Think Again.

(Why people don't think)

A terrible (but also liberating) discovery for someone my age [c.f. post #3] is the indubitable fact of one’s total ignorance of all things. Combined with a much earlier realization that said ignorance has been exacerbated rather than ameliorated by the years spent in educational institutions the result of this realisation is not unlike being reborn while at the same time keeping your grey-hair, pot belly and tattooes from the Russian Mafia (see David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises").

So yes, Christmas is coming and I feel something like what the blind Borges might have felt were he teleported back to the village of his childhood by some substance of things unseen to a time when his parents were still young, beautiful and delighted by this new incarnation of hope and love called “Jorge Luis.” You realise that you are at an age to raise children, but without the knowledge to so much as (apologies to Bob Dylan) feed yourself, let alone weigh-in on matters of justice, the state, or the good life.

Thus, you find yourself subject to two imperatives: one that allows you to return to the state of childhood and another that reports that your knowledge of ignorance is not a good excuse to shirk your (adult) responsibilities. Tricky.

Yes, that's right. Nothing exciting here: the pilgrim regresses, but finds along the way that the discovery of one's own ignorance is as great gift as we can hope for. Platitude City Limits. But (as phenomenologists would remind us) it is very often the obvious -- those things that we know all too well that -- are (or at least become) most obscure to us. Particularly when said obvious truths might be painful: they take on that paradoxical obscurity of the all-too-familiar.

So, I submit: discovering ignorance is one of those great things, that, like spending a week eating muesli and doing calisthenics that is extremely good for you, but to which anything else (even listening to people wax lyrical about the virtues of J.M. Coetzee or watching the "White Masai") seems infinitely preferable. And here we stumble across a great font of modern, everyday sophistry. Not defensive, convoluted academic sophistry, mind you, but the sophistry of the streets. Everyman's sophistry which imbeds itself in everyday alongside such things as waking up, fumbling for the coffee-cup, looking for a teaspoon, a hang-over cure and so on.

One of the roots of hiding our knowledge of ignorance, is, I believe is the fact that most people like to believe that their lives show some kind of progress and in particular that there is something about their current situation or lifestyle that is testimony to a little learning, a little growth in taste if not in wisdom.

Although we've probably heard the line about the “crooked timber of humanity” most of us want to apply this abstractly to the wonderful diversity of the human species and not to reminding us of the fact that the existential fumblings in the dark of our own lifetimes (the struggles of the soul) are allowed no royal road -- no highway conveniently divested of robbers by advancing Imperial legions; no paths that are all flowers and no coyotes.

So, when we make decisions, if we've, for instance, left one place for another, exchanged x career for y, it’s often pretty standard sophistry (as well as a decent bulwark against madness) to say to one's self: "it was the right thing to do, I’m wiser now, I’m smarter, happier and I absolutely have no need to go back, or to rethink what I did before. I'm doing the right things now. Lucky I looked up that fact on Wikipedia, or I wouldn't be able to take on an authoritative tone, as if I were NOT an ignoramus. FINALLY. I must be on the right track; otherwise I'd have to start thinking again -- in which case how would I ever achieve the things on my goal's list'?

This is the reason for the fact (and again I don't mean this patronisingly) that most people I’ve met have really only thought about something maybe ONCE in their lifetime, usually either just prior to or just after a painful crisis that either necessitated or was precipitated by some anguished decision or another. But because the period of thinking was propelled by dissatisfaction (or even misery) it was thus abdicated for ever more once the initial dissatisfaction abated. For most people, I think thinking again would be like amputating one's leg for the second time: how perverse to do something for fun that we only did because of a situation which we will spend our life avoiding.

So, someone, feels sad or lost. They then find themselves losing the religious faith of their birth or finding a faith that they once disavowed. Of course, being Australian, I don’t really mean to refer to religious conversions per se: I'm talking, for the most part, about its its secular (often tawdry) equivalents.

Thus: somemeone decides to change their political opinion from one side of the spectrum to the other, they decide that they are an x and not a y, that they are a actually a gourmande, a bohemian, a family man, or an S&M fetishist. I don’t always mock such changes in 'identity'. This is because they’re not only or not always the results of flakiness, even if they do so often emerge from what a twentieth century philosopher called our "joyless quest for joy" or our attempts to squeeze meaning out of the big, but basically non-absorbent sponge that is modern consumer society. But the problem is that the period of 'thinking' (philosophically) was usually associated with a period of tumult and unhappiness: of anomie and looming despair -- ultimately to speak like a psychologist, the "trauma"

And from trauma, comes the desire (apologies to psychoanalysts) to avoid a repetition of the trauma’s source. So if the original thought, the thought that led to a conversion, or the change of lifestyle has to be a once off if we're not to experience trauma all the time. Consequently, the decision, or the single moment of thinking has to be inured from future criticism or future reflection to prevent lest we have another run-in with the traumatic source. So the decision, the aftermath of the trauma has to be rendered sacrosanct; ringed round with curtains and candles and the armed guards provided by sophistry -- the refusal of philosophy.

This then, is what principally leads to the slight hysteria that comes over people in the face of anything like Socratic questioning. I've often seen people react to even the word 'philosophy'. with a defenisveness that would have been a little excessive if applied to 'axe-murdering for the greater glory of paedophilia.' Worse: it’s a defensiveness (and maybe this is only my limited milieu) that seems to increase in everyone I’ve ever known, every year that goes by. I think because my immediate social milieu is full of people who are in various ways full of doubt, uncertainty and anxiety that they would like to have disappear into a puff of celebrity glory once again proving the obvious thesis (D.I.V's mainstay) that we are creatures impelled by night-terrors, small scared things trembling in the dark.

And this is even, and especially (if I may call this an affect of the “dialectic of Enlightenment”) amongst average Epicureans – i.e. people who find one of the greatest merits of atheism (as opposed to its justification) to be that its supposed to free us from fear of non-existent things and allows us to leave lives of free, bold reasoning. (I've said this elsewhere.)

In a world (where according to average middle-class self-babble) we're supposed to have freed ourselves from superstition and learned to love life, our bodies and so on, why does it seem (especially amongst those who profess themselves children of afore said liberation) that our liberation has actually left us anxiously watching the skies for dark and vengeful gods -- gods who will smash us against the walls of existence if we can't prove to ourselves that we're enjoying ourselves enough, or if we can't think of every moment as an epiphany of delight?

Thus: according to people's self-description, I have never met a person who wasn't “critical”, “open-minded”, a "searcher", an anti-dogmatist, an anti-fundamentalist. But in practice, what i meet is people terrified of the precariousness of their opinions, appalled that anyone might suggest that they are anything but perfectly virtuous, or in possession of all wisdom worth happening.

In the end we choose the sedative over the cool morning air. And are diminished.


-Mal.