Abstract People
I love having my beliefs and values affirmed by good friends as much as any sane person. That’s maybe the main reason we love being with our good friends. But I also enjoy being around all kinds of people. Okay, not all. Out of the world’s current seven and a half billion souls I know and have known—what?—a few thousand? No, I can’t say I like being around all of them. But definitely most of them. I wouldn’t have gotten to know them in the first place if not. And I like variety. I like trying to imagine what fundamentally drives people unlike me. I like to visualize being them, and I enjoy puzzling over the odd taste of thinking their way.
People amaze me. I look at them and there’s this thing in there and I can’t even remotely understand how that could be. No two are alike. They all see a different reality.
I guess once you’re born you have a right to exist, and I’m not the guy to draw up the list of superfluous ones, but there are too many of us. It’s our root problem and there’s nothing to be done about it. We are exhibiting more and more the behavior of locusts. Or hamsters crammed in a box. Frantically seeking the escape that isn’t there. We feel trapped, even if we don’t know it, by a situation we sense is deteriorating, by our thought patterns that are stuck where they are and have no interest in any others, by uncertainty, by financial anxiety, by our own subversions to the specter of change. The same things that have always trapped us, but our own time, with its subtle cruelties, and the press of too many hamsters for the box, is the one to hand.
There are just too many people to interact with personally, so we turn them into abstractions and project onto them the qualities we need to dismiss them. Or, more often, savage them. It’s a natural habit and I’m as familiar with it as anyone. But I have noticed that I have never actually met the vile creature I have invented to embody everything I hate and fear. People in person (a qualification we especially need to make in our solipsistic modern lives where voices tell us what we want to hear) always turn out to be more complex than our handy ogres, with their own values derived from their own life experience. Just as with us, there are reasons for their being who they are.
So, do I feel hope? The short answer is no. I think we will continue exactly as we’re going to some catastrophe. I suspect a bang, but if it’s a whimper it’s still a catastrophe. I look around at modern human culture, select pieces of which I’m fond of, and just as when I look at myself in the mirror, I know it can’t last. All the cars belching poison, the plastics, the water running out, whatever. Like a keg party—fun while it’s going but you know where it’s headed.
The long answer is yes.
But this takes us into a realm beyond the self—into the context in which all of this lies. You’re making it up, you say. I know, I say, and so are you.
Because all of our thinking is built on the foundation of intuition—to use an approximate word, feeble and loaded though it is: there is no word for something we take so for granted we don’t even see. Intuition is just an evasive word pretending to mean something when it’s really only a placeholder preceding rational understanding, you say. Your belief that rational understanding is supreme and reliable is indistinguishable from religious faith, I say. I’m not talking about the props and dramatic personae, I’m talking about the given of the play. We see through experience that you can make a law that two and two are four. But that awareness, and our certainty of its reliability, are different things. We can talk about the source of the former, but not the latter.
The truth is, that though we would all like a perspective on reality without the operation of the human or human-created brain, it’s just not possible. We’re stuck with ourselves and really have no way of knowing if reason is inherent in the universe, or only in our brains, and if the two can really be separated.
That’s the source of our hope, that duality. That there is, mercifully, something besides ourselves. And an awareness of it is possible only in the absence of the self and the emotions that sustain it: fear, pride, hatred, greed, resentment, envy, anything that insists on our separateness and makes abstractions of others, and in the presence of our intuition of the whole.
December 8, 2018