Reflections On Faith, Truth, and Properly Changing The World
In regards to seeing patients in a clinical setting, one of my favorite Authors and Jungian Analysts Dr. James Hollis is purported to have said “When someone comes into the consulting room — what it’s about, is not what it’s about!” In other words, when a patient comes to see him for some kind of psychological disturbance, he or she is usually capable of identifying the symptoms of such ailment; but not really the cause of such. In many instances, what they think “it’s about” is not really the cause of their troubles.
Besides, it turns out, it doesn’t really matter “why” sometimes. The cause of our problems is more difficult apprehend than we think it is. As Author and Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson says “Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is. Inopportune questioning can confuse, without enlightening, as well as deflecting you from action. You can know that something is wrong or right without knowing why. Your entire Being can tell you something that you can neither explain nor articulate. Every person is too complex to know themselves completely, and we all contain wisdom that we cannot comprehend.”
Peterson and Hollis both have had a profound effect on me personally, as I’ve experienced a strange and deep metamorphosis over the past several years — and they have helped me to develop (in part) a more psychological lens through which to view the world. Reading their words (among many others), coupled with a fair amount of introspection, has been transformative. In addition to that, I’m also married to Mental Health Therapist who specializes in the treatment of personality disorders in adolescents; and her effect and impact on me can’t be overstated in this regard.
We live in an age where we have access to, for all intents and purposes, all of the collective wisdom that humanity has to offer. It is, broadly speaking, more than we can possibly comprehend. I’m old enough to remember when we had to look things up in an encyclopedia, or ask someone older and wiser than we were, if we didn’t know something. We used to call people’s telephone, which hung on the wall in their kitchen, and if they didn’t answer — well then — we didn’t talk to them, and we didn’t know where they were until they called us, or showed up at our door. We used to use maps (and if you’re a boy scout, like I was) compasses, to find our way in the world. Technology has changed all of that in a generation, and these things seem strange and foreign to people just a few years younger than I am. Life is impossibly different than it was for people separated by a mere 20–30 years; perhaps moreso than at any other point in human history. While our lives are unquestioningly more convenient; I’m not so sure they’re all that better.
Even with all of the information we have; it seems that the prevailing attitude among many today is that of being more comfortable that they have arrived at conclusions that properly and accurately construe reality. In other words, given the seemingly limitless access to information about virtually everything, people are more convinced than ever that they are right. Instead of being confronted with the fact that existence, consciousness, and reality is more complex than we can properly comprehend — we have distilled everything down to binary 1’s or 0’s, and are seemingly incapable of holding two contradictory ideas as potentially, and even probably, being simultaneously “true” in their own right.
I think this is due to the fact that reality is incredibly complicated; and we’re not adequately equipped to deal with how complicated it is.
Throughout human history, we’ve relied on tradition — particularly religious tradition — to guide prevailing attitudes, sentiments, and customs. These days, given our unprecedented access to facts about reality, we have grown skeptical of religion and it’s ability to construe reality in an accurate way.
Several years ago, I myself left my religion — and I thought I would never come back to it. I thought it was, above all else, an inaccurate depiction of objective reality. Which, of course, it is.
What I was missing was that describing objective reality is only so useful. Objective reality doesn’t provide an “ought” to the “is”. It doesn’t adequately capture the nuance that so often accompanies human existence.
You see, I developed in my formative years a fundamentalist faith. Fundamentalism, in this context, is adequately described as a literal belief in religious concepts and ideas, in relation to objective reality. So, when the Bible says that God caused a flood on the face of the entire earth — well then — there was, in fact, a flood upon the face of the earth. There were components of my faith that were more symbolic or metaphorical — but by and large — it was interpreted as history; as an accurate depiction of objective reality in days past.
Of course, Google can deftly debunk many religious claims as being objectively true. And in a religion such as mine, there are quite an incredible amount of such facts to debunk. And in my case, it didn’t take long to do so. Within months, I was quite convinced that my formerly held beliefs were mistaken; and I felt embarrassed and naïve that I had ever held them out to be “true”. I stopped attending my religious services, and disassociated myself from organized religion in any form; believing I had little to no utility to derive from those beliefs.
When one leaves their religion, there is an incredible vacuum. A deafeningly empty space. A vacuum of community, and values, and morals. I experienced a deep sense of loss that is impossible to describe. It was one of the most difficult times of my entire life.
For me, I continued to believe that most of what I was taught continued to be true (or at least wise) — it just happened to be true for the wrong reasons. I delved into Philosophy, Science, Psychology, etc. to re-orient myself.
One day I listened to a Podcast featuring Sam Harris (one of my favorite modern thinkers) and the aforementioned Jordan Peterson. Shortly into their conversation, they got hung up on the definition of “truth”.
In the course of the conversation, Harris states:
“It just seems to me undeniable that there are facts whether or not any of us, any existing population of human beings are aware of those facts. So, before there was any understanding of the energy trapped in an atom, the energy was still trapped in the atom and the trinity test proved that beyond any possibility of doubt. So, prior to the bomb going off at Alamo Gordo you had some of the world’s best physicists not entirely sure what was going to happen . . . there was kind of a probability distribution among the smartest people over the range of possible outcomes there. So, this was a linguistically mediated conception of what was true at the level of the very, very small, physical reality, and we got more information once we saw that bright light and mushroom cloud, and the now the conversation continues. But, It seems to me that a realistic conception of what’s going on there, and really the only sane one if you look long enough at it, is that our language didn’t put the energy in the atom, it’s not because we spoke a certain way about it that that determined the character of physical reality, no, physical reality has a character whether or not there are apes around to talk about it.”
Jordan Peterson responds:
“My one objection to that is the, “well, is it true enough” objection. So, in order to establish an objective fact, we have to parametrize the search, we have to narrow the search, we have to exclude, many, many things, and I think sometimes when we do that we end up generating a truth, and I would say it’s a pragmatic truth, that works within the confines of the parameters that have been established around the experiment, but then when launched off into the broader world, much of which was excluded from the theorizing, the results can be catastrophic.”
From the onset of this discussion, I was Team Harris all the way. Believing in a fundamentalist conceptualization of “truth” bodes well for the kind of worldview that Harris constructs, and is particularly useful against Religion (he himself being a prominent Atheist). This conceptualization of reality is useful, and incredibly insightful. But not without it’s limits.
Something about the kind of “Truth” Jordan Peterson was describing seemed so absurd at first; but over time (and a lot of thought) I began to see merit in what he was saying. Though the conversation between the two of them was frustrating for them both, and at times, difficult to listen to for anyone that was able to deal with the second-hand dissonance, it was the foundation for a turning point for me personally. It was the beginning of a tacit realization that reality is incredibly complicated; and there is sort of a pompous arrogance in thinking we know what the hell is going on in the world, let alone with ourselves. It was a realization that the world is both simultaneously (and validly) construed as a forum for action, and as a place of things — and that two seemingly contradictory viewpoints can be simultaneously true, depending on their implementation and usage in describing our relation to objective reality.
To make a long story incredibly short, I came back to my former Religion with a Faith stronger than ever. This Faith was not, as Peterson puts it, “the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness.”
He continues to describe what Faith has come to mean to me:
“ It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) your life.”
In North Texas (where I live) it’s not uncommon to see flags or signs in people’s yards that read “TRUMP 2020 — NO MORE BULLSHIT”
It’s easy to jump to conclusions about these people. But, as was stated at the outset, “what it’s about isn’t what it’s about”. Trump is, for many people, the protector of individual rights.
Personally, I think that Trump is probably one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had — and one of the worst we could ever hope to have; but it must be asked “compared to what?”. In that light, I’m not so sure we have a much better option at present. Are we to choose between the ideological left, and the ideological right? Is that the best we can do? In my opinion, with history as my witness, the ideological left poses a greater existential threat to humanity than the ideological right. Though, we can and must do better than that.
I’ve come to believe that our social norms and traditions are not merely relics of our forefathers, that should be discarded in light of our new-age “wokeness” — perhaps they are the product of millions of years of evolutionary experience, a kind of collective consciousness, amassed unknowingly throughout the entirety of our species’ existence. Perhaps those ideas and concepts (religious and otherwise) are the best we have figured out to promote the ultimate flourishing of our species. Although many of these ideas are freighted with fault; that doesn’t mean they should be cast aside or dismissed.
This is why we need the juxtaposition between “conservative” and “liberal”; so that we can maintain the order of tradition, while simultaneously questioning the utility of our previously held beliefs so as to refine them and weed out the aspects of those beliefs that cause unnecessary harm.
Just as my religious journey progressed from fundamentalism, to anti-fundamentalism (which is fundamentalist in it’s own right — the reverse side of the same fundamentalist coin) — I eventually arrived at a kind of pragmatic truth.
We need to abandon ideology; and embrace nuance in our political and social discourse.
Both sides of the spectrum are guilty of not doing so. The pathological simplification of identity politics over Race, Gender, Sexual Orientation, Political or Religious affiliation, etc. is an absolute zero-sum game — and has the capability to cause the same kind of Hell on Earth we witnessed in the 20th century.
Again, James Hollis says it best:
“A culture driven by the trivial has seldom matured sufficiently to look at itself. How can we expect to find and elect leaders who will in fact provide vision, summon us to the realistic costs of growth and interaction in the world community, and effectively deal with the reality that all important issues have nuances and ambiguities?
Why do we not have leadership that says to us, respectfully and candidly, that the problems we face at home and abroad are complex, that no choice is without its costs, and that patience, humility, dialogue and a larger grasp of complexity will be required of all of us? Are we so immature that we need someone to protect us from ourselves, to lie to us, to collude with our lack of intellectual discipline, our difficulty in handling complexity, our immaturity? Why do we not have more theologians or preachers who confirm that life involves suffering, and that our deepest questions will never fully be answered? Why do we have psychologists in the media who conveniently fail to verify the contradictions with which we all daily live, the necessary suffering that is a byproduct of real life rather than suggest that 3 easy steps will bring us happiness and material affluence? Until we grow up and step into the large challenge of living our journey as individuals and as a society, we will get the demagogic leaders and infantilizing culture we deserve. These external artifacts reflect what we have not addressed within.
All of us have to ask this simple, but piercing, question of our relationships, our affiliations, our professions, our politics, and our theology — does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller? Usually we know the answer immediately, because we always intuitively know (and yet are afraid of what we know and even more afraid of what it may ask of us). If we do not sincerely know, then we need to continue asking the question until it reveals itself to us — as it inevitably will. Then, the real task begins.”
And so, it seems, that “what it’s about, isn’t what it’s about.” Society’s problems, deep and varying, don’t have an easy solution. We would do well to realize that Individuals, not groups of individuals, are what comprise society; and if we are incapable of making such pathological simplifications as to characterize individuals solely by their group affiliations, than we are doomed.
After all, who is to blame for society’s many woes? Who should we be pointing our fingers at as the cause? Nobody — other than ourselves. Our only hope is start there and see if we can put ourselves together enough so that we don’t tilt this world so far towards Hell, that there is no possibility of making it Heaven. We have done it before — and I pray we can do it again.
