Against Deception
....the life of words
I write mostly about mathematics in an effort to broaden our understanding of life and creativity as well as science. There is no doubt mathematics emerged from human interaction with nature in much the same way that eyes emerged from the presence of light. I make this point to encourage new thoughts about math and science and to enhance our view of so many things.
I now realize that my preoccupation with investigative reporting over the last eight years was rooted in my yearning for the success of any attempt to reveal the dishonest scams that produced and protected Donald Trump’s hold on power. Because all of these attempts failed, every news show I listen to now feels like a steady flow of words without life, words no longer attached to any real action or outcome. Maybe this was the problem all along.
In the last few weeks, every time I reflect on my frustration, I see in my mind a sea lion staring into the cameras that produced the remarkable images of a Planet Earth episode I watched. It was the sea lion’s eyes that held my attention because they shared so much with my own. I watched these creatures lounge and eat. What are they doing? I wondered. What is their life? I can only see that they have one—they breathe, perceive, nourish themselves, and they breed. Does a more complicated nervous system make my life fundamentally different from theirs?
I remember when this separation between the reality given by words and nature itself was unexpectedly demonstrated to me some years back. After I moved out of Manhattan, I tried to change my New York City state of mind and learn how to use the sun for directions instead of the Manhattan street grid. I was driving south along a major road in St. Charles, Illinois in the early fall and I noticed a flock of ducks flying overhead. Like little switches in my brain the thoughts came, I’m driving south on Randall Road, they’re flying south above me. It’s early fall. The birds are flying south for the winter, just as I have always been told! All sorts of things about instincts, patterns, roads, and directions slid into place when their south lined up with mine.
Their south has no name. But it exists. It lives in sensation. It is not an idea. They just move with the planet, getting their navigational information from the way the earth fell into its orbit—from the sun, the stars, and the earth’s magnetic field. These birds contain direction. My south is a word, an abstraction whose source is the same sky as theirs and the same sun as theirs. But I heard about my south. I learned to say it. I learned how to spell it. It’s in the dictionary, on maps and road signs. It’s a mental image, one of the ideas that shape my world for me. Only now I was seeing how it lived without me. The birds were in line with my road but they were not directed by it. And in our lining up I saw the reality underneath my words, that preceded my words, that is more than my words. I learned something I thought I knew.
Their south is so simple. The moment, the direction, and their flight are all one thing. I envied them, and felt stuck to the ground. My car suddenly looked silly—a poor excuse for power. In that moment thinking itself seemed like a strange neurological aberration that twisted an otherwise simple life. But my destination that day was a bookstore where the devil’s advocate kicked in. I looked around at the words in the bookstore—“nature,” “language,” “history,” “science,” “literature”…these are the rewards for our sometimes troublesome self-awareness and intellectual development. We have photographs of the planet itself, of galaxies billions of light years away. We can see inside the womb, inside a cell, and the interactions of subatomic particles. How are we to understand our intellectual lives?
As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philosophers were not as convinced, as we seem to be, that they could see everything needing to be seen. These philosophers were devoted to illuminating what was true, or real. They were scientists, mathematicians, and theologians all at once. Today we suffer from the turmoil of specialization, ignorance, and a growing skepticism about whether there is anything we can call truth. Potentially life-changing insights revealed by our sciences are hidden behind largely inaccessible, dense, and prolific research publications in disciplines (such as physics, biology, linguistics, and mathematics, to name just a few) as well as the loud noises of popular entertainment. Many of the sciences’ provocative finds are also diminished with the popular predilection for acknowledging only practical outcomes.
Whatever life is, those sea lions have it too and what is common to my life and the lives of all other creatures is fairly obscured by human intellectual development. Their presence is a great gift because they can remind us about how little we understand. Yet we plow ahead, convinced by the illusory completeness of the cities we’ve built, the practical power of our sciences, and the history of our governments. We’ve got this, we think.
Our inventive, imaginative talents have given us exciting creative power to grow but they have also encouraged the deception that we are on our own and responsible to nothing but ourselves. Communities held together by words that represent common desires or gripes have proliferated. People are becoming defined by the words they choose to describe what they see in the world and what they don’t. It’s getting easier and easier to judge a book by its cover. More importantly words with no substance, words with no life, egregious lies, have found their way into some of our most important efforts to live peacefully together and will no doubt corrupt those efforts.
Words always begin grounded in the substance of shared experience, whether it’s concrete or abstract. Once given life, words evolve. We can see this in the etymologies provided by any good dictionary and the evolution of languages. Words can be explored and nuanced but they can’t be yanked from the common ground from which they sprang and given arbitrary new meaning by an individual ego. Concepts such as equivalence, beauty, justice, dedication, and freedom, are real things. They carry the truth of human experience and human history and we need to hold them faithful to that truth.
The problems we are facing will not be solved with only political and legal strategies. The view we have of ourselves needs a serious correction. The world we see around us does not belong to us, we belong to it. Our intellect developed inside of it, with the specialization of cells, building the neurological system which produces what we see. As a species we have been wrestling with the question of who we are, and why we are here using the creative action of the intellect since at least the dawn of any recorded history. But the fruits of the intellect have grown prolifically and now the swarm of ideas and aims, with so many competing purposes, has become exceedingly complicated. We no longer see the roots of our thoughts or any fundamental shared vision leaving room for self-serving agents to steal attention.
We need to pull ourselves together, literally. We need to find the common threads that have run through religious, scientific, technological, and political action throughout the centuries. Our intellect has gained remarkable reach. We can see and understand in great detail the life of stars whose evolution produces the very material from which we are made. The complexity of our nervous system gives us the power of abstraction with which we build words, ideas, mathematics, and technology. But nothing we find in our mind or in our world is just ours. We are all part of what we see.
The extraordinary practical success of science is only possible when individuals remain subservient to what is true. With his telescope, Galileo saw that Venus had phases, like the earth’s moon, and so it had to be orbiting the sun, as are we. Science and mathematics give our vision even more remarkable reach. In the arts we express and share our interactions with the world, with painting, sculpture, and music. The very nature of all of these disciplines asks us to look, look closely, and look again, and then report what we see.
To say there is no such thing as truth is to ignore our history. I recognize that the concept of truth is no simple matter. But I remember when it was a very big deal to find out that a politician or a President lied to the American people. I suspect the high standard to which we held public figures was not motivated by petty or even party concerns. More likely it was a consequence of some intuitive sense that truth is a serious matter and deception holds very destructive potential. I do not believe we can get through this time without committing ourselves to congregating around what truths exist in our words and our history. We are still close enough to it to find it. It’s not just bad policy that should concern us but unchecked deception, deception fueled by the absence of belonging to anything. For some this needed reorientation can be found with an honest reading of religious teaching, or an open mind to what the sciences have been able to see, or an exchange with other life, like that sea lion. For others, perhaps art and music can serve as the conduit. Deception will remain part of our lives, but our task will always be to find it, reveal it, understand it, and weaken it because it separates us from our truest nature.
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So well written. Loved it.