On Relativism: 3- Doublethink

“My son, the Giant who had one head was stronger than the Giant who had two. When you grow up there will come to you other magicians who will say, ‘Γνωθε δεαυτον. Examine your soul, wretched kid. Cultivate a sense of the differentiations possible in a single psychology. Have nineteen religions suitable to different moods.’ My son, these will be wicked magicians; they will want to turn you into a two-headed Giant.” The Magician in "The Disadvantage of Having Two Heads" – G. K. Chesterton

Doublethink was introduced in George Orwell's political novel "1984", it is defined as the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs.

This form of doublethink was a very conscious act, it was used by common people & ruling party members alike, & its mechanism was driven by fear more than anything else. It was a means of survival in a totalitarian world, but also a means of maintaining that totalitarian world.

When I consider what it is that I am having trouble accepting in our ambiguous modern mentality, I find it is something remarkably like 1984's doublethink, except that maybe it was driven by different reasons.
Let me explain...

Those who strongly believe in something fight for it, that is essentially true.
And the result of which was fanatics of all sorts filling the world with wars.

What people began to suggest after ages of difference (& because of ages of difference) is that since apparently nothing seems Real to everyone, then maybe everyone's beliefs are Illusions.
So no reason to fight about it, really. It might all turn out to be wrong!
Notice that this isn't saying it is wrong, but that it may be, & this is suggested as a reason to not get too excited about it!

As a proposed solution to religious strife, that is very much like castration as a proposed solution to adultery!
To stop crimes of passion, let's kill passion!
To avoid burning others or getting burned, let's stop making fire!
The result has to be a long and terrible winter.
So people died out inside, at least towards what they believed.

Naturally, this was welcome by Atheists (especially agnostic atheists), but there were also many Theists who wanted to embrace the all-accepting nature of that pseudo-solution to religious strife, and they did.
This resulted in a generation of religious people that advocated belief in a "private" religion.
Obviously, once a religion becomes private you have no reason to publicly profess it, let alone enforce it.

But not only that, once a religion becomes private, it no longer really is a religion at all. For a religion is a belief regarding the universe, it is about the universe, not only about a person. This was elaborated on in the latest entry in this series.

But this "private" religion of a "private" universe -as far as I understand- is backed up & promoted for by Buddhism. Which was getting fashionable at the time when this relativism began to be popular.
In any case many thinkers had no real problem accepting it. It was even considered in style! It became the new "modern thinking".

But I'd like to draw your attention now to the fact that this thinking is actually doublethinking.

To believe in an admitted illusion is doublethink.

To believe in a System of Belief & yet not care if it is false is not Believing at all, it is doublethink.

To believe in a Universal Philosophy & yet believe it to be Non-Universal is doublethink.

Just like doublethink of "1984", our doublethink is done for purely practical purposes, namely neutralizing fanaticism-caused violence.

Also just like doublethink of "1984" had a special sort of language (Newspeak) invented to facilitate its manipulation of reality, our doublethink has its special sort of language as well; as C. S. Lewis put it in the first of the Screwtape Letters as the speech of a wizened old demon to a young unexperienced one:

"Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about."

And just like doublethink of "1984", our doublethink was made possible by promoting that Reality (with a capital R) is either non-existent or unimportant.

Or in a more subtle way, by suggesting that Reality is whatever you make it to be, reducing it to your reality. A practical reality!

And right here, Truth becomes excess baggage.

& I think we need Truth... don't we?

On Relativism: 2- Isolation

"The modern habit of saying"This is my opinion, but I may be wrong" is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying "Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me" - the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon."

Introduction to the Book of Job - G. K. Chesterton



I have met many people whom after having expressed their opinion, expressed how they considered it merely their own opinion and nothing more. They said that "to them" it was right, however they didn't think that necessarily meant it applied to anyone else's life, or even that they thought it to be it Right in the absolute sense of the word.

This was uncomfortable to me at first because that meant I can't discuss with them any of those opinions. Whenever I'd say something they'd answer back "Yeah, maybe to you that's right!".
Now, what these people were actually suggesting was that they have their own private universe in which these opinions were true. In that universe I didn't exist, hence I couldn't claim that these opinions were either right or wrong.

After a few times of meeting more of those people, & a few more times where I noticed that to those people more subjects seemed to pack up their stuff & move to that private universe, it became downright annoying!

I understand how those people wanted to avoid disagreements. And that may be ok in some cases I suppose, unless they actually believe it! Then the price they pay for that mental peace becomes their sanity!

Many people became convinced that they are apart from all Mankind. In fact, they are quite convinced that all Mankind is quite apart from Mankind!
More people are moving their ideas to a place where they can hear no outside criticism, but the price of that is that they can also get no external help. They have no external point of reference to refer to when in need. A Man alone in a universe isn't a good thing, is it?
This model of thinking as you can see, may lead to an isolation of the individual, if taken seriously.

As I understand it, this translates directly into Hell. Life becomes a place of nightmares & doubts where no external help is noticed or accepted. It's an even more modern angst.

Now for many logical reasons, I'm pretty sure that this private universe people think about does not exist. We may all have different personalities. But there is one Reality and we all live in it.

I'd like to stress here that this doesn't mean that our reaction to that Reality must be the same.

However, when somebody claims that they are satisfied with some belief & that belief describes (& reflects on) that same common Reality. It has to hold true in that common Reality if it is to hold true in someone's personal life.
In other words, it is either Real to everyone or it is actually an Illusion.

In other words, it is either True, or it is not.

& I think we need Truth… Don't we?

On Relativism: 1- Individualism

First of all I would like to apologize beforehand to my friends FW & Python. I am not writing this series of entries now because of our conversations, but rather because this subject has been on my mind a lot lately... Our conversations were one result of that, this series is another.

I want to complain,

I want to complain, not only of myself, or merely of my people. But of nearly all people! For these days they are mostly forgetting to add the word "all" before the word "people".

These are my thoughts & feelings (strong feelings, actually!) on the subject of relativism.

Now, relativism is the faceless daughter of the sweeping popularity of Individualism,

Individualism as a mental school fought very hard to cut the ties people had to their ancestors & their peers. In short it tried very hard to sever all ties between all people.

In stressing that each man should choose for himself, it refused the idea of Common Sense.

In stressing that each person was free to choose whatever he wants to think (which is a noble cause, I am sure), that Men should think for themselves (Ah! if only that could come true), it also refused the use of the word "should"... which is effectively cutting its own throat!

As G. K. Chesterton put it (please don't hate me for quoting him again!) "Individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an 'ism' quite as much as Communism or Calvinism.".

Meaning that for Individualism to become a mental institution, people had to belong to it. & when people did belong to it, they no longer thought for themselves anymore. Instead they were once again united under a thought-out idea, and this time it happened to revolve around the self.

"So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness." (conclusion of Chesterton's statement from which above quote was taken)

Which has been proven historically to be an inevitable outcome.

Men will always gather around a flag. To try to tell them to never gather around a flag is useless. The question then arises as to what flag Men should gather around.

Now concerning "should"s, if course there has to be a "should"!

Individualism (with the help of relativism) has led us to believe that we humans are all so different, and that it is quite natural (& healthy) for us to adopt completely different & mostly opposite views on every major & minor subject. It has stressed that this is perfectly OK.

Of course nobody would object to the observations upon which this idea is based, but I will strongly object to closing our eyes to the other plain observations, which show that we are all still humans!

Individualism values Logic above all else, & so implies a common set of rules for evaluating situations & standards. So at least Logic should be common.

But in addition to Logic, we all have the same needs, desires & weaknesses, don't we?

We all are pursuing pretty much the same things & we all are pretty much failing to get them! Now doesn't that mean anything at all?

How have we been led to believe that we are so terribly different?

The ancient thinkers noticed first how Nature was full of goups of things that are very similar. All horses belong to Horse, all men belong to Man. They argued to which extent that made them similar (and maybe even connected). Hiraclites, Plato & others devoted great attention to the problem of universals. They understood that to decide what we mean by Man is to decide whether we can know anything about Man.

It's drawing the line between the objective & the subjective.

It's drawing the border around Truth.

And I think we need Truth... Don't we?

On the Art of Debate in Egypt

I write this entry here after reading this, a very amusing old debate on Socialism (In a sense, the not-so-proud father of Communism) by the two intellectual giants G. K. Chesterton & George Bernard Shaw.
At the same time, I am following another rather different debate, that between some elements of the Coptic Orthodox Church regarding "The Deification of Man".

I had to notice the sharp difference between the two methods of debate.

One main difference is how the first debate is to a great extent a dialogue, although each side takes his time with the microphone. While the second isn't a dialogue at all!
This manifests itself mainly in how the second debate doesn't follow any particular train of thought through to its conclusion; instead each party simply throws a wide variety of statements in the face of the other party, very few of which can be considered a reply to the wide variety of statements thrown at it before...

At the same time the two parties seem to try really hard to avoid saying certain things or certain words, as if they think it quite possible that at any given moment they may find themselves on the other side of the fence!
This results in a refutation that proves little & disproves nothing, & you find that in the end the arguments presented from both sides can get along pretty well.
You can just write most of them down in conclusion & none would cancel another out.

To actually debate the issue, we have to reply to questions asked,
we have to clearly define the problem,
highlight what we agree on & debate what we disagree on,
we have to illustrate using examples that are related to & follow up with examples given by the other party.
And most importantly we have to follow the same rules of Logic! There's no sense in running a math contest if the two contestants neither agree on the multiplication table, nor do they use the same numbering system!
I say this because it seems that the two debating parties don't agree on what it means for two statements to be contradicting.
Nor do they draw from the same history. One very clear example of this is how both parties are labelling each other with the same labels.
I can understand it (though won't like it, it's a cheap shot) if in some debate one debater labels the other a communist, and the other debater labels him an imperial capitalist, but it makes no sense at all for both parties to label the other "Protestant" (unfortunately yes, it is used as an accusation),
it makes no sense that to both parties, the other's theology is always labelled as "Western" (another mis-accusation), this is happening so often that maybe western theoligians should join us at the table to explain themselves!
And of course there also is the endless -and same- names of heretics being flung across that table as accusations.
This can only mean that at least one of the two parties doesn't know what Protestants confess to believe, what Western Theology is, and what the old Heresies were.
In this thicket of ignorance, how can you have a real debate?!

If we were trying to have a debate, the art of debate actually has rules.
Even if that debate is mostly political, & even if it is being conducted on the pages of newspapers & tabloids for amusement, as a replacement to gladiator arenas!

ISB

They turned the lights off on the plane.
Finally...
It's been a very long flight.
And I can't quite remember what it is I'm fleeing from.
Bad joke, I know...

Some guy was arguing angrily with the stewardess a while ago,
said something about wanting to go home.
They wouldn't let him disembark, of course.
So childish of him.

Some warm fluid is dripping right next to my eyes.
Oh that's a tear.
feels good.

It didn't go on very long, though.
Too bad, wish it did.

Well I don't think anybody should blame me,
what better to do, than to cry?
What better way to prove to yourself you can still feel.
That you aren't really as monstrous as you'd have yourself believe.

It didn't go on very long, though.
No, Sir.