Learning to Understand the World

I’m Canadian, but my father often worked overseas. My earliest memories are not of Vancouver, where I was born, but of Malaysia, where I spent my first five years. The person who took care of me then was not my mother, but Anna, the housekeeper.

She was a Chinese Malay and I spent most of my time with her. I ate the same food as her and thought that was great: The western fare my parents ate was not half so tasty as the fried noodles and soups that were her mainstay.

She had a son, maybe twenty or so, though it’s hard to say. He had a motorcycle and seemed to me the epitome of cool (though I didn’t know that word) and kindness. One of my clearest early memories is of him teaching me how to catch butterflies in the little net I had.

The secret is to not chase them, let them settle in the grass and put the net over them. It takes the challenge out of it, but it works.

My favorite person in the world was Dee, my father’s secretary, also Chinese Malay. She was wild, and young, and had a sports car and would seat me in her lap while she drove. When my grandmother came to visit, I steadfastly refused to call her Grandma or any such thing, until someone hit on the name of “Grand-Dee”. So she was ever after.

We moved back to Canada when I was six or so, after stays in Jakarta, Indonesia and in Singapore and I didn’t travel overseas again till I was twelve, when my father got a job running a project in Bangladesh.

We traveled extensively through the Indian subcontinent in those years: Kashmir before the troubles, Nepal before the troubles. Delhi. Calcutta where I had a great-aunt who had not left after partition.  Darjeeling, where my grandfather had been police chief under the Raj. Many other places. My mother, having spent much of her childhood in India, spoke fluent Hindi. This always surprised Indians, often to hilarious effect, as she would putter along like a typical white woman, letting them say whatever they wanted, then break into Hindi herself.

I remember someone cursing out our driver, and my Mother listening for quite some time before she leaned over, a round, little white matron and said, “That’s not very nice,” in Hindi.

The reaction was both funny and touching.

My father worked for Food and Agriculture, a United Nations organization. He often had guests over to the house, and if he went to someone else’s house, I usually went along. His compatriots were other aid workers: foresters, geologists, economists, agronomists, and so on. They’d sit and discuss trying to help the Third world; what worked and what didn’t.

The “what didn’t” list was a lot longer than the “what did,” but of more interest was why. Between them they had hundreds of years of experience.

I sat, listened, and learned.

Because I spent so much time around people with different beliefs, I became fascinated with how people could believe such different things. The Christians. The Hindus. The Moslems. The Secularists.

My father had a weird mix of white paternalism and deep respect for the locals and they generally seemed to like him. He was an asshole, but he was a fair asshole–and that was a vast improvement over the people they were used to working for and dealing with. He didn’t assume they didn’t know their own lives and he gave respect where respect was due.

I remember, back in Canada, being approached by Christian evangalists and my father telling them where to shove their beliefs. “You tell me that these good people I know who aren’t Christian are going to hell because they don’t follow Jesus?! Get off my property, or I’ll throw you off.”

He was a large, red-faced man who radiated anger and menace.

They got off his property.

People believe all sorts of weirdness. They believe contradictory weirdness, which doesn’t stop many of them from being good people, even though their beliefs are different.

It doesn’t stop them from being bad people, either.

Western scientific knowledge clearly mattered, but our ideological beliefs always struck me as as dubious as any theology. I remember, in grade eleven, reading an economics textbook which talked about rational man and utility optimization.

This was theology. Moral beliefs about how people should act and about how the universe must be, little different from Medieval Church scholasticism. Later I was to discover that the more a social “science” tried to pretend it was a science, the more dubious its insights, the greater the corruption, and the more massive the harm it did–and had done.

Economics, being the most “scientific” had done the most harm. Psychology was close behind.

I was a reader. From the time I was seven, until perhaps age thirty-two or so, I read more than a book a day on average. Often I would read as many as twenty in a week–two or three in a day.

Most of it was fiction, but amongst that was a fair bit of non-fiction. It’s not clear to me that I learned more from the non-fiction.

My main interests were in questions of knowledge: epistemology, cultural anthropology, comparative religion.  What did humans believe and why?

I didn’t really become interested in economics and political science (in the broadest sense) until the recession of the early 90s. It was so clear that those leading society, and most economists, had no idea what was going on that I turned my attention to learning how the economy worked.

They couldn’t fix it, so I’d see if I could figure out how.

I did not lack intellectual confidence.

And so I read the economists, trying to winnow some gems out of the trash and hoping to find the occasional economist who knew his (they were all men) discipline was an ideological garbage heap and thus was able to say something useful.

I went back to university, before illness and poverty drove me out, and while there I studied (and read) mostly philosophy, linguistics, and sociology. In sociology, I found a discipline which had a broad enough focus of view that amidst the crap (and there was plenty) were real insights into how society, power, and economics actually work.

This was because no one took sociology seriously and most had contempt for it. Freed from interest by those with wealth and power, some sociologists were actually able to do useful work.

Anthropology and cultural historians remained the best people to read to remind oneself that “It was not always thus,” “It is not always thus,” and, “People are really plastic and can believe all sorts of amazing stuff.”

Cultural anthropology remains the best antidote to the sort of fools who try and pronounce that everything a human does is because of selfishness, or utility, or any other one thing.

No one who is well read can believe such a thing without engaging in the sort of mental gymnastics which make a circus contortionist’s physical antics look like those of a gross amateur.

Sociology, anthropology, and the better parts of psychology and history are also excellent reminders that humans are only slightly rational, and that when they do manage to be more than slightly rational it is the irrational parts of their belief systems which determine whether or not the rationality will lead to anything good.

Any rationality which tries to rest itself entirely in rationality becomes monstrous, precisely because it fails to recognize its monstrous non-rational roots, or that rationality can never provide ethical ends, only means.

In the 2000s, I fell into the blog world. As I have said before, I started out writing about policy and war, often nerdy, weedy stuff. Twenty-seven mistakes made during the Iraq occupation (nine months in), and so on.

I should have remembered what Ian, at twenty-one, knew.

People can believe essentially anything. People are not rational. Knowledge systems are pre-rational, even if a huge mound of rationality has been piled up to bury the non-rational roots.

You can’t convince anybody of anything they don’t want to believe, and most people’s real need to believe is to believe in their tribe and the Gods of their tribe, whether those Gods are supernatural ones like YHVH and Zeus, or merely metaphysical entities like utility or pure reason shorn of ideology.

I came back, first, to try to explain the first principles of morality and ethics to people. Stuff like “killing less people is better than killing more people.”

That didn’t stick. Most people can’t get it. They believe what their tribe does is right and if a moral symbol has been violated, their anger and outrage is too high to do the math involved in “this ‘terrorist’ is far less of a criminal than George Bush or Barack Obama.”

Fine. Ethics and morality don’t work, shorn of tribalism.

This is where the great Axial reformers wound up, by the way. They tried to create universal religions which made everyone a brother (sadly leaving women largely out, with a few partial exceptions). They tried to extend the tribe to everyone.

Instead, they created super-tribes which spent the next 2,000 years fighting it out in bloody and spectacular fashion.

Then, we raised up national ideology as tribes and did the 19th and 20th centuries.

Because I promised in my fundraiser that I’d do twelve reviews of foundational books, I have spent the past three weeks re-reading some of them. To date, I have read mostly sociology, with a side of theories of justice and charisma.

I have been brought back to my early concerns with knowledge and belief: People can believe virtually anything, and they will do so well past the point where it kills them, or their entire society.

I have been hammering, for the last six months, the issue of the logic of capitalism: How it has destroyed the environment and will thus lead to the deaths of at least a billion people or more.

We knew it was doing so, and we kept on keeping on. We knew planned obsolesence was wasteful and we kept on keeping on. Lately, we’ve been engaged in economic austerity despite the fact is has worked for, maybe, one nation in the world (Germany).

Rational?

We are barely sentient.

We live inside knowledge systems in which we have created the world as very concrete (often literally–buildings are instantiated ideas). We are so enmeshed in them we are barely able to question their assumptions or where they are leading us. We will not stop till they lead to catastrophe, and, often enough, not even then.

Forget the present day; go read how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation went down.

So, I find myself today sifting through the books I have read before; the thoughts I have thought before. I look back at different Ians and each of their understandings of the world.

These grains have fallen through my fingers before, and I have stared at the sand looking to weave a pattern that explains the order humans create.

Leaving aside natural processes we mostly don’t control, what changes the human world in the most far-reaching way are ideas. Those ideas may be technological ideas, or scientific, or ethical. They may be religions or ideologies (little difference, really). But the change comes from ideas.

So many, many ideas. So many we could not even ennumerate them, though the encyclopedists and editors of dictionaries have tried.

These ideas were all created by us. Some are very close to the natural world; some are far removed, but they are our ideas.

And they control us. The hand of dead philosophers, scientists, and technologists rules us.

We thought Reason would free us. The Enlightenment project was to dispel illusions and hobgoblins and myths. But reason has not freed us, and by giving us great power without giving us that cliched great wisdom, it has led to a great extinction that may even claim us.

Answers?

I have a few. They seem to me inadequate against our vast will to believe in garbage and our unwillingness to admit that the garbage is all created by us, and corresponds little to effectiveness, let alone reality.

But I will write them. There will be the book reviews I promised. There will be the booklet on the Creation of Reality.

Perhaps we can point towards a way of becoming self-aware creators of our own reality. Because we already create our own reality, we simply do it like the blind men in the parable of the Elephant, save not describing what we feel but creating it with no mind to how it all fits together and what the consequences of adopting each idea will be.

Marx posited that we create our own chains, but denigrated the role of ideas. Nothing but our biology binds humans more than ideas, because, beyond the basics given us by nature, everything–including the power of the gun, comes from ideas.

Let us see whether my forty-eight-year journey has taught me anything useful about those ideas, and whether I can impart what I have learned to others.