Tag Archives: truth

Storm Surge:  Clearing 2021s Mental Debris, Dr. Robert Zuber

31 Dec

I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn’t explain away afterwards. Rudyard Kipling

Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.  Margaret Atwood

When we kill people, we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretense of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history. Shashi Tharoor

He had a clear conscience. Never used it. Stanisław Jerzy Lec

So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness. Randall Robinson

Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one’s most reassuring self-deceptions! Ashim Shanker

No one, Naomi had learned, did evil without believing it was right at the time. Maybe this was why it was nearly impossible to talk them out of it?   Rene Denfeld

The most trustworthy and likable guides are the ones who occasionally ask others for directions. Frank Bruni

I know that I promised fewer of these posts but the transition from one difficult year to another which, despite the hopes that we will pin on 2022, is likely to be saturated with challenges at personal, community and global levels that seemed to warrant a bit of reflection.

As 2021 and its lessons fade from conscious awareness, we at Global Action are attempting to do what we should have done years earlier – ask others for directions, including on how and where we should place our energies in what is already poised to be another time of challenge, both familiar and fresh. 

We have commented before on the wide range of skills and capacities which the times demand, ranging from the deeply intimate to the most technologically sophisticated, just some of what we will need to tap if we are to effetively care for the sick and isolated, ensure that provisions are accessible by refugees and others in almost unimaginable need, launch and monitor telescopes that can bring us closer to the edge of creation, and reverse what we can of the damage done from a warming and warring planet.

None can attend to all of these things, certainly not alone. Indeed, any contributions we might make are constrained as we allow our own capacities to erode and as we fail to address what seem to be widening gaps between what we feel we must do and what we are able to do.  Like many others, we at Global Action are trying to discern the frontier of our effective actions, a task in part about making more sound judgments regarding the efforts we can undertake ourselves and those times when we are much better off helping to enable others.

But success here also requires us to get our own heads straight, to clear away some of the psychological and conceptual debris that is holding us back, and by no means us alone.  Amidst the pull of caregiving of all kinds, amidst our dangerous and often petty political rhetoric, amidst the necessity of broadened educational and health care access as well as restoring the impaired biodiversity on which our very lives depend, there are modes of thinking and feeling which have dominated much of our social life in this past year, modes which have wasted precious human energy and sown distrust at community and policy levels,  modes we would do well to abate as this new year begins, if not relinquish entirely. 

There are many candidates that could have been listed in this post, but three rose closest to the surface for me.  The first of these was a focus of classical psychotherapy as practiced by persons such as Erich Fromm – pointing out our almost obsessive tolerance of “rationalization,” the half-truths (at best) we tell ourselves about our motives, our intentions, our goals; our unrelenting efforts to justify the unjustifiable; the misrepresentations we parrot with such frequency that we come to believe them – no matter how many others remain duly skeptical.

Such rationalization has done and continues to do damage to our social fabric.  We are inclined, as Fromm himself noted, to invest enormous amounts of personal energy – energy we simply cannot afford to squander in these precarious times – protecting ourselves from the truth of our own intentions, the “explanations” that hide as much as reveal, the rationalistic “after-thoughts” of decisions which are often driven by desires we can scarcely admit we have, desires which might call into question our carefully-crafted images that fool only some of the people some of the time.

In this social-media saturated world that we have constructed for ourselves, we have been conditioned to purchase the surfaces, to make snap decisions (and often inflexible ones) based on mere snippets of camera-ready activity and/or personality.  We seem committed more and more to the principle that what is true is what you can convince others to be true.  This principle becomes an incubator of rationalization, exacerbating the trend of hiding often-complex truths about ourselves from ourselves.

This impediment is related to another which was also not invented during this past year but seems to have flourished at this dangerous moment – the tendency to judge (and even demonize) others about whom we know little, including little about their familial, social and economic contexts.   The volume of judgements emanating from people of all political persuasions, all races and genders, regarding people that they don’t know, indeed don’t have any interest in knowing, is quite staggering. Those who struggle mightily to discern the truth of their own motives seem to have surprisingly little difficulty in pinning down the motives of perfect strangers often in the form of self-interested and overtly stereotypical rants.   “We” know about those liberals, those refugees, those proud boys, those racists.   What “we” know in fact are too-often carefully groomed snippets of behavior and perspective, now mostly social media-mediated, which serve to confirm rather than complicate our snap judgements.  If we were more mindful and honest about the opportunities, limitations and challenges embedded in our own contexts, it might well help to moderate much of the self-righteous and context-challenged stereotyping that breeds division far more than understanding.

Finally, it would be good if in this new year we could find a way to abandon, or at least modify, our current widespread tendency to apply an anti-scientific mind-set to our assessments of science.  We have been living through a period characterized by a profound skepticism of any official views of anything, coupled with a stunning lack of skepticism regarding the conspiracies which challenge such official views. Many also have doubled down on their desire for what John Dewey called “monistic” ideas, the “science” that is “true” once and for all, the “science” that eschews the “plurality of ideas employed in experimental activity as working hypotheses.”  In other words, a “science” which intentionally rejects the methodologies and conclusions-in-process of science.  

The solution to this is not what Dewey referred to as a “thoughtless empiricism” devoid of culture, of value, even of faith.  What is required instead is a rejection of the fanatical claims of some, often draped in religious as well as scientific terminology, that what is “true” must be true for all in all circumstances.   Regardless of culture.  Regardless of context.  Regardless of gender or race. Regardless of revisions to our understanding of the world required by subsequent research in many fields including by new technologies that allow us to see deeper and further such as the Webb Space telescope now probing areas of our universe hitherto beyond our reach.

It has become clear to me, rightly or otherwise, that the current skepticism regarding a “science” incapable of revealing or sustaining “monistic ideas” is merely one component of the same conceptual “field of debris” that we have duly laid out for ourselves and reinforced over this past year.  One that rationalizes and conceals rather than reveals; one that habitually judges harshly, categorically and independently of context; one that pledges allegiance to the one that that claims to uphold the “truth” that is right for all in all circumstances, even as the actual truth lies elsewhere.

As our calendar year flips, we have so much on our collective plates if we are to keep ourselves sane and our progeny alive.  Some of this is related to the pursuit of justice and physical health, the restoration of our environment, the resolution of conflict threats.  But some is related to the debris rummaging around in our psyche that we generally seem unable or unwilling to clear away:  the need to hide our true motives from ourselves, the need to de-contextualize those with whom we disagree; the need to turn pending truths into eternal ones. Overcoming these self-imposed impediments, these wounds inflicted over and over on our social fabric, is the new year’s resolution that can help heal our divisions, our democracies and possibly even our planet.   Let’s give it a try.

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Bubble Wrap: Unpacking our Digitalized Enclosures, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 May

Bubbles

For a bubble, even the gentlest touch is fatal.  Mehmet Murat ildan

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.  Nadine Gordimer

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Oscar Wilde

What fools we mortals are to think that the plans we make are anything more than a soap bubble blown against a hurricane, a frail and fleeting wish destined to burst. Barbara Nickless

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.  Joe Klaas

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.  Flannery O’Connor

On a weekend when we celebrate the end of Ramadan and mourn the loss of the fallen on our various battlefields, I have spent much of the time cleaning out file cabinets filled with old letters.  Some of these letters were angry, some grateful, some filled with insight about the writer, the intended audience, the world at large.  But what was most revealing is the amount of care that went into them, page after page in longhand, people often younger than me committed to disclose and share, to make sense of a world which was often making none, to decipher and embrace the core of their being amidst a cacophony of conflicting and competing messaging, to transcend fleeting joys and hurts and find the north star within themselves to guide what would hopefully be a long life of care for self and service to others.

We rarely communicate like this anymore.   Our introspective longhand has become digital shorthand.   We have trouble sustaining attention of any sort let alone sustaining a train of thought that promises genuine insight, even possible breakthrough.   Our messaging is ubiquitous but thin; we “stay in touch” by dropping in and out of lives from which we extract highly-branded versions of key “incidents” but with less and less of the backstory that explains why such incidents actually matter and what longings might yet exist between what are often lengthening cracks revealing our obsessive efforts to convince others we’re OK when we may only be partially so.

As is often the case with these posts, I am preaching to the choir; but also to myself.

This week, for me, was immersed in communications-related issues.  It began with a “new” campaign-related initiative by the US Republican party and ended with what will hopefully be an important opening gambit in the UN Security Council examining how the cyberspace we are now reliant on to almost desperate degrees is digressing into “bubbles” of self-referential propaganda and even hate speech that directly threaten international peace and security.

The aforementioned campaign initiative was given a most interesting name:  The Truth over Facts Investigative Website which is designed primarily to highlight the gaffes of the US president’s political opponent, but which neither interrogates the president’s own slippery relationship to facts of any stripe nor breaks any new ground regarding our general confusion regarding how “facts” are and are not constitutive of a fuller “knowing” of the world and our own relationship to it, how “facts” divorced from context can just as easily reinforce our various cognitive bubbles as puncture them.

As someone whose long-ago graduate school experience was literally drowning in epistemological considerations related our diverse “ways of knowing” the world, I have long been a believer that data and truth are kissing cousins but not quite marriage partners.   I won’t waste your weekend on a protracted diatribe about the ways in which we misuse data by failing to properly contextualize it, or about the ways in which we use “facts” to place people in boxes that we don’t want them to escape or even use “facts” to justify an end to exploration rather than as the engine of its continued evolution.

But I will communicate this.  In my erstwhile-jaundiced view, the behavior of several leaders of major power governments during this pandemic has been nothing short of criminal, principally in its lack of humility, its unwillingness to consult and abide by those of greater knowledge, and its utter lack of urgency regarding the preservation of life.   It is certainly the case that scientists are learning more and more each day about the pandemic, its modes of transmission, effective treatment options, even the consequences of infection – from kidney failure in the sick to psychic depression in those merely fearful of sickness, but also with sustained periods of loneliness and of protracted economic uncertainty.

But the certainties that many seem to be looking for in this time of pandemic remain elusive. Yes, we have vaccine trials with results that are sometimes encouraging and we can generally ascertain when the viral “curve is flattening” and where relapses are most likely.  But do GDP or official unemployment statistics really communicate the “truth” about our collapsing and vastly unequal economies? Is “official” data on COVID-related deaths and infections the “truth” about our viral circumstances, or might matters actually be more dire due to people dying in places other than hospitals and tests yielding untrustworthy results?

It is alternately intellectually interesting and emotionally unsettling for me to watch public officials struggle with their COVID messaging in an environment where trust in officials is low across the board, where the “facts” of infection change regularly as we learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and when national political leadership seems more inclined to stoke anger and anxiety than coach it away.   As a result, too many people of all ideological persuasions feel abandoned to cope with the current uncertainty largely on their own, to pull the metaphorical blinds and double-down on the “bubbles” with which are most reassuring, even if those bubbles are riddled with half-truths, even if those bubbles only offer equally false choices between hard certainty on the one hand and conspiratorial make-believe on the other.

Our remaining confidence in authorities and experts seems now less about the credentials behind what we are being told and more about who is telling us, who we choose to believe, who is able and willing to confirm what it is that we have more or less already concluded about the world and what in it truly threatens us.

This week, the UN launched what it calls Verify, a useful initiative to combat the growing scourge of COVID-19 misinformation “by increasing the volume and reach of trusted, accurate information.”  Of course the test for Verify will be less about the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data it scrutinizes and more about the trust that the UN and its World Health Organization can garner as a responsible arbiter of the “truths” of COVID – what we know, what we don’t know, and why some of the rumors and conspiracies floating around the planet (and especially in the digital universe) do not pass the test either of facts or context.

Does the UN retain the capacity to do more than offer its version of competing narratives about the pandemic or, for that matter, the many other, science-relevant, global challenges also on its policy agenda?  Sadly for me, this is unclear.  As much of a proponent of science (and of the UN) as I have been all my life, I lament that we have misplaced so much of our capacity to educate people about what it is that scientific and medical experts can and cannot (yet) accomplish, to have an honest conversation with people about the nature and limits of scientific inquiry, the findings of science that might well eventually set us free but, in the short term, are almost as likely to “piss us off.”

We need to have those conversations in our schools, our communities and especially in bastions of social and political authority such as the UN.  No, our data is not static.  No, all of our facts are not situated in proper contexts.  No, our “authorities” are not always authoritative. Sometimes authorities do what we now mostly all do and much too often – re-purpose “truths” espoused as a manipulative pathway to get what we want rather than as a means of enriching our connections and the quality of our common life.

In reading this over, I recognize how naïve and old school it must seem to some readers, especially those who have given in to the modernist assumption that we can be expected to do no better than to encase ourselves in our bubbles of choice and then pray to whatever powers we might still acknowledge to preserve our bubble from puncture.  But puncture is inevitable.   Our bubbles might be lovely to behold but as even the reference dictionaries acknowledge, they are also fragile, temporary, fleeting, insubstantial, unable to withstand much in the way of the winds of change and the challenges of new lenses on truth that now buffer them routinely.

When those bubbles do finally burst, when disenchantment towards our governments and official expertise has been set loose, when the convenient untruths communicated by our digital media preferences start to unravel, when our resentments (and the entitlements to which they are often tethered) are allowed to overwhelm our collective solidarity even more than they already do now, then we have set the stage for fresh ugliness that even the excellent Security Council discussion on Friday on “digital threats” to peace and security could barely discern.  We have shaken and awakened our hunger, not so much for truth and the data to which it must remain attached, but for grievance-based vengeance, for our petty cancel culture and its righteous minions, for a “rules based order” created by powerful states and individuals who don’t play by the rules they advocate. And this is encouraged by a media and “information system” that often seems relentless in its attempts to manipulate emotions not help them reach maturity.

This is a larger problem even than the virus, even than the digital culture on which we increasingly rely and which now seems to offer many more opportunities to reinforce prejudice and distance than wisdom and connection.   We are being pushed into bubbles from many angles, but we often now offer little resistance and even less inclination to abandon their false security.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple as Oscar Wilde noted.  The question now is whether we have the “stomach” to pursue — with humility and even in longhand — the truths of our time along their winding, rocky path; and then create a post-COVID world of security, health, equity and beauty once we are fortunate enough to catch them.

 

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