First published, 7th December 2018
The world is the mind in which we live. Ours is a tropical universe. Those who believe that reality is really real are those most at ease with their own fantasies, some might say, delusions. Monotheism, perhaps, has given us some of the most theatrical ‘realities’ and yet Judaism and Christianity must demonise the pursuit of knowledge (whatever that is) and Islam abhors representation in art. Science and art are condemned by a singular god created in the image of most jealous men.
Daoism, now I think of it, has a similar yearning for a back stage pass to ‘reality’. However, Daoism’s problem is less one over representation and more over interpretation. Interpretation is a ‘false’ dreamscape. We add layer upon layer of filters. Our interpretations are fantastical, fake, delusional, divorced from externality, dreamlike, drugged, fallible. Like Keats or Tennyson’s lotus eaters, we prefer dreams, and too readily seek escape from the painful void or nothingness of external ‘reality’.
Indeed, ‘reality’ matures, as a human construct, into just meaning externality. But in ‘dangerous’ contrast, truth and beauty have been too keenly regarded as coming from within, not from without. Romantics like Coleridge and Keats would have had us slip into the solipsism and idealism of Negative Capability where truth is nothing more than the property of a sentence and is content to remain unstimulated by Kantian noumenal anxieties. The Daoist, like the monotheist dreamers, seeks to pull us back out from our phenomenal worlds. We must meditate ourselves away from states of interpretation and seek to reconnect with some imagined primeval experience of direct interaction with externality. Live like a bird or a cat or unadulterated wood block.
Well, sure. Consciousness is interpretation that seems to put up a barrier between external stimuli and our internal experience such that we cannot ever belong to the noumenal club and so seem rather obliged to become and remain obsessed or possessed by the phenomenal world of our mental experience. Our internal world is only a virtual reality. We can’t experience external reality ever, because we have to encode and interpret it first. No other forms of matter or even species have to deal with the difficulties that language and highly evolved consciousness bring to the experience of existence.
But it’s worse than that. I mean, language and consciousness are bad enough but I’m not sure our inner representations are even analogue; I’m not convinced that our brains are wired to function as analogue computers. There is an element of analogue-to-digital conversion going on in there. What is language, if not a complex form of digitalisation? What is digitalisation if not ‘language’? Further, the encoding processes performed by our sensory and nervous systems do not decode into some infinitely regressive ‘playback’. Our heads are not amplifiers and speakers. Our heads are silent. The complex combination of firing neurones is itself the Muse live concert performance of Algorithms. The silent super computer has experience. We cannot experience the ‘experience’ of an artificial ‘brain’ any more readily than we can experience the experience of the dude singing along to Thought Contagion. Goodness, my AVR might already have a mind of its own…
We have more recently ‘evolved’ to find it easier to connect to cyber-space than space. The internet is our way of extending into externality by outreaching and outsourcing our internalities. The internet has allowed us to give up on the Daoist dream of connecting to some archaic or legacy notion of external reality and, with barely a shrug or backwards glance, get on with the full-blown ‘remotification’ and ‘teleconceptualisation’ of our experiences, our selves and our others. Take a look at the effects yourself: people on screen are more ‘real’ than the people sitting beside them or across the restaurant dining table. Food is more ‘real’ snapped onto Instagram as an image than it is left to congeal on the plate almost forgotten and relatively irrelevant. Not only that, but we have also willingly handed our personal interpretations over to technology, AI and, with that, the algorithms of governments and marketing executives.
Perhaps the prophet Mohammad was right to be alarmed at our species’ insatiable thirst for disconnection through representation. Cave paintings were just the thin end of the wedge; since then we’ve gone through: camera obscuras, zoetropes, stereopticons, magic lanterns, flip books, photographs, silent movies, talking movies, television, videos, DVDs, YouTube, hallucinogenic drugs, and so on. The list is longer than Noah’s passenger directory.
Thinking involves interpreting but interpreting is just connecting things or ideas, one interpretative piece of a jigsaw linked to another. But this is not getting us closer to reality, it’s just building up more complex mental representations. We’re never going to connect to externality by trying to understand it. A cat lying in the sunshine is closer to sunshine than we’ll ever be trying to intellectualise the experience. We are trapped. We can only ever experience the effects of external causes not the causes themselves. We cannot even experience others’ experiences. Our existence is our experience. Our experience is our existence. Not before long, we’re into Heidegger territory…
Our embracing acceptance of virtual realities goes hand-in-hand with the tacit acknowledgement that we are no better than the Prince Regent in Black Adder, unable to distinguish between life performed and life lived (https://youtu.be/N2imgiK2Kqk) or Dougal in Father Ted, unable to comprehend the experience of perception (https://youtu.be/MMiKyfd6hA0). We are Hamlet, the worst detective in literature, trying to establish possible realities from probable illusions, religious fundamentalists unable to evolve into the figurative, flat earthers unable to evolve into the literal, Donald Trump trapped in mythomania, unable and unwilling, for the sake of commercial and political expedience, to comprehend or contemplate the fake, fraudulent and false. We are all tragedy’s children, or possibly the kids of comedy. Who really knows…
Faith, defined as suspended disbelief (which is actually what faith is), requires a distinction to be made between experience and belief. The child possesses the ability to remove belief and replace it with ‘make-belief’ or pretending, which is similar to dreaming and the closest we get, as adults, to disbelief suspension, when watching a film or theatre play. The Prince Regent in Black Adder looks stupid because his beliefs relating to experiences are reversed from the norm. Dougal in Father Ted doesn’t have a belief at all. He only has raw experience. Father Ted tries to give him some beliefs to go with the experiences but fails. The religious fundamentalist is different. He has no experiences, only beliefs. Donald Trump and his supporters are the most bizarre. They have few developed or informed beliefs or experiences. The white supremacist, the racist, the conspiracy theorist, the prejudiced hate preachers seem to give greater free rein to those cognitive processes that involve more primitive brain functions that in turn give rise to greater emotional, rather than rational, mental processes. Such types have more reptilian brain functionality that fires up areas such as the amygdala and limbic systems more readily than those who are relatively rational and circumspect. The mad, the psychotic, are simply those of us who have experiences they believe are real. As such, they are seemingly indistinguishable from the ‘normal’. The only possible discernible difference is that they do not share their experiences with the majority and/or the mainstream.
There is some degree of species specific objectivity that comes about through the fact that our sense organs, our perceptual and conceptual systems are more or less the same, and are aligned ultimately because of our shared genome. Someone who is mad has mental experiences that do not tally with, are not ‘consistent’ with, the experiences of a significant portion of those around him/her. It has nothing to do with the possibility that those who are sane have a greater grip on reality, because ‘reality’ is, itself, unreal or a mental construct. Sanity comes down, quite simply, to consensual agreement and species specific objectivity.
Raw experience, the experience that is combined and complex neuronal activity, is informed by beliefs to create more complex conceptualisations. Richard Dawkins argues that we need to control our beliefs and that the best way to do this is via scientific inquiry. The Daoist says we need to address things more from the inner experience of things through meditation and a removal of belief and interpretative systems such as language, culture, and other ways of thinking about representation and interpretation.
Whatever the problem or the solution, it does seem to be the case that it is very difficult to be clear about what reality is other than it is probably another muddled human/cultural construct. I don’t think the solution to human conflicts arising from different interpretations of reality lies with Dawkins and science or a sort of nihilistic Daoism. By this I mean that attempts to point out there is a clear meaning to ‘reality’, that ‘reality’ is, in some sense, real are destined to fail. The better solution is to accept that experiences and beliefs are really unreal. We need to take the world of make-believe more seriously. We might need to enjoy and accept the delusions of others and ourselves more than we do. We need to return to a sort of childlike polytheism of the Ancients. The ambit of reality is, in reality, much smaller than we would like to imagine. The danger that develops from even the loosest form of realist agenda is dogmatism, intolerance and tyranny. ‘Reality’ is a false god to worship.
It would seem that I am obliged to align myself with all the delights of postmodern relativism so contrary to the growing popularity on the intellectual dark web (http://intellectualdark.website ) of more conservative and, perhaps, neo-enlightenment confidence in what might be called realist absolutism or, better still, a mutated form of logical positivism’s verificationism.
The role of ethics and aesthetics is to create fictional classifications and value systems that might result in an enrichment of experiences. That’s all. In this respect we should aim to be hedonists in the sense that the ultimate goal in life should be to make it as enjoyable as possible through kinetic and, more particularly, katastematic pleasure. Children understand this intuitively. Kittens, puppies, lambs, all the young play at life. That’s all we have to do: play at the pretences of our lives. Macbeth is right in his nihilistic ‘Tomorrow’ soliloquy on the suicide of his wife: brief life really is just a performance that signifies nothing. If Macbeth had realised this at the beginning, the tragic consequences of his pointless ambition could have been averted. Macbeth wasn’t too full o’ the milk of human kindness so much as stupid or, at least, unreflective.
It’s not the affirmation of reality we need so much as a humility over an acceptance that our ‘worlds’ can never be more than delusions. Let us pretend. Life is a game. It’s ridiculous that this poor forked creature should ever get too dogmatic about what is and what isn’t – as if we knew or had the power to know. We are, like Hamlet, quite unable to work out what really is the case. Remember, Hamlet does not resolve the uncertainty regarding the circumstances of his father’s death. Again, as an investigator of the crimes of reality, Hamlet sucks. We all do. Hyperion or satyr? How should I know. Don’t ask me…
Conservatives, or rather Preservatives (as I shall call them), like Jordan Peterson, are terrified of chaos. Jordan Peterson’s anger at postmodern relativism is founded upon some neo-enlightenment unspoken belief in objective reality. The Preservatives of the intellectual dark web fear that relativism must undermine the standards and measures upon which culture and civilisation, social identity are protected and preserved. Relativism, it is claimed, is the root cause behind all the degrading and destabilising of the quality and standards enjoyed by those in better past times. It’s the cause of the trashing of identity, meaning and structure. It must lead to chaos. Order must collapse, when relativism comes to town. Is this fear well founded? Does the reality of ‘reality’, really save us from collapsing into chaos?
Well no, it can’t, because belief in reality is a delusion. The quest for the external anchors upon which to fasten ourselves doesn’t lead to stability but dogmatism: itself, a far greater danger to human happiness and common welfare and more likely to cause chaos through conflict. According to the likes of Peterson, Camille Paglia and other Preservatives, the collapse of Western civilisation (if that is, indeed what is presently unfolding in Europe and North America) is being caused by postmodern relativism. It’s not. Technology, inequality, regressive tax systems and corruption of democracy by kleptomaniacs, abuse of social hierarchies and reduction of social mobility and population increase are, probably, more the sorts of things to blame.
Preservatives’ positivistic blind faith in an objective reality can only cause conflict because we can never get everyone to agree on what’s real. There’s a simple reason for this already discussed. History should teach us to give up on one-reality-fits-all final solutions. Postmodernist relativism emerged out of the chaos and carnage caused by the totalitarianism of conflicting political and social beliefs, beliefs that sought to give themselves objective truth far too encompassing an ambit. We cannot accommodate a plurality of totalities and expect peace, calm and stability. The idea that the ‘preservatism’ of one group’s standards and meanings over another’s will save us from relativistic chaos is absurd, as history has repeatedly tried to demonstrate. If we want to avoid chaos, preservative dogmatism is the last thing we need. We need to be more childlike and less dogmatic about our experiences and beliefs. Less aggressive about the way we assert what is real.
But there are two problems for relativism, sometimes cited by Preservatives on the intellectual dark web, and these need to be countered, if relativism and multiculturalism are going to survive the current climate of hostility. Without relativism, what will we have to protect ourselves from the past-proven ravages of popularism and totalitarianism? The first problem for relativism is how it must respond to intolerance. We can call this the Tolerance Problem. How should tolerant systems cater for or deal with intolerant members? This is a real and currently pertinent conundrum that lies behind a good deal of the EU’s confusion and angst over immigration and how to deal with the totalitarianism of certain states, regional cultures and religions. The second (and connected) problem for relativism is, of course, the paradox: relativism must, by its own reckoning, accept that non relativistic beliefs are equally valuable. A belief in tolerance that originates in uncertainty and humility must be paradoxical if presented, in some way, as a categorical imperative. The person who asserts: we must all be uncertain, cannot or should not be, themselves, certain of their assertion. There are many similar examples of this sort of self contradiction. For example, you shouldn’t tell others what to do, is a paradox, a self contradiction noted for its comically ridiculous effect in The Life of Brian (https://youtu.be/KHbzSif78qQ ).
Don’t tell people what to do collapses into paradox because of the prescriptive or imperative mode. The paradox of certain moral imperatives lies in an underlying hypocrisy: not practising what you preach. Be moderate in all things, for example, seems immoderate when it comes to moderation. I should be moderate in my moderation results in a collapse of my intended advocation of the virtues of moderation. I should be relativistic about relativism. Same problem. How can we resolve what can be called the Paradox Problem?
Hypocrisy with moral imperatives can be characterised as: don’t do as I do, do as I say. The schism and, hence the paradox, seems to lie in the mismatch of word and deed. Mr Moderation seems to be saying: be moderate in all things except moderation. Mr Relativism says: be relativistic in all valuation except that of relativism, which is absolute.
The postmodern left cannot maintain a credible position, if these paradoxes behind relativism and toleration are not resolvable. You can’t maintain a philosophical or political position based on contradictions.
A possible solution to these paradoxes might be found in set theory. Take a set like all prime numbers between 3 and 13. Here there is the ‘name’ or description of the set which is, in a sense a rule. The integers within the set, determined by the rule, are: 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13. Likewise, take the moderation rule. The rule is the description that determines the members of the set. It is not, itself, a member of the set. That would be silly. The role of the rule and the members collected together under the rule are different. Just so with moral imperatives. The fallacy behind the paradoxes lies in thinking that the rule, imperative, needs to be a set member itself. So, for example, intolerant people are excluded from the set of tolerant people, obviously. Relativism is not a member valuation system but a rule for collecting all value systems. It’s a rule for the set. As for moderation in all things, this is a description of the set of all things, i.e. human behaviours. Moderation, itself, is not a set member. Moderation is not itself a type of behaviour but a rule about behaviour. Relativism is not a value system, it’s a rule about value systems. Toleration is the set of all tolerant behaviours.
The question then arises: what’s the relationship between the set rule and its members? In mathematical logic, the relationship is descriptive not prescriptive. This should be the case with moral sets. Relativism isn’t a valuation but a description of a set of all value systems. Not being prescriptive, relativism cannot be a member of prescriptions. Relativism simply describes all value systems as being relativistic. Relativism is not a value system but a description of all value systems, a descriptive rule or law of all set members.
Preservatives like Jordan Peterson are frightened of a perceived chaos that comes from the undermining of the conventions that ensure stability and meaning. He is playing the role of a parent telling children off for being irresponsible with the tropes of the past. Marriage, for example is being played at by people who should not be married. Same sex marriage is playing at marriage and this is an undermining that can only result in chaos. Gender identity language must be preserved, and so on. Peterson is, fundamentally, a realist in the enlightenment sense that he believes language and its tropes refer to objective externalities. Once language, and its perceived connections to external realities and objective verifiable correlates, breaks down, everything collapses. Postmodernism seems to be our greatest danger because it exposes the idea that reality is not real in the sense that it is independent of what we make it. For Peterson, this is a disaster and explains the whole dangerous game play. Western civilisation has been taken over by children.
The political correctness spat over the law in Canada allowing the LGBTQ community to refer to themselves with whatever pronouns they like and, more is the point, obliging all others to respect these pronouns, is, of course, exactly an issue about language and reference. It’s not a free speech issue, it’s that the legal system is being used to force members of a society into accepting the disconnection between language conventions and external identities or objects of reference. The relationship between the way language refers to things and the things themselves breaks down and this must, according to Peterson, result in chaos. Language is not something we should play around with. In this respect, Peterson is a preservative, not a political conservative. He is one who feels that language must remain in some sense stable or fixed. He believes in the importance of conventions for the preservation of order. Like Confucius, he feels society needs rituals and conventions to remain stable, coherent and non-fragmentary. Chaos means social fragmentation. He seeks to warn us against fragmentation. The Canadian law seems to be using legal conventions to enforce deconventionalisation and we return to the relativism paradox and hypocrisy. It’s essential, at this point, to remember the paradox of relativism, its hypocrisy. Political correctness demands we respect all except those who question political correctness. What sets out to be an advocation for tolerance turns out to be tyrannical. This is, again, perceived to be the big problem with the left’s stance.
Jordan Peterson’s conventions, like marriage, need to be conventional to remain conventions. To change the convention removes it. Marriage is a case in point. The religious fundamentalist unwittingly appreciates this point, that undermining a convention destroys it. The Quran must be literal in meaning, not figurative, in order to preserve it. But the reality is that there is no reality in the sense that language is literal. Language is only ever figurative. Our meanings slip and slide over species specific objectivities as they will. Attempts to literalise or maintain conventions can only be enforced by threats, violence and tyranny. Even then, language will take its course, like water. Those who want to somehow control language, meaning and make them literal and conventional cannot succeed.
Left and right wing thinkers end up forced towards tyranny because the former will seek to enforce progressivism with gulags, the latter will seek to enforce regressive conventionalism with prisons and assassinations. Of course, if something is true, it doesn’t need enforcing. It’s just true. Without prisons.
Maybe I understand Preservatists’ alarm regarding perceived effects of postmodernism, but you can’t turn the clock back on cultural history, we can’t return to thinking about language and reality like they did towards the end of eighteenth century. Not that I’m a great believer in human progress. We just move from one state of muddle to the next…
These issues have real implications for society. Take the Tolerance Problem. Toleration underpins the idea of the value of multiculturalism, itself connected to relativism. We can think of post war Europe as a collective desiring to be a set of all tolerant peoples. What happens when, through migration, not just people, but a fundamentalist religion with an intolerant and aggressive agenda wants to move into the ‘set’? This is exactly what has happened in more recent years. Within the migrant population are intolerant individuals who are part of a group with a definable identity. How does the EU tolerate an intolerant sub culture or sub set? This issue lies behind the whole original Brexit fiasco and has threatened to fragment the EU in real terms with the U.K., Poland, Hungary and others taking increasingly xenophobic ring fence approaches to Islam and potential intolerance.
The British have always been more xenophobic than their continental cousins possibly because they are an island people. The 2016 EU referendum result confirmed the presence of this xenophobia in a slightly greater proportion of the population. The shopkeepers of Britain did not have the stomach for or belief in tolerance conversion tactics and programs set up in countries such as Norway and Germany. Germany and France seek to absorb intolerance in the hope that the majority will ‘entolerate’, transmute migrants arriving from intolerant cultures. Whatever, in the long term, no EU member wants to tolerate intolerance. Solutions, however, vary. Is xenophobia a solution for dealing with intolerant others?
Tolerance is the key character of postmodern relativism and multiculturalism. It means acceptance, acceptance of difference. It is antithetical to xenophobia and to those who cannot accept difference but must coerce different others into following suit and taking up the dominant seeking conventions that define their own group identity. By the way, even during the golden age of Islam, non Islamic group identities were not accepted by Islam in the relativistic sense. Though conversion and coercion of Jews and Christians might have been on the back burner, dhimmitude was the order of the day. Islam did not respect or value difference, which is a step, perhaps, beyond toleration. In a polytheistic culture, different gods might be respected and polytheistic cultures are, of course, rather more relativistic. Monotheism has been a tragic turn for human development and progress. Monotheism’s literalism means that there is only one way of looking at, describing, thinking about the universe. Its ambit of reality is all encompassing and totalitarian and that is what has made it so dangerous.
What kind of world do we live in, when different identity groups all claim to have or be the truth? How are the differences to be resolved, unless we accept that there is no such thing as truth, in the sense that what we believe and experience are not connected in any way to some external permanence?
No amount of killing can ever alter the fact that all of us inhabit illusions, constructions of the mind. There is no externally verifiable reality upon which we can or should seek to define ourselves. We can, and maybe need to, pretend that things are real, suspend our disbeliefs with ‘faith’, but, when push comes to shove, like children, we should be willing to shrug and smile when it is time to pack up for bed and close the games we play.