Just as this was fading in the news cycle we are given another name to conjure: Rachel Dolezal. Rachel is a professor African American Studies in East Washington University (Spokane) and describes herself as an “African American woman”.
Her parents claim she is white. They have provided photos of her revealing her to be a blue-eyed blonde.
Rachel resigned as the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP on June 15 (the 800th Anniversary of Magna Carta) and is reported to be in seclusion at this writing. In the next few days and perhaps weeks the media will be relentlessly picking apart Rachel’s life and spreading it out before anyone who cares to look. In all likelihood the focus will be on the individuals and their unique social circumstances. The “rationalities” that will be sought in these dissections will all be one way or the other “local”.
There are three pairs of rationalities which are illustrated in these two cases. Subjectivity and Objectivity, Individuals and Groups, Trust and Justice. These three dimensions and the focal points we choose to take along each of them determines for us how we will experience “identity” in many of life’s situations. The complexities of the first two dictate to some extent who we trust and how we experience or define justice in our social dealings.
In terms of objectivity, we have some fairly good evidence to support calling Bruce Jenner biologically male and Rachel Dolezal biologically white. Rachel’s case is a bit more difficult because the male/female distinction is usually determined by a few physical attributes and the XX or XY chromosome difference. Race, while being “observable” and so to some extent “objective” is on a number of sliding scales. Both sex and race designations make predictions (challenged or not) about attitudes, beliefs, and abilities.
The social constructivist school regards almost all differences as the result of ‘nurture’ and not ‘nature’, of the social roles we play and not our biology.
From this perspective, the (white?) woman known as Caitlyn Jenner came into social existence in June of 2015. I’m assuming Caitlyn is white. I may be wrong on this.
Rachel Dolezal’s arrival as a black woman took place about 20 years ago. In terms of “time in role” it is possible to argue Rachel is “more black” than Caitlyn is “female”.
But maybe “time in role” is not important. Maybe it’s how each of us “feels” that is important. Maybe, too, the facility with which we play the roles is the crucial factor. If the role does not require any specifically biological attribute (such as are given by genitalia or the need for SPF 50 in winter) then we could possibly argue that the way the role is played is more important than anything else.
If we take this seriously then we have a problem with the designation of certain “visible” (that is “objective”) criteria for affirmative action considerations. In some settings now applicants are asked to “self-identify” as it relates to their racial, sexual, gender, orientational, or other category. Could able-bodied people “self-identify” as disabled in order to get better parking spots?
Caitlyn did not in all probability emerge from Bruce because some affirmative action employment advantage was available. Did Rachel find in her early school career a strong interest in “African American studies” and come to the conclusion her employment opportunities would be substantially enhanced if her “birth race” were otherwise?
If the categories of race and sex and gender are used as visible proxies for assumed lacks of opportunities are hardships in early life then are these policies not making a huge problem? What about the “hidden injuries” of poverty, homelessness, and simple isolation from networks and resources that are taken for granted by the children of privilege?
In 1972, British author Richard Sennett wrote “The Hidden Injuries of Class”.
Will President Obama’s daughters ever be asked to check theirs?
The children of the relatively disadvantaged: those who grow up in poor parts of town and attend inferior schools and do not have well-connected and stimulating friends, they are all reminded of one fact of life when they are growing up.
Poor people have little if any margin for error. The smaller your margin for error, the more you will rely on the predictability of the rules of the game to be able to plan for an honest and successful life. It’s not enough for the system to be fair or the playing field to be level. They need to be stable. Stability is even more important than fairness or levelness as long as these two are not too extreme.
The honest disadvantaged people in this world need to trust that the rules won’t change. Nobody really expects perfectly fair rules. At least not once they get to be seven or eight years old. What they do want is for the rules to be stable. Cheating is “breaking the rules” much more than it is “getting a lucky break in life” because of who our parents are or the country in which we were born.
When we decide as “individuals” we want to think of ourselves as male or female or oriental or occidental that’s one thing. When we take these “self-designations” into a biased context which will assign selective advantage to some choices more than to others then charges of “cheating” may arise.
Cheating brings up the idea of “local rationality”. Some CEOs define their corporate actions as “rational” from the point of view of “increasing shareholder value”. Moving the frame of reference a bit it may be possible to see that putting 50,000 people out of work by closing a profitable but marginal facility does not so much “increase shareholder value” as much as cost the wider community far more money because of the increased need for social service expenditures and these costs will be passed on to taxpayers. Increasing shareholder value may be another way of phrasing “redistributing wealth to the benefit of those who are already wealthy”.
Rachel may be just as subjectively sure of her identity as being that of a “black” person as Caitlyn is of her identity as a “female” person.
The larger social problems begin when the subjectivity of these assignments is applied to categories which have group or collective impact. What would happen to the Affirmative Action or Positive Discrimination policies of companies and government agencies if all applicants just decided to “self-identify” as African American Lesbians?
Are we going to wind up having to enunciate our own variants of the Nuremberg Laws? Are the now abandoned Apartheid Laws of South African going to appear to future generations as models of simplicity and clarity? What does it mean to be “black” in America? In 1961, the white southern male John Howard Griffin wrote “Black Like Me”. He used walnut oil to make his skin dark, he shaved his head, and he set off to live like a black man in the southern states of the US in 1959.
These questions lurk just below the surface of the coverage of the Jenner and Dolezal diversions. If we look more closely at the underlying social context of these events and pay less attention to the personal factors involved in each we can ask better questions.
What do we mean by “identity” and how do we determine what “objective” collective policies should be when all of the identity categories to which they apply are “subjective”?
Societies, like physical structures, cannot progress to their next level of development until the already existing levels are stable. It is this stability which gives people the degree of trust they need to make informed choices in the present because of what they anticipate will result in the future. When these factors are damaged or destroyed the first people to suffer are those who are honest and hard working and just coincidentally come from modest backgrounds.
The difficulties do not stop there. Collective trust and predictability are the psychological equivalent of glue. Societies are stable only to the degree people can predict one-another’s actions and trust one-another’s motives and intentions. This is one reason why now, as the global order is under so much pressure to change, we see the unmistakable rise of ethnic and tribal loyalties. These are loyalties which are assumed to be more stable and more enduring than contractual obligations defined by written documents and interpreted by members of one or another group of intelligentsia.
This brings us to the context of this comment. Followers of George Lakoff will call it “framing” while Jürgen Habermas enthusiasts will detect “systematically distorted communication”.
The focus can either be “individual” or “group”, the interpretative dimension can be either “subjective” or “objective” and the trajectory of the narrative can either be directed towards the goal of “people feeling good about themselves” or “maintaining a social order which fosters trust and stability”.
Is there an opportunity here to open up a conversation examining the potential conflict in a society which celebrates local short-term rationality so much its own collective long-term rationality is being called into question?
We can only hope the pundits and sages can find a little time, in between segments picking apart the childhood difficulties of the temporarily famous, to ask themselves if they are contributing positively to making the world a bit more stable and predictable for those who need it most.
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.”
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Unjustified Margins 