Richard Shaw - Mechanisms, meaning and moral imaginings |
Mechanisms, meaning and moral imaginings (Saturday 29th May ’21)In a crisis, we need someone to turn to; we need a guide. Increasingly, and almost exclusively on this occasion, we have turned to ‘the science’. This is fine as long as ‘the science’ really does know everything to the extent it thinks it does, and is beyond other influences. What ‘the science’ does know about is the mechanism of how a thing works. In this case, it can know - and predict - the mechanism of how the virus behaves, how it replicates and mutates and even how it may have originated (although in this case there seems to be less certainty about that). The belief then is that when you know how a thing behaves, you know all there is to know about it. The mechanism is everything. When science becomes the new religion, this is what you can expect to dominate. But what is missing in this, and was present in more old time religion, was a sense of mission and meaning. This was what raised an event from an abstraction to a life force and a life force with a purpose. It was here to tell us something, even to teach us something. All that now seems to have fallen by the wayside and our participation in this event of unparalleled global magnitude in our times is to be marked by avoidance. Is this showing the wisdom, or exposing the limits, of science? Human behaviour, and what influences it, is not irrelevant or merely coincidental in all this, however. Especially when you want people to follow a certain script - to understand their reluctance or resistance and to ‘overcome’ it, you need to turn to another branch of science - behavioural science. This shows how illogical human behaviour can be and indicates how to transform this. The case this behavioural science makes is compelling in many respects but ultimately it is yet another reference to the mechanism, only this time the mechanism of the mind. The message here is ‘once you have understood the mechanism, you have understood everything; the mechanism is all there is’. I’m not sure how I feel about this as an understanding of the human being but what may also be displaced in it is the individual human being’s deeper inner knowing. This may make him eccentric but also makes him what and who he is. It represents his truth and his sense of himself. This may not represent the whole truth but, as what is right for him, it represents his own particular route to the truth. And how can we say we know the truth about anything when we only know the one route to it? For this branch of science to live by its own rules, however, would require that it also directs its thinking and doing in accordance with the known evidence. Its approach then would derive entirely from this and would not be ‘corrupted’ by the incursion of other elements into it. Even within the scientific guidance - natural or behavioural - this is not happening here. Many measures (vaccine passports, vaccinating children to name but two) rest on a view of transmissibility which is not supported, or not to the extent assumed or claimed, by the evidence. Here, once more, what we prefer to believe or what we want people to do and how we want them to think is being influenced, or ‘nudged’, by personal preference, or strategic aims, rather than objective evidence, even amongst those who would claim to be above such things. So those who claim to be above these things show that they are no less subject to them than the rest of us. So who do we really trust, or look to, for guidance? We must do all we can to acquaint ourselves with the known facts and the evidence. We all realise this and we can also come to know a thing by how it influences us; how it causes us to behave, including towards others. How, in this way, does this virus tell us about itself, beyond its mere mechanism? How, under its impact and its ‘doing its worst’, has it brought out the best in us? How does this help us to ‘know’ it and ourselves? When we move the focus of our attention to these human qualities we move beyond the mechanical and into other realms. What can be most telling about person, or an event, are its contradictions. They show more the true nature of the thing seeking, and struggling, to come to expression than something which lacks this paradox. But all of these things require that each human being is allowed to come to his or her own decision about the right thing to do in the circumstances. This will also be in accordance with what works instinctively and/or intuitively within him, and which also educates itself about the right thing to do on the basis of how all the facts and the implications, including the indications for himself and his fellow men and women. This is how he arrives at his own personal choice and to be a moral choice it must be his own and his alone. For the moment someone else informs you of your moral choice, it is no longer yours and to that extent is no longer moral. And the moment you prescribe a moral course of action for someone else you have made him a stranger to himself. We have to believe that in their place of deepest inner knowing, human beings want the best for themselves and others. A mobilisation towards desired collective ends or goals destroys and sweeps this aside in an instant. For it is more a harking back to the past than a path to the future. As human beings become ever more aware of themselves as individuals, so they must be left to arrive at their own solutions. Otherwise within the collective framework, they are neither recognised nor respected - fully and properly - and hence neither are they fully represented. * * * A government of today preparing for tomorrow muster reckon and work with all these things. That is why Party Politics itself is so outdated and can only take us back, insofar as it does not of itself hold the frame within which changes are also to be made towards the future. Seeking to overcome the subjective in Man in order to make us into better citizens is a forlorn and misplaced ambition. Actually it’s a frightening prospect. For it would rob us of what makes us most truly human. And yet so much of what would sway us in our thinking has this singular ambition. It is the task of each one of us to arrive at a better understanding of how the subjective within us obscures from us the higher truths and deeper knowing of our own particular uniqueness. How adapted, or inherited, or adopted to characteristics conceal us from ourselves as well as facilitate our progress along life’s journey to the goal of our own knowing. But ‘nudge units’ cannot do this for us. No one can do it for us. This is our own journey in the space and time we share with everyone else. The individual and society need to be celebrated at the same time, not one made subject to the other. These things are for the individual to decide. And that means everyone coming to their own decision in their own way. This is a ‘more than’ democracy not ‘less than’ version of itself. It is democracy plus, not democracy minus. At the moment we have to look at just where we are in this respect. What is the nature of our ‘consensus’ and how have we arrived at it? A mobilisation is a forced consensus and is accompanied by slogans and themes to recruit the individual to its cause and help them identify with it. To this end it is compelling. A consensus arrived at through individual choice at a deeper level of discourse with oneself and others, and in Citizens’ Assemblies for example (if properly conceived and run) is one where consensus grows through putting down its own roots and building from there; not in suspending or abandoning them or allowing someone else to suggest these things to us. There will be moments when practicality needs to trump philosophy. I leave you to decide whether this present situation is really one of them. |