Wednesday, December 22, 2004, 5:58pm
Wednesday, December 22, 2004, 5:58pm
This will be my last entry for the year. Tomorrow I’ll be working from home, and thereafter on-vacation until the morning of January 4th.
Perhaps the time has come to make some higher-level statements about premises underlying this journal.
Ideas.
Complex ideas.
That is all we have by way of intellectual structure. Our facility with ideas more than anything else is what makes us human. Dogs feel the cold crunch of new-fallen snow and likely associate this with all sorts of past experiences, hungers, and desires, but we go beyond this to create a skiing industry and the Winter Olympics and formulate a science of specialized ski waxes for new-fallen and every other type of snow. In those places where there is a lot of snow we invent word upon word for all of its subtle varieties, and where, through natural happenstance, snow is lacking — we make our own.
None of this is to say that dogs have no ideas. They do, yet their ideas are in proportion to a simple life. People govern their lives by them — chose their paths by them, who to love, when to kill, what to create and destroy by them.
Literally, without ideas I can describe nothing about our human condition.
Here is the one notion that rises above them all — Ideas don’t just fall from the sky. Rather, we, as humans, are the sources, caretakers, and consumers of all human thinking. The entirety of our human organization, conflict resolution, gamesmanship and competition are played out in an arena of idea — notions and concepts and definitions are constantly in play like a game of marbles. And the most powerful among us hoard and control ideas as their pathway to supremacy. Ideas are the real currency of human life. Money isn’t paper or even a balance sheet. Even money is an idea.
In the absence my own critical thinking, somebody else will gladly insert their own belief system into my life – most often to influence where I spend my income, or how I pursue any sort of spiritual life, or for whom I should be voting. Ideas are the only way I can maintain my own identity and the clarity of the paths I may choose to follow. And if I fail to do this, ideas are the means by which I am enslaved in a web of thinking that is not of my own choosing.
Once I’ve done my own analysis I may wind up thinking and believing very much like everyone else – yet I am still the owner of my own thoughts. Ideas need not be unique to be valid. There is no internal inconsistency to arrive at the same conclusion as others. On the other hand, should I chose to see things differently I have no obligation to follow a prescribed path. I may travel alone and invent any idea I want.
Some may call this moral relativism. I consider this a human responsibility. To be truly free I must learn to understand what I face without waiting the hear what my opinions should be. That is what most healthy parents ultimately hope will happen as their children mature. Parents will not always be there to act as the super ego of the child – and unless the child learns how to govern his or her own thinking, someone else will gladly assume that role.
“Wish me a lotta luck” says the woman to her friend as she passes my seat heading for the cabin door. I wonder why. What difference does wishing luck make? Does her hopefulness in luck really change anything? Probably not — and in this case it’s more like a greeting card warmly received because someone cared to send it — and not so much about the message contained within.
Our internal ideas are the currency of the mind, the toolset we use to interact with our own experiences in the world — with other people and their ideas — with fixed notions from institutions and their rulers — with culturally rooted dogma and other concepts still in flux.
For example, this train exists for me as a ‘train’ because I recognize a pile of moving steel as something more than happenstance. From my own observations I see its underlying design, and from reading a bit of railroad history I understand some of the reasons behind its scale and workings. If I’d never seen this for myself or read about trains in some dusty book, and suddenly encountered an MBTA passenger train in real life for the very first time – in those first moments before I’d had the chance to study the train for myself and how it might be similar to other modes of travel familiar to me – in those first moments before I’d begun to piece things together – I would have no concept of trains, no ideas about their inner workings, no notions for why anyone would bother to climb aboard, and therefore no appreciation of its value.
Yet having grown up beside a railroad and having a daily rail commute later in life, the notion of the railroad is so fixed in my mind I can scarcely imagine a world without trains. But if I were to travel back three centuries and ask people about the notion of a railroad system crisscrossing entire continents hauling shiploads of freight and hoards of people at breakneck speeds, then I’d realize how the idea took shape quite recently in human history, and before that point, how the idea of trains arose just like every other idea that hadn’t never existed before.
What I know, what I think, who I am, what I am able to become is all governed and limited by who I am already, how I handle the new experience that comes my way right now, and what I think about information at my disposal in the moment — how I feel about it — how I react to these thoughts and feelings — how I sort the loose details into meaningful categories. Until I learn more and grow more I cannot reach any further than from where I am right now.
Each day presents many forks in the road. At each juncture I have a choice to accept existing ideas all neatly packaged ready for cognitive implantation or I choose the other fork and rummage around my junkyard of real-life experience to assemble my own ideas from these bits and pieces — all according to my own choosing. It’s more work to do my own cooking, and it’s tempting to buy some sort of standardized happy meal. Yet if I want to live a life with any sort of personal growth, I need to explore new territory.
Though almost every educator will say they’d prefer to generate citizens who think for themselves like this, in the real world of power and money, the real goal is to push everyone towards conformity to a cookbook of established ideas made for the benefit of the established order – and that more than anything else is the reason to resist the easy fork in the road leading to today’s happy meal menu.
The most powerful action I can perform as a human being is to take responsibility and own my own thoughts and feelings – to do my own living, to make my own decisions based upon my own personal sense of who I really am, where I really want to go, for whatever responsible reason I may choose. I don’t need somebody to tell me what is right and wrong because I understand the notion of consequences and I am able to clearly derive a moral compass directly from my abiding respect for other people or my proper loathing of ominous behaviors. From this I can interact with others to form agreed-upon laws and commonly accepted behavior and help to build a community based on character rather than conformity.
In this way I am engaged yet I am not locked in – where I’m still free to see the Universe in new ways and still able to push for improvements in the commonly accepted world view – even where I may not fully agree with those around me. Being right is not the goal. Being intellectually honest and self-aware and willing to grow – that is the goal.
The world of power demands yes-men. It needs people to work for less than they are worth, and most of all it needs people to toe the party line and believe what they are supposed to believe and think the ideas they are supposed to think. Yet even in such a world I don’t need to be a functionary, or a yes-man, or a party-line-toer, or a cookie-cutter true believer to make it through this life – so long as I allow myself a bit of uncertainty along the way and apply a measure of independent thinking.
If people felt safe to think just a little bit more independently, perhaps not so many ordinary people would be underpaid while paying almost all of the taxes and facing nearly all of the bodily risks while political, industrial, and other powerful institutions build and collect the lion’s share of the wealth and influence.
Many people may claim to be independent thinkers, but this is only true when we espouse our own ideas – vetted through our own minds – weighed, filtered, processed, then consciously integrated into our own thinking. If I assemble a worldview from little more than pre-manufactured public relations spin-doctoring, sound bites, and sloganeering generated by marketing departments, political parties and other idea peddlers, then I am not doing my own thinking, and instead I am simply filling my head with the tools of my own intellectual confinement.
For me there is nothing wrong with religion or capitalism or politics until the point is reached where I am required to abdicate free will and where I am expected to follow an orthodox or corporate or political party line for the sake of institutional preservation more than the general well being of individual humanity.
Although those in power would like us to believe otherwise, no one on the planet is intrinsically more or less valuable than anyone else. And if that were not true, then tens of billions a year wouldn’t be spent undermining that simple opinion.
The answer is not to swear off participation in hierarchical institutions, rather to choose my participation carefully, and thoughtfully, and respectfully – to work among those with a higher purpose — higher in some way I find meaningful and enlightening — perhaps most of all a place were I am exposed to ideas that challenge my own. I need not ever act in a knee-jerk reaction to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I can be fully functional in this world and wholly free to see the world however I choose to see it, no matter my circumstances.
In a nutshell – one need not sell one’s soul for a meal ticket.
At a time of war this sort of individuality is much easier to attack as ‘unpatriotic’ — and today, in response, I am appalled at the need to make a case for something I once saw as centrally accepted among regular people. Yet after 9/11 the second casualty has been reason itself where fearful institutions have pulled ‘off the gloves’ (to borrow their own words) and decided that free-thinking is a convenient target to be swept into the fray alongside their overt fear of the terrorists.
Today we live in a dark age that few saw coming, and I can only hope through a commitment to rationality — however maligned — we can recover our national sanity.
Unfortunately, even as much as the human brain is somewhat pre-wired for clear-thinking, rationality -itself- is an invention (a truly terrifying thought), so the road ahead is always the road ahead, and there’s never an end to the battle of the rational mind versus all the other ways we could be enslaved by institutional thinking.
Okay. That’s enough for now. I’m way ahead of myself here, and need to work through this piece-by-piece next year.
Framingham Station is about to drift away, and soon I will be on-foot walking into the night. Though I worry about the corruption of ideas for the benefit of the few I realize also how there is more to life. For nearly two weeks I will be on-vacation from this journal every bit as much as from my job.
And that is a good idea if ever there was one!
