Facts alone cannot
win over beliefs –Let us examine the why and how of it?
Life’s evolutionary
aspirations are tossed between repetitions and changes.
1. Read this wonderful article which appeared last month and
I wanted to share it.
This article proves certain very pertinent points.
2. This article
articulates the reasons for many luddites
with so much of reluctance and many impediments
of all kinds and sorts: - be they socio-culturally or religiously imposed or
intellectual ideological identity based impediments and so on.
3. Confirmation bias,
unfortunately, is part of the eco-system of our thought process and gets
settled in our subconscious.
4. That’s why repetition and refrain are more appealing in
almost all domains and traditions [‘activities
which have lived through times as an intrinsic part of a culture with certain
inherent attributes’] remain unchanged. The positive aspect is
that it enables to store in our collective memory many things which would have
other disappeared and we would have ended up spending lot of time relearning
things from the scratch.
5. However, the negative aspect is that this postpones the
acceptance and assimilation of new and raw evidences and facts which alone can
enhance our understanding the purpose and relevance on many things in the
scheme of life’s evolutionary march.
6. Or are we to merely acknowledge that repetition
replenishes or rejuvenates the existing status.
7. That’s why perhaps right rationalism is confronted with
ground level empirical hurdles and feasibility issues.
8. I would like sprinkle some thought provoking
quotes which I use often in many contexts to spice up and sharpen as well as
sober senses to accept the many
vicissitudes of life with equanimity.
“In the end nothing less than the whole of
everything can be the truth of anything at all”- William James
“Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to
preserve itself - at the expense of the new demands of each new
generation.” ~John Haynes Holmes
“The things that are wrong with the country today
are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as
individuals” ~Charles W. Tobey
“When we think of the past, we forget the fools and
remember the sage. We reverse the process for our own time”.
~George Boas
“We
live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our
conception of it”-Timothy Ferris
“There
is no tomorrow. There is only a planet turning on its axis, and a creature
given to optimistic fancies”-Robert Brault
Guy Murchie
declares, “Evolution itself is an open ended and indeterminate process”… “Given
the remarkable progress in our understanding of biochemistry, molecular
biology, and evolution as a whole … we have failed to develop concepts, ideas,
even a language that could capture the dance of this life”
Erich Fromm, “humans have a need for a stable frame of reference. Religion
apparently fills this need. In effect, humans crave answers to questions that
no other source of knowledge has an answer to, which only religion may seem to
answer. However, a sense of free will must be given in order for religion to
appear healthy. An authoritarian notion of religion appears detrimental.”
As the great
scholar and my favorite author Bertrand Russell
writes in POLITICAL IDEALS (1917) CHAPTER
IVINDIVIDUAL LIBERTY AND PUBLIC CONTROL
“The creative impulses, unlike those that are possessive, are directed to
ends in which one man’s gain are not another man’s loss. The man who makes a
scientific discovery or writes a poem is enriching others at the same time as
himself. Any increase in knowledge or good-will is a gain to all who are
affected by it, not only to the actual possessor. Those who feel the joy of
life are a source of happiness to others as well as to themselves. Force cannot
create such things, though it can destroy them; no principle of distributive
justice applies to them, since the gain of each is the gain of all. For these
reasons, the creative part of a man’s activity ought to be as free as possible
from all public control, in order that it may remain spontaneous and full of
vigor. The only function of the state in regard to this part of the individual
life should be to do everything possible toward providing outlets and
opportunities”.
A great quote
by H.P. Lovecraft, in The Call of Cthulhu “The most merciful thing in the
world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its
contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of
infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each
straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day
the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying
vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either
go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and
safety of a new dark age.”
"All
intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to
try to think them again." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“If I have seen
further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”- Isaac
Newton
Shakespeare
once said “I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people”.
William
Lyon Phelps puts it, “One of our secrets of life is to
keep our intellectual curiosity acute”.
Or as Thomas H. Huxley says, “Sit down before fact as a
little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly
wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.”
As Sascha
Vongehr mentions
in ‘Science As Rationalization And Ultimate
Religion
By’ “Every
adaptive system has what can be called a perception apparatus and information
processing structures and so forth. Science is part of the perception/thinking
of social systems. All perception has its “blind spot”. Perception is ignorant
of everything except for a tiny slice that it evolved to select and focus
attention on. Thinking is there to interpret in a certain evolved way. Humans,
being parts as well as environment of social systems, cannot grasp the
perceived world of social systems, let alone map out their blind spots.
Scientists are especially suspect when it comes to judging the blind spots of
science.”
Self
imprisonment works in these ways without even our realizing it.
“Everything
changes as you move through three stages of awareness:
first, that beliefs are the result of conditions;
second, that beliefs are the cause of conditions;
and third, that beliefs are themselves conditions.”― Eric Micha'el Leventhal
“All of
us have our own inner fears, beliefs, opinions. These inner assumptions rule
and govern our lives. A suggestion has no power in and of itself. Its power
arises from the fact that you accept it mentally.”― Joseph Murphy, The Power of
Your Subconscious Mind
We must realize
that the subconscious mind is the law of action and always expresses what the
conscious mind has impressed on it. What we regularly entertain in our mind
creates a conception of self. What we conceive ourselves to be, we become.” -Grace
Speare.
9. Despite all
these, evolution has taken us from Kuru disease generators to cyber
Guru Venerators.
10. On repetition
11. So, the task of seeking and searching and seeking
meaning both become difficult.
12. However, the great visionaries and votaries of change
who form an important part of evolution’s inevitable stride with its
inherent necessity for change have been
effecting changes very carefully as a neurosurgeon would handle his surgical
knife.
They acknowledge
first that in any domain stereotyped, trite, redundant aspects cannot be
allowed to be fossilized or ossified but they have to evolve, like everything
else, by wading through the tides of trends –which could be contributory,
complementary, contrasting, conflicting, contaminating etc- with the oars of
compulsions and compromises and sail smoothly and safely to ensure the
fundamental and basic principles or inherent aspects are kept intact and
appropriate doses of innovations or improvements or changes are introduced to ensure that there is a
subtle transformation through a smooth transition from status quo but not
away from or apart from it.
Because in
every domain of life the status quo addicts wield a great influence so whatever change is
effected must be presented as an important part of life and ensure it create a
very powerful impact to intoxicate the status quo lovers to forget their past
addiction for at least brief moments through various forms of expressions, enticing
and emotionally appealing activities, involvement of intellectual ideas to unravel
the multiple meanings of life as journey
of life’s experiencing, acting and interacting with all its tools like body,
mind, emotions etc.
13. Denying and
defying things which have stood the test of time, either with reason or
irrationally, is all the more difficult task and before denying their
importance we need to first understand what has contributed to their survival
through long periods of time.
14. However, evolutionary
advancement in most domains of life is also inevitable
[Like
evolutionary biology, evolutionary sociology, evolutionary philosophy,
evolutionary politics etc].
“Across planes
of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be
simultaneously true.” ― Ram Dass.
15. We cannot
analyze anything through ideological fixations or subject it to satisfy socio-
political justifications.
We must also
know that everything has its own inherent attributes, intrinsic values,
internal mechanism and logic for its existence besides, beyond, exclusive of
and unmindful of human intellectual justifications, acceptance,
acknowledgement, social approvals, political support and therefore , it is purely absurd to
extrapolate anything with specific ideological fixations.
