterns would be found in which regions of the set. I did not understand the mathematics of all this but my visual abilities allowed me to “intuit” what was likely to be found and where.
Unless you want to imagine intuition as “the gods” speaking to you, then intuition is most likely little more than our best guess based on our experiences and our hopes or fears.
Reductionism
This means we actually have two kinds of “intuition”. One kind is “bottom up” and rooted in our material nature. The other kind implies our ability to be (somehow) in contact with “non-material” or perhaps even “transcendent” parts of the cosmos.
The first of these kinds of intuition is ultimately “Reductionist” in nature. The second is “Transcendent”.
The World In Context
If we want to summarise this we can put “the world” at the centre of some higher-dimensional sphere, the sphere determined by all the dimensions in which we believe the world exists.
Our worldview is that pattern which comes to us when we see it in the context of the dimensions we believe to be there, from the point on the surface of the sphere (or hypersphere) which is determined by all the coordinates of our social, personal, and experiential attributes, focussing at the level we find most appropriate with a depth of field and an angle of view which also must be considered. And then factoring in the “intuitive” meaning the scene before us may have.
If all of this sounds impossibly complicated just recall how readily we can immerse ourselves in the worlds of fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. Look at all of the arguments which go on ceaselessly about the “meaning” of “history”.
Today it seems fewer and fewer people are either willing or able to understand the local rationality of other people’s worldviews. One reason may be fear of the unknown. Some people may be sufficiently uncertain of their loyalty to their own worldview that any exposure to an alternative will result in defection and then to ostracism. This is the fear of being pulled away. We may not enjoy our present reality very much but we are unsure of our abilities to enter into another.
Another reason may be arrogance: the present worldview bestows unearned privilege and status which will not be sustained from any other. This is the fear of being pushed away from the throne. Other reasons include laziness or lack of experience.
But what if we tried to see the world from as many viewpoints as possible? Would this lead us into such confusion and disorientation we would become completely rootless? Or would we start to see a way to integrate them all into a greater unity which would be locally as good as any of its parts while at the same time it would not have those unpleasant and contradictory features?
Most of us know what we believe.
Fewer of us know why we believe it.
Fewer still have any sense of who we would be if we believed otherwise.
… but …
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot. Little Gidding. The Four Quartets.
So does this mean if we strive long enough and diligently enough we can find the one unique viewpoint from which all the others make sense and can be comprehended? Does this mean that humanity will one day be able — as Einstein wished — “to read the mind of God”? Will we eventually get a GUT (Grand Unified Theory) or a TOE (Theory of Everything) which is the current striving of some of the more ambitious members of the Physics Fraternity?
No.
There are four reasons for regarding this aspiration as unattainable.
1. The Gödel theorem, briefly, states that for any finite number of consistent axioms there are completely valid questions which cannot be answered. One simple example from mathematics may be the Goldbach Conjecture: Every positive even integer is the sum of two lesser prime numbers. It has been computationally verified to very large values but there may be an even number out there somewhere which is not the sum of two and only two prime numbers. So far nobody has been able to prove this conjecture is either true or false. In Gödel’s terms, it may be “formally undecideable”.
The essence of this proof for our purposes is that it shows there are some problems which we cannot solve logically. We will have to make some accommodation. There is no finite logical system which is complete.
Much has been written about this and much more certainly will be written. What it means for us is simply the conclusion about us not being able to solve absolutely all of our problems with logic alone.
2. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle simply tells us we cannot have perfect knowledge of any physical system. In this high glory days of mechanistic determinism, Laplace maintained that if we could just know where everything is right now, then by using the equations of physics we could know with complete accuracy where everything was in the past and where it will be in the future. Heisenberg says we will not have this empirical knowledge
3. Chaos theory introduces a new problem for those of us who still want to live in a deterministic universe. Perhaps we can’t, thanks to Gödel, have a total theory of everything without reference to our observations. Maybe we can’t, thanks to Heisenberg, have observations so accurate that even if they are not perfect they will give us predictions which are “good enough”.
Chaos theory introduces the idea of “extreme sensitivity to minor changes in the initial conditions”. For chaotic systems, even using the same mathematical models, the slightest — perhaps even immeasurably different — changes in the initial conditions can lead to drastically different predictions.
This is known sometimes as “The Butterfly Effect”.
We can live in two “logically consistent” worldviews which are inconsistent with one another.
This gives us two major choices. One choice is to live in a world which is totally materialist. The other is to live in a materialist “locally rational” region of a world with “higher dimensions” which are not materialistically accessible to us.
If we choose the first one we are left with the prospect of living in a world as described by the Norse idea of Ragnarök, known to Nietzsche as Gotterdamerung,
and in an odd and ironic fashion recapitulated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno and the cultural relativism of the school of Cultural Marxism more generally.
The reason is simple. Our best theories and speculations will not be able to tell us “why?”.
Life’s meaning and purpose will always be something we must believe. And if we embrace a worldview of mechanistic determinism we won’t even be able to do that.
Any worldview at all we may construct will only be partially or locally rational.
But to escape from this impasse we must choose to live as if certain “higher dimensions” are really there.
That’s not the sort of thing “heaven on earth” utopians want to deal with.
That’s not the sort of thing people who keep talking about “the right side of history” want to deal with.
Maybe that’s why Escher’s works are so compelling.
Escher’s work symbolically represents to us the centrality of “viewpoint” and of “assumptions” when we deal with concepts like “rationality” and “worldview”. Taken farther it can represent for us the limits of human reason itself.
This leaves us with a final problem. If we are to reject any possibilities of “higher dimensions” all well and good. But if we are interested in discussing our “higher dimensional options” then our materialist science will fail us.
To close this it is fitting to end with the opening line of Frank Kermode’s book “The Genesis of Secrecy”.
“And to those outside, all these things must be taught with parables.”
A recent study tells us of female chimps in the Fongoli part of Senegal. The female chimps in this part of the chimp world are more likely to use tools when hunting for prey than are males. The males in this region are more likely to kill their prey with their hands and are more opportunistic hunters. The females appear to be more deliberate in their hunting activities.
J. D. Pruetz , P. Bertolani , K. Boyer Ontl , S. Lindshield , M. Shelley , E. G. Wessling. New evidence on the tool-assisted hunting exhibited by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in a savannah habitat at Fongoli, Sénégal. Royal Society Open Science, 15 April 2015 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.140507
Among the more fascinating conjectures as to why this female hunting and tool use behaviour is only seen in Fongoli relates to the type of “Chimp Culture” found there.
In most chimp societies any prey killed by a female or a low-ranking male is taken by the alpha male. In Fongoli this is not the case. The alpha male role in this chimp society conforms to the “if you caught it, it’s yours” approach to hunting.
How this cultural difference arose is the province of speculation.
Additional speculation can be directed to how this cultural practice seems to be transmitted from one alpha to the next, and perhaps just as importantly whether this particular cultural variant may impact later on the survival of the group as a whole.
Chimp cultural differences have been observed before, in terms of such things as coping with rainfall and other individual-oriented conduct. This may be the first time a cultural difference related to some primordial concept of “property rights” has been seen.
We can also anticipate different interpretations of these observations.
The feminists will no doubt remark on the negative impact of chimp patriarchy, the evolutionary biologists will want to know if the brains of these particular chimps are somehow different than other chimp brains, those given to epigenetics will seek to account for this uniqueness by making reference to the local geography and the abundance of food while blizzarding us all with drawings of DNA molecules demonstrating gene expression, and no doubt some intrepid souls will find evidence of extraterrestrial visitors who imparted higher wisdom to this group of primates.
The evidence for the space alien interpretation is compelling.
Some happy souls believe that “science” can tell us “the truth” about everything we observe. What is fairly clear from this set of observations regarding female chimps and tools is the wide range of possible theoretical explanations which can account for them. Or at the very least include them into an existing interpretive worldview.
It’s not quite as bad as trying to interpret a poem but sometimes feels that way.
“How does this poem speak to you?”
“How do these observations bolster your already existing worldview?”
The rules which govern which set of interpretations are going to be “admissible” are different for poetry and science. Not too many people have actually asked themselves what these rules are and tried to provide lists. I haven’t. If someone actually does this will we be astounded at how different the two lists are? Or at how much they overlap?
In the meantime, female chimps in Fongoli will continue to use their tools while those elsewhere do not.
The distance from objectively accepted observation to accepted theoretical interpretation is farther than it first appears.
I recently watched a rerun episode of the BBC Learning series “Into the Mind”. The episode was “Emotions”. The series itself is the creation of Michael Mosley, a physician who set out to show how scientific research is aiding the understanding of the brain and hence whatever is meant by “the mind”.
The parts of the broadcast I found particularly interesting were:
Harry Harlow’s demonstration of the need for baby monkeys to cling to a soft surface. This need was so strong only the need to get nourishment would make it leave the surrogate and as soon as feeding was finished the monkey would return. Most students of Introductory Psychology know about “Harlow’s Monkeys”.
The presenter mentioned the Harlow research changed the way parents raised their children. In a way this was true but not entirely. Parents who learned the “rational” theories of child-raising from either the Skinnerians or the Spock-followers were, whether they knew it or not, engaging in human experimentation.
One argument given was that “thanks to psychological science” we learned how to treat our children. The problem I have with this is simple: evolution produced something fairly close to an “instinctive” sense of what parents and children need to give each other. The baby monkey had this capacity. The cloth surrogate did not.
One of the more compelling discoveries made by Harlow involved making the cloth-surrogate (mother) monkey a painful place to be. Harlow randomly blasted jets of air against the baby monkey to see how the transformation of the environment into a “punishing” one would influence the baby monkey’s responses. Apparently the need for even the rudimentary “comfort” of a cloth surrogate was enough compensation to tolerate the “discomfort” which the surrogate also delivered.
There is an obvious question about whether this can shed light on the stability of “abusive relationships” or even on the psychological techniques for turning children into soldiers, prostitutes, suicide bombers, or concert pianists. This topic was not pursued.
The source of many of the now-discredited notions of “how to raise a child” came from previous theories of human nature and human development. These theories were widely embraced by the intelligentsia. There are times when those of us who are part of the great unwashed should simply ignore what the elites are telling us. Sometimes their theories of human nature, right and wrong, economics, and even immigration policies, turn out to be incorrect.
The second section of interest dealt with a man who was diagnosed with a brain tumour. The surgery to remove it also removed his ability to experience emotions directly. He could “remember” how to interpret the moods of others and even remember the socially appropriate responses to their emotional states. He simply could not longer “feel” (empathically) what they were experiencing.
The most intriguing demonstration on this came when was given a gambling experiment. When people gamble they try to use their logical capacities to gauge the odds and make the best bet. We like to think of this as being “rational”. It turns out though that the emotions are involved all the time. When we are losing a lot we become afraid and then we’ll change our betting strategies. The man without emotions consistently lost gambling contests with people whose emotions made them more cautious. The heart and the head need to work together.
An interesting reference for this is:
Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Quill
Another well-known individual writing on the general topic of morality and psychology is Jonathan Haidt.
The ways in which we are going to be able to join “emotions” to “morals”, as is normal in matters of moral philosophy, is not settled:
Gluck, Andrew Lee. 2007. Damasio’s Error and Descartes’ Truth: An Enquiry into Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Consciousness. Scranton: University of Scranton Press.
The final part I found interesting was the interview with one of Harry Harlow’s collaborators. The questions which were put to him were related to the fact that the kinds of psychological experiments which were done on fear, deprivation, stress, and subsequent implications for mental illness would not be allowed today. We have much more stringent ethical guidelines (in the West at any rate) which would not permit causing pain and suffering to people or animals unless no other alternative was available. Even then some experiments will never be allowed. Only volunteers can be studied in some circumstances.
Harlow’s collaborator said that after 35 years in clinical practice as a psychiatrist and having seen the terrible costs inflicted by depression and other related conditions, he would redo these now-unethical experiments (on monkeys we should remember) without question.
It is one thing to sacrifice the few for the many. It is something else to sacrifice people in your immediate presence for the sake of those you will probably never meet. And something else again to do so without their knowledge or consent. If a person volunteers to be an experimental subject we can always justify this as a matter of “free will”. Can parents volunteer their children? Can physicians volunteer their patients?
The hidden idea of whether the “scientific method” is the only way we can be sure of something’s truth. I wished the presenter had asked this man if these experiments which are now generally regarded as unethical were “necessary” to uncover these relationships between fear and psychological development, of if they were merely “sufficient”. To say they were “necessary” is to say there is absolutely no other way we could have collectively made these discoveries. That said, the scientific method is still mostly a good idea owing to the incredible complexity of the world and the limitations of human intelligence. Experiments allow us to concentrate on one or two relationships at a time rather than trying to grasp the intricacies of the way the universe works all at once. The danger it holds is possibly monomania: the old adage of a small child with a hammer treating everything as if it were a nail. Science is better suited to questions that start with “what” or “how” more than with questions that start with “why”.
In a society which has little if any moral consensus to bind it together, a society in which “the rule of law” has become code for “the casuistry of lawyers”, do we even know what the word “rational” means? Is the most “rational” course of action always going to be the most “ethical”? Does the decision which is justified by pure rationality sometimes turn out to be the worst in the long run?
Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist, insists the only difference between the ethical standing of humans as opposed to the ethical standing of animals is the fact that the humans find it “convenient” to regard the animals as ethically inferior beings.
But perhaps all of this commentary about ethics and rationality is beside the point. Maybe all we are really seeing is yet another application of the “might makes right” doctrine and all we are really doing is shifting the boundaries, the perspectives, and the labels for the terms in order to “rationalize” the activities.
Thucydides, in his commentary on the Peloponnisian War, included a famous section known as the “Melian Dialogue”. His summary of the exchange of demands between the Athenians and the Melesians includes with this observation:
“The strong do as they please. The weak endure what they must.”
Are these positions justified “rationally” or through “rationalization”?
This question was broached by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in perhaps his best known works: “After Virtue” and “Whose Justice, Which Rationality?”
Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.
A closing tangential comment can be made. The title of this series is “Into the Mind”. The content is all about neurophysiology. The implicit assumption here is to equate the “brain” with the “mind”. Maybe one wants to equate the functioning of the brain with the mind or something else, but the underlying assumption is what is called “physicalism”.
Some see the patterns of the flow of electric current through the brain as the stuff of consciousness and of mind. One example of this approach is:
Harth, Erich. 1993. The Creative Loop: How the Brain Makes a Mind. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Another approach is entirely different. It treats the flow of current in the brain as more of a symptom of some “metaphysical” consciousness. This makes the “mind” something akin to the “fingerprints” the consciousness leaves on the brain. This topic, owing to its intrinsically “beyond the scope of material science” nature, is less often discussed in “scientific” journals. The following link is not endorsed as much as presented to show this debate has at least been engaged by the scientific community. It is, however, at the boundary between science and meta-science or between physics and metaphysics, if you prefer.
The resolution of this debate, or if it cannot be resolved the choices we make as to which interpretation shall inform our moral and ethical decisions, comprises part of the context within which the main content of this post must be seen.
After all. If science is not ever even in principle going to be able to explain fully the idea of “consciousness” then it is very unlikely it will be up to the task of explaining ethics and it is consequently inadequate to compass fully the immorality of abuse.
And that represents another boundary, another margin, which both defines another of the many ways we see ourselves and our relationship to others and which also may have to be accepted as an article of faith rather than an obviously true universal theorem. This boundary is between two different meanings for the term “metaphysics” itself. This is the “ontological/phenomenological” boundary. That exploration will have to wait for another time. For now we are left with a decision.
Ethical conduct may not be that which Mother Nature is forcing us to do through the inevitabilities of evolution. Ethical conduct may be what we should choose to do because it is right.
Not too long ago a CBC announcer spoke of an upcoming a radio commentary on what can happen in a family when one of the children becomes very religious. What kind of stresses will enter the family? How will people cope.
The on-air promotions only mentioned how one sibling would deal with another sibling who had become “super religious”.
I decided to get this podcast and listen to it. In light of the recent news reports of brothers (and sometimes sisters) leaving their secular Western families to run off and join the worldwide Jihad against Christianity by going to Syrian and participating in ISIS the topic seemed entirely in keeping with one of the dominant questions being asked: has the West somehow failed to be nice enough to these young people? This is the allegation made in the Washington Post by Masha Gessen regarding the reasons for the Boston Marathon Bombers engaging in terrorism. How Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s immigrant path explains his guilty verdict
I was naturally interested, too, in the problems of identity which arise when people leave their homeland and enter into some kind of diaspora community. What is “identity” and how does it enter into the lives of people in our ever more mobile world. How does the ideology of “multiculturalism” which seems to demand simultaneously that we should all maintain our “authentic” cultural roots as well as being completely tolerant of all other cultures regardless of their fundamental differences with our own.
The CBC broadcast I finally heard was about secular Jewish woman from Vancouver whose previously secular brother had become an Orthodox Jew and insisted on obeying all the kosher laws when he visited other members of his family. Peace in the House: A not-so-religious Jew and her Orthodox siblings
As I listened I learned of the compromises which involved using paper plates, the purchase of a barbeque which would only be used to cook kosher meat, and how Danielle’s brother prayed every day. I heard about his wearing a ball cap to keep his head covered while at the beach. I heard about his concerns about how some “kosher” products were not really “kosher enough” and so on.
What I did not hear was any hint of a discussion between the secular sister and the “SuperJew” brother about such things as abortion, same-sex marriage, the political tensions in the Middle East, or really anything at all which related to “religious differences” other than the need to keep meat and dairy separate and observe the sabbath.
Nothing about siblings heading off to distant lands to engage in acts brutal aggression or die almost immediately. Nothing about differences of worldview and belief so thoroughgoing that the only shared emotions left were contempt, disappointment, and loss. Minor inconveniences, not broken hearts, were all which were likely to arise.
My memory wandered back to some people I met a few years ago. Their nice secular Jewish daughter had spontaneously (i.e. no “love interest” was involved) converted to Islam. She had begun learning Arabic. She had cut herself off from them. She had taken herself out of their lives completely. And they said they did not know why. They could not imagine why.
I wondered what they and their other children would have to say about this broadcast.
If religious fundamentalism were about nothing more than dietary laws, head coverings, not missing the daily prayers — the content of which is not to be discussed in any case — if religious fundamentalism were understood by everyone as nothing more than personal lifestyle choices which in no way required anyone else in the world to change their own behaviour for any reason other than keeping “peace in the house”, then we would not be living in the world of today. We would not be gazing helplessly at pictures of the Chibok girls abducted by Boko Haram, at the mass beheadings of Christians on beaches by ISIS forces, of the wanton destruction of Nimrud and other world heritage sites because of their being somehow “unislamic”, the destruction of the Timbuktu libraries because infidel books are haram, the multiplying of no-go zones in the cities of Europe, and so on.
We would not be wondering why thousands of people born and raised in Western countries would be inspired to embrace these religious teachings, run away, and join their communities either to be “fighters” or “brides”.
Keeping “peace in the house” is one thing.
Not noticing the gorilla in the living room is another.
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Unjustified Margins 