Why might our seven realisations be relevant or important?
The world is facing a range of problems caused by human activity – climate change, nuclear proliferation, pollution, war killing thousands and leaving millions homeless, destruction of the environment &c &c &c &c – we can all recite the list. None of us wants this to be so. In theory therefore, given that we live in a democracy, we should be able to deselect the bad things and vote the world into peace and happiness. Naïve as it undoubtedly sounds, this is the rationale behind liberal democracy. But it isn’t happening and the long-established democracies are hardly less complicit in destruction than other nations.
Everyone agrees with grave solemnity that we are living in ‘uncertain times’. But life is uncertain. The failure to acknowledge the uncertainty of every day that dawns is called ‘taking things for granted’, which is what society (with its routines) and the media (with their narratives that ‘explain’ events) always do.
The problems listed above and the recent political upheavals are mostly the result of just such complacency, of failing to stay alert.
Uncertainty need not mean insecurity, however, [Footnote: Keats, after all, relishes ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt’] unless we have no trustworthy values to guide us.
Unfortunately . . .
Contemporary Western society has no philosophy. It has no solid principles. ‘We are trying to live without an agreed narrative of our place in the cosmos and in time,’ says Neil MacGregor. ‘Our society is, not just historically but in comparison to the rest of the world today, a very, very unusual one in being like that.’ Academic philosophy (always a minority interest) has become too abstruse, organised religion is in decline, politics is opportunistic and divisive, science on principle offers no guidance. Without solid principles informing our thoughts and actions, we react to stimuli. Most of these come from the media which is fixated on novelty. [Footnote: news stories are dropped when they become dull, not when they are resolved; celebrity stories and sport are inherently ephemeral; the chief BBC reporter is the ‘political editor’ focusing on personal manoeuvrings rather than a ‘governance editor’ assessing the efficacy of government policy; we hear about the ‘latest’ culture rather than the ‘best’. Meanwhile, our economic system, capitalism, is founded on restlessness – the aim of advertising, after all, is to spread dissatisfaction. The greatest discontent of the greatest number is capitalism’s fuel – it will not run on happiness.] Social media is still more ephemeral. As the frequency of the stimuli increases, we either become more frenetic in our responses (often to the exclusion of the reality around us), or we just become numb. Either way, we recognize our powerlessness – that we are an audience rather than protagonists (even if ‘liking’ things on Facebook, ‘voting’ in online polls and signing e-petitions gives us the illusion of participation). We have democracy but, in an age of 24/7 news, our quinquennial vote seems an almost quaintly remote responsibility. The issues are too complicated, the sources of our information polluted, and the distractions too many. We are told we have ‘choice’ in abundance because we can shop on Ebay and compare insurance providers – we should be embarrassed to be seduced by such trivia. We do not, frankly, know what we are doing. We see that lots of things are wrong but, bewildered by their complexity and accustomed to our role as spectators, we either just jeer along with the celebrity comedians or wearily disown the whole shebang.
The Leaden-Eyed
Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
Vachel Lindsay
The politicians and the media will not change unless they see their constituents change. The multi-nationals will not change until they see the public, the media and the politicians all change beyond the power of bribery to stop them.
Is STA the philosophy that will change the world?
Um ….. yes and no.
Mostly – in fact overwhelmingly – no,
- sorry if I’d got your hopes up –
but it can change the perception of the world by an individual. [Footnote: and, once I’ve explored more of its implications, towards the end of the book, I will briefly consider the ways in which STA could change the wider world.] I know this from personal experience. With me, it already has. It is not an ideology. It does not say, ‘This is how it is. Believe it or go to hell,’ like some religions. It does not say, ‘This is how it is. Believe it or we’ll beat you up,’ like some political and religious groups. It says, ‘Stand still and consider’ because if everyone could set aside their ingrained cultural pre-conceptions and just have a look at what’s really there…
The world is made of individuals. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ Margaret Thatcher notoriously claimed (before she realized her political misjudgment and quickly recanted). She was wrong. Society does exist, but only as the agreed fancy of all its members. To borrow Tyndale’s invaluable distinction, it is a ‘congregation’, not a ‘church’. It is the sum of all the people in it, not a vast tyrannical behemoth with its own autonomous identity. [Footnote: William Tyndale, in his great edition of the Bible, was confronted with translating the Greek word ‘ekklesia’. His choice of ‘congregation’ suggesting that the organisation derived its authority from its members, rather than ‘church’ implying the organisation itself held authority, was literally inflammatory. The church demonstrated its de facto authority by burning him at the stake. It is a bottom-up versus top-down distinction. Society (in the top-down ‘church’ sense), with the media and advertising its henchmen, tries to dictate ‘norms’ that we are expected to adopt – family life, good job, even the pressure to be ‘individual’ (which, according to advertisers, usually means driving one brand of mass-produced car, or wearing one brand of mass-produced lipstick, rather than another). True individuality pays little heed to these representations. It does not react against conformity, which would just be conformity en fête. It has its own business to attend to, building society from the bottom up.] It is the meeting-place of people living Ruskin’s ‘true lives’ rather than the slave-quarters of his ‘false lives’. Paradoxically, when we misinterpret society as a ‘church’, when we think it has an independent existence as a thing in itself rather than being merely a word broadly covering the individual actions of every one of us; it is then that ‘society’, and even ‘community’ – these lovely, warm, friendly, concepts – become coercive and threatening.
Our safety as a society lies in our individuality. As Daniel Davis showed, it is the diversity of our compatibility genes that helps safeguard our health. In the same way, rather than an unsustainable isolation, or an indolent subsuming of ourselves into a crowd, individuality-with-interdependence is nature’s pattern for us and, I would suggest, our best hope – a way of life growing out of our own cultural microclimate, rather than imposed ideologies. [Footnote: at the end of episode 12 in his still remarkable series on Western art Civilisation, Kenneth Clark pauses before Rodin’s statue of Balzac and declaims, ‘Balzac, with his prodigious understanding of human motives, scorns convention and defies fashionable opinions (as Beethoven did) and should inspire us to oppose all the forces that threaten to impair our humanity – lies, tanks, tear gas, ideologies, opinion polls, mechanization, planners, computers, the whole lot.’ This was in 1969 – the time of Vietnam and student protests. Half a century later we still generally oppose the first half of his list, but the second half we have absorbed into everyday life with barely a murmur. Was he a silly old duffer making a fuss about nothing? Or have we sacrificed something of our humanity without ever noticing?]
To lead an individual life – Ruskin’s ‘real’ life – we need the independence of thought to resist blind conformity. This is not the lonely heroism of Gary Cooper in High Noon, but something much more humdrum: simply looking, without regard for fashion or tradition, at the individual circumstances in front of us and deciding what’s best. STA ET CONSIDERA, in fact.
Education has no higher duty than to equip and encourage children to think for themselves. Unthinkingness causes myriad problems: complacency, unfulfilment, a sense of inadequacy, boredom leading to hopelessness and addiction, fatalism, narrowness, inarticulacy, chances missed and delights unencountered, vulnerability to peer pressure, malleability when faced with ‘authority’ (whether of husbands, government, media or advertising). No poisonous ideology can ever make much progress faced with millions of individuals used to thinking for themselves, but it spreads like the flu when we neglect our native independence of thought and accede to what media and demagoguery proclaim, when we do a thing because ‘it’s a thing’, when we abdicate our haecceity and become a crowd.
[Footnote: My concern to protect and promote this ‘habit of thought’ makes me sensitive (perhaps over-sensitive) to its vulnerability. But here, very briefly, if only to chase them away like Rumpelstiltskin by saying their names out loud, are a few seeming threats to clear thinking:
i) in the century or more since Freud and Jung there has been a tendency to turn inwards to explain or justify our actions based on our background rather than objective prevailing circumstances, thereby undermining our responsibility for our lives.
ii) some scientists argue that that our thoughts and actions are biologically pre-determined. This too diminishes us. (There is much fun to be had with these determinists. You can key their cars, piss in their flower-pots, sleep with their partners, and they can’t hold you accountable without denying the theory which got them their lucrative professorships, where they expound, with carefully reasoned arguments, the non-existence of human reason.)
iii) institutional and office-based work breeds conformity and paralyses individual responsibility. Reports into scandals routinely use phrases like ‘a culture of secrecy’ or ‘systemic racism’, blaming fictional behemoths rather than the individuals who, faced with the choice between honesty and dishonesty, bigotry and kindness, chose wrongly, albeit under pressure. ‘The haunting fact is that we are morally free,’ writes Marilynne Robinson. ‘If everyone around us is calling for Barabbas, it is only probable, never necessary, that some of us join in.’
iv) the internet brings many advantages and can inspire discovery, but it discourages active thinking when one can instead ‘Google’ an ‘answer’. It can also make us reliant on knowledge outside our brains rather than encouraging us to learn and store information in our minds, where it mixes and cross-pollinates more imaginatively than if it is kept in separate compartments on the web, whose algorithms mimic but do not match our imaginations, and which are, in any case, the tentacles of a corporate commercialism that does not have our best interests at heart (that, indeed, does not have a heart at all).
The STA perspective, founded on your individual reaction to the unique, objective circumstance in front of you, thinking and taking responsibility for your thoughts, wards off these circling vampire threats like a whole bucketful of garlic.]
To return to the question asked earlier, ‘Why might it be relevant or important?’ Any considered action is based not only on the individual circumstances of the moment but also has deep and broad foundations. It stems from a decision which in turn depends on a judgment. This has been influenced by an opinion which has been based on values which finally are founded on a world-view. STA is a world-view, a description of reality. It appears to be true – a series of logical deductions traced from undeniable evidence – and truth is its own recommendation. It is solid ground on which can be built the superstructure of values and judgments culminating in action. The alternative – actions based on habit, hearsay, media chatter, unverified anonymous ‘authority’, pre-conceptions, prejudices, personal misunderstandings of what someone said someone else said – is chancy. It’s unreliable. The ground can be loose and treacherous, but you’re never quite sure where.
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