Humility ... what a concept

You shouldn't get the idea that I'm picking on my fellow humans. I'm not. I'm merely pointing out that I'm of the opinion that we think we're better than we are. Maybe a bit of humility would serve us well.

It's OK not to know things. None of us can know everything. Some people are good at history, others at math, others in biology, science or physics, others know a lot about how we think the mind works, but nobody knows everything. That's OK. Since we can communicate as easily as we can, we can always get insights, knowledge, and information from others, be it personally or in written or recorded form. Things are always better with a little help from our friends.

The difficulties start appearing immediately, however. How do we know if what we're being told is correct? Most often we don't, because, well, we're not experts in that field, that's why we turned to someone who knows more about than we do. To accept what we given, we have to trust the source. That's a rather large problem these days, isn't it? Trust, that is. Who can and do we trust? And why?

The closer we are to the source, the easier it is. We can see how they act, how they treat us and others, what they do in their spare time, how others see them. The farther away they are -- physically, socially, psychologically, etc. -- the greater the challenge. In these cases we have to resort to other means: reputation, personal history, evaluations by others, on the external side; and coherency and consistency of argumentation and presentation, supporting data and evidence, and the like on the internal side. It's pretty obvious that most of us aren't very well prepared for the latter, at any rate. Those items belong to the realm of critical thinking, which we all like to claim we do, but hardly ever do in reality. In fact -- and I find this especially mind-boggling -- it is actively discouraged in school these days, and some states, like Texas, have active movements to have it officially eliminated from the school curriculum. How sad is that? But how did we get to such a place?

It's pretty simple, really: like I've mentioned before -- just last time, in fact -- what we accept as true and right and proper and correct depends more than anything else on what we believe to be true and right and proper and correct. We all go into the evaluation from a biased position. Some folks are aware of this and try to adjust for it; others have no idea that they do it, so they tend to come across rather arrogant, know-it-all, or dogmatic. If you ask me, any of these last three characteristics is a dead give-away. People who really know stuff tend to be just slightlyl humble about their knowledge. They try, in any number of ways, to take the edge off their own authority. A lot of things we think we know a lot about turn out to be quite incorrect a bit farther down the road. The entire course of human history and knowledge is littered with wrecked and abandoned things-we-knew-for-sure. In my mind, the mark of a truly intelligent person lies not in how right s/he thinks s/he is, but rather is how open they are for the possibility that they might be wrong and willing they are to adapt what they think to accommodate the new data and information.

The observant reader will recognize that there is more involved here than initially met the eye. We're not talking only about knowledge, but apparently belief and attitudes need to and do play a role in what is said, and in what we are willing to accept. It's worth stopping to think about.

If nobody can save us, we might as well get real

If it's up to us, we might as well recognize that reality. That's what "getting real" really means. We're not going to do that, however. We're going to retreat into the safety of our delusions and bemoan that fact that nobody is doing anything to help, that it's someone else's responsibility not ours, that we've been left all alone.

Please forgive me if I don't get all choked up about this. I didn't make the rules, but I have always found it amazing that so many people are willing to say one thing and act differently. There is long-standing tradition in humanity to blame those below you (real or imagined), for it relieves you of having to admit you yourself are the problem. You're the problem. I'm the problem. We're the problem.

Why? Because we only believe what we want to believe. Truth doesn't mean a whole lot to us. Facts don't carry much weight. What is reasonable and makes sense is too easily discarded and replaced by visions of how we would like things to be. We like to think of ourselves as members of an educated, objective, advanced, serious society and culture. We are not. We're every bit as timid, fearful and superstitious as our forebears who we'd rather ignore and forget. After all, we're not like them at all. But we are.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking of things political or economic or anything like that. I'm talking about our most fundamental attitude towards life in general and our own lives in particular. I'm talking about basics ... the very fundamentals that allow things to be a particular way. This isn't a new theme, as many of you know. I've talked about it more times than I care to remember (or reference).

We're a strange species. Just because we have the gift of language, we tend to think if we can put a name on something, we understand it. Obviously this breaks down every time we go to the doctor's and s/he tells us what we have in terms that we can only hope s/he understands: Yes, you have a cardiovascular thrombotic resistance to nonvegetative triesters of glycerol enhanced by hyperutilization of hydrolyzable ionic compounds. Gee, why didn't I think of that? Giving something a name doesn't do any more for us than give us a way to refer to something. We most likely don't understand it, but we're pretty sure it's a "something". Isn't that comforting? Not really.

We like to think that we're sophisticated, advanced, developed, intelligent and stable. We're not. Swap out nuclear devices for fireballs launched by catapults and the only real difference is the number of other human beings that can be killed in one shot. The underlying principle is the same. It's only a difference of magnitude. What applies to war applies to every other aspect of life. Watch a film about the bushmen of the Kalahari foraging for food, then stop by your local mega-supermarket between 2:00 and 4:00 am. There's really not a whole lot of difference, and since we're moderns, we simply don't have to walk as far.

Nah, I doubt we'll be getting real anytime soon. We're far too enamored with deceiving ourselves, of thinking we know things when we don't and thereby perhaps missing the real point of it all.

Can anyone save us?

And so, it would seem we've come full circle. When we reflect back upon the last few posts, we see that none of the disciplines or institutions that we might expect to come to the rescue can or will.

Science is capable of developing deep, insightful and helpful knowledge, but if we ignore it, we do so at our own peril.

Technology can solve lots of problems, but not all problems, and it is up to us to help it decide what's worthwhile and what is not.

Politics has become beholden to special interests, but it is we, the populus who have reneged on our responsibility to get involved and keep their noses to the wheel.

It should be clear that "the market", as it is currently practiced, is simply a degenerate extension of the political sphere. Money can never be the measure of anything, but we have essentially turned it into a god in its own right.

Turning the "religious" corner, we see that Jesus showed us the way, and he admonished us to follow suit, but we've chosen to ignore that.

And God, if He exists, according to His own accounting, told us all that if we don't do it, nobody else will.

This is where is all comes together. Regardless of whether we're religious or not, believers or atheists, in the end, we're all in this together. Regardless of what we may think is true and right, at bottom, we're all in this together. When all is said and done, there is no outside force, power or agency that can, or will, suddenly step in and snatch us from the jaws of destruction.

No, if anything at all is to be done or can possibly be done, we have no choice: we -- you, me, our families, everyone we know and don't know -- are the only ones who can do anything at all.

We have already raced past the crossroads, but it may be that we can backtrack far enough to take the other road. Whether we do or not doesn't depend on anyone or anything other than ourselves. As Pogo put it so aptly so long ago, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

If this enemy is to be defeated, however, only we can do it. Who's up for the challenge?

Can God save us?

This is the trickiest question of all. I mean, after all, the Big Guy (according to the legend) put us here, so he can take us out anytime He pleases (which he did once, according to the text: see the Story of Noah), and according to the believers, absolutely everything is in His hands. The atheists and non-theists among you will quickly retort, quite consistently, that He doesn't exist, so He isn't going to be doing anything. That may or may not be true. We cannot know for sure. Regardless of what you believe (there is or there is no God), it is simply a matter of belief. You can't prove it one way or the other. So, in one respect, this simply removes God from the equation.

There are a lot of people who believe in God or some kind of god or gods or the like. Truth be told, it is the majority of humanity. For that very reason, we cannot simply discard the God question out of hand. For that reason alone, it deserves to be taken seriously, regardless of how intolerant militant atheists can be. I certainly don't agree with a lot of people, but I do try to make an effort to understand why they think what they think and why they believe what they believe, and I am extremely hesitant to tell them flat out that their full of crap. (Unfortunately, this seems to be the preferred argumentation modus of our militant-atheist friends.)

Given the large sphere of influence of and my own upbringing within the Abrahamic Traditions, I'll restrict myself to that one perspective. (I believe, however, that mutatis mutandis everything I have to say applies outside this context as well, but that's another blog for another time.) We are told in the Good Book, Part I (Old Testament), right up front (1st book, Genesis, Chapters 1 & 2, in particular the latter) that we (that is, humankind) were put here to be the caretakers of this world. We might have screwed up and got kicked out of headquarters (the Garden of Eden), but we weren't fired; we still had the job, we just had to do it out here where all of us all. We're doing a pretty sorry job of it, too.

Granted, even God got fed up and washed the slate clean (literally), but He told us he wouldn't do that anymore, and from then on out -- according to the text -- he repeated sent this, that, or the other guy (or gal ... there are lots of stories in the Bible in which the female plays a decisive role) to remind us of what we actually should be doing. But, He told us flat out, He wasn't going to intervene so directly. The way I read the text and see the big picture, then, we've been passed the buck. The way I see how things have been developing, especially in the last couple of hundred years, though, we want to pretend like we don't have it ... never heard of it ... and that's why we are in the straits we are in. We've lost sight of our job description. We're not doing our job.