January 6, 2021 riot in Washington, D.C. 

                                 (credit: Tylor Merbler, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Changing Our Philosophies of Life

The ongoing investigations into what happened in the US capitol last January 6 has got me thinking heavy thoughts again. Very general, large-scale thoughts. 

I know people who claim confidently that they do not have a philosophy of life. In a simpler analysis, I believe they just don't want to have to think about it. But have no philosophy of life of any kind in their heads? I don't think it is possible for that to be true. 

If one had no philosophy of life whatsoever, one would sit catatonic and stare and, probably, drool. There aren’t a lot of such people, but they do exist. Most of them are in asylums, of course, and a few are being looked after at home by family members.

But the point is that in almost everyone’s head there is a set of values and a decision process of some sort that enables them to choose – second by second, as they watch the details coming in from their senses – what matters, how much it matters, and what they should do about it. That much of a basic minimum of a philosophy of life must be in your head in order for you to function at all in the real world. And stay on the curb until the traffic light changes and even then, stay on the curb if you see a car coming at you at a high rate of speed. And so on for decisions all day long for all of us. You have an ontology, an epistemology, and an axiology in place, or you wouldn’t be making any statements at all.

The set of concepts and beliefs that enables you to make decisions and act second by second is a philosophy. By it, you put sensory details into categories like “matters”, “urgent”, “animal”, “edible”, “hazard, “sexually available”, and so on. This philosophy or code also guides you to form action plans with which you’ll respond to, or ignore, the details you are noticing.

You may never have thought about whether your philosophy of life causes you to seek specific kinds of people and experiences or avoid others. The code may have been programmed into you so deeply (by parents, usually) that you can’t examine it honestly. Or you may have lived a life that so far has run smoothly and has never caused you to ponder over your code. But I reiterate that it is still in there. You couldn’t survive everyday life if you had no code at all.

I think one of the things gnawing at millions of us now, in cultures all over the world, is that we have learned in the last fifty years or so just how mistaken our codes can be. Many people have also realized that all cultural codes are, in fact, always changing. Our ways of life change as we come upon new organisms like new plants or animals that may be dangerous or edible or in some other useful category. Or we may, as a whole tribe, make contact with another tribe whose way of life is very different from our own. Different foods, rituals, morés, customs, and beliefs. We may mingle, get on well, trade, or even exchange members for marriage. Or we may become mutually hostile and dissolve into making war on each other. The scenarios can become very complex.

But all of this discussion of possible programming-driven scenarios for humans that can arise only underscores my point: you have a philosophy of life of some sort, or you wouldn’t survive in the real world.

What frightens many of the people of the world today, I believe, is that they can now see that their philosophy of life is deeply flawed. We all have been taught to notice and value only certain things we’ve been trained to see as significant. Via more and more experience of the world, we learn that when our system – our culture’s system – is held up to hard scrutiny, many of the beliefs or values it contains are trivial or even unkind. Beliefs and values that are just wrong.

And then we start to get scared. We don’t want to think about how limited and even mistaken our philosophies and customs might be. Such thinking threatens to be very upsetting. We’d rather not contemplate it for very long.

Ours is a changing world. The mingling of cultures and the anxieties that go with that mingling keep happening. In fact, the mingling seems to be moving faster and faster. We’re all going to have to deal with culture shock.

The culture that I am living inside of now here in Canada is called "Western". It has risen to a position of dominance in many parts of the world. It values a lot of different things and sometimes the code is unclear about which of its values should take precedence over which others. Do money or "face" matter more than the love of one’s family? Should some races, creeds, or genders have a right to better opportunities for education and employment? Should I be as honest with my customers as I am with my father? 

To some, answers to questions like these may seem obvious. Every human being has a right to a good education, you say. But maybe your culture has not in the real world practiced that value very well. Some sub-cultures within your culture may now be so badly scarred that the adults have passed anger or criminal behavior on from generation to generation for decades or centuries.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for many white males in the West to realize that maybe they are where they are in life, in the world, in the midst of a comfortable job, family, set of hobbies and possessions and so on more because they were born white and male than for any merits of their own.

It’s a bitter pill for many women or people of color or indigenous people in the West to realize that their opportunities in life have been, and are being, limited by the accidents of their gender or race at their birth. Many of them get angry at a young age as they begin to see their world for what it is. Some stay angry for a lifetime. I think that being that angry tends to destroy the peace of mind and health of the one who carries the anger many times faster than it does the privileges of the ones she/he is angry with. But remaining engaged in this life without getting mad, if you are one of the underprivileged, must be very difficult. And here I speak only from what I’ve learned via my reading and viewing films and talking to people, some of them members of minorities. I’m just a white male from Canada. My experience base is limited.

But my point rises to the surface again. Whoever you are, you do have a philosophy of life and you are likely going to have to examine and revise it soon, if you are not doing so already. With the growth of communications media, travel, and especially the internet, many cultures are mingling now.

                                  UN Headquarters, New York, New York, U.S.A. 

                                             (credit: flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) 

For me, in that reality, there lies much hope. Yes, it will be scary and sometimes painful, but you and I can reprogram. In fact, the brains of humans are always reprogramming. In the past, the privileged had more choice about which beliefs and values they were going to modify, adopt, or throw out than we do now. We used to be able to get away with staying inside the culture of our birth for lifetimes. We can’t anymore. Life for humans on this earth is evolving. We’re changing. But I see many signs that, as a result, we’re coming together. Getting closer every day to understanding one another well enough to live together as a single, complex, global society with a single, complex ecosystem of a culture.

Moral relativists and postmodernists who claim to have no code of values, of course, are not helping the adjustment, though they often argue that they are. But they insist that every culture’s values are right when one is inside that culture. That kind of talk has, in the past, only given the Proud Boys and their counter-parts in other sub-cultures a free pass to do whatever they want as long as they can gather a group of their cohorts together and shout down their opponents. Or beat them down. As some of them did on January 6 last year. 

And why not? Proud Boys are right if they say they are. Or so the moral relativists have told them.

We can’t live that way. We have to come up with a basic minimum set of moral rules: a moral code by which a global community of humans can resolve disputes peacefully and live together. A code built around reason, not violence. I believe very strongly that the evidence that supports that code and makes it acceptable to at least some people in all cultures is going to have to come from the one thing that there is some chance of us all agreeing on: physical reality. The universe itself. Then, if the code works to create a strong, new way of life, that way of life will grow.  

But that is material for another post on another day. For today, let’s just be content with concluding that every one of us has a set of values and a philosophy of life in place in her/his head. And take heart from the fact that Psychology tells us clearly that humans and their sets of values are programmable.

We really can make a new, better us.   

                               International Court of Justice, the Hague, Netherlands 

                                            (credit: Yeu Ninje, Wikimedia Commons)