A man in my e-mail group asked to be excluded from my responses. He said I was “negative” and “liberal.” I had merely mentioned I don’t believe in war, that it is barbaric, institutionalized murder. I said I don’t believe in standing armies, either.
It really hurt my feelings that he called me “liberal.” Liberals don’t like me, either. In fact, on the political continuum from the various “ism’s” at the extremes and including “liberal” and “conservative,” I don’t fit anywhere. I feel like a sphere in Flatland.
For those who haven’t read this charming classic satire, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott (1884), it is well worth reading, and only 160 pages. In it, narrator A. Square describes a planar world in which the social hierarchy is determined by how many angles you have. When Lord Sphere makes himself known to A. Square, he is incredulous until taken on a visit to “Spaceland.” His attempts to convince his fellow Flatlanders of the existence of a third dimension only gets him in trouble, and he ends up in jail for his lunacy.
Another image, maybe more appropriate to the linear liberal-conservative standard and its limitations, is of trying to assess the validity of a book by the scientific method. The scientific method is the holy grail of modern scientific dogma, but it is limited by its linear approach. Scientists believe this makes it superior to other methods of assessing truth.
The scientific method presumes cause and effect, yes-and-no, good and bad, right and wrong. It sneers at extraneous information, abstractions, symbols, and patterns. Logic is linear: words must come out in sequential fashion. Those who relate this to the left brain–the seat of verbal thinking and expression in most people–claim superiority of this hemisphere because of its lock-step method of reasoning. The right brain is associated with symbols, patterns, dreams, and appreciation for art and music.
However, the brain is wired such that incoming sensory information travels through the thalamus, the pain center, then through the limbic system, the emotional center, before it reaches left or right brain. In other words, every thought is colored by physical and emotional input before it becomes conscious. Even the most logical and rational analysis is founded on emotional bias.
The scientific, linear mode presumes to be objective, insofar as is humanly possible, yet the choice of study subject is based on emotional factors. The idea that artificial intelligence, with its binary code, can eventually surpass the human brain’s abilities discounts the spontaneous creativity of the right brain and its symbolic language of patterns and associations.
The recent preoccupation with what’s called “fake news” shows how easy it is to confuse the “rational” mind. Misinformation, propaganda, distortions, opinion, gossip, libel, and slander have always been around. Assumptions presumed to be factual have fallen apart over and over in light of new evidence. The earth used to be flat, remember, and the sun revolved around it. Now there’s a widespread concern that people don’t know whom or what to trust, with “trust” seemingly synonymous with blind faith in the source.
What is truth, after all, and does it matter? If this trend leads to a greater tendency to question authority or formerly trusted sources, or to more critical thinking, it might result in the revolution in consciousness that some people imagine. We will not achieve it through the scientific method, which requires an artificial situation that attempts to reduce variables to one. In life there is always infinitely more than one variable to consider. Thus, trying to place anyone on a linear political scale reduces her dimensionality to a pitiful caricature, but we see it all the time: the blacks, the women, the illegals, the racists, the poor, the 0.1 percent, and on and on. The so-called advocates, whether members of the identified group or not, posture themselves as knowing the condition, needs, and wants of the group.
Labeling of groups dehumanizes them, clumps them into an agglutinated mass of undifferentiated genetic material that serves only to concentrate emotion into an identifiable target for support or attack. Advocates tend to use that emotionally laden grouping to promote their agendas, which may be personal or may be backed by yet other groups.
I can only know my own truth, and even that changes moment to moment or as soon as I turn my head. Truth is a slippery little rascal. Like a sphere in Flatland, or a book whose value defies the scientific method, I can see from above or below the plane, or even with the plane, but at least I know the difference between a line and a circle. The scientific method might judge based on emotionally based standards of comparison, but patterns make no judgments and have no beginnings or ends, no cause-and-effect, and reveal no ultimate truth.
My dislike for war, and for fighting, compels me to avoid arguing, recognizing as I do that my choice is emotional, as is my detractor’s. Energy goes out of me when I’m drawn into conflictual situations. I believe this happens with others, too, but I could be wrong. The relentless focus on competition and struggle, on differences cemented by stifling labels, only feeds the problems, generating parallel, linear, universes with no spherical perspective.
katharineotto 