We talk too glibly of living with uncertainty. We do that now, facing a new year after the shock of the old. At the beginning of the year many of us were paper millionaires, if we were to believe the value put on our houses - and now have lost that spurious virtual status in the economic down turn. Does this mean that we are able now to ‘get real’? Priests speak to our own doubts rather than politicians trying like evangelists to ‘save’ the economy: how can it be sensible to spend money we haven’t got to get out of the mess caused by spending money we haven’t got ….
The experts would say that we just don’t understand. One thing we have learned is that no-one understands, no-one knows how it works.
But how do we know anything? We know most things through the filter that we call self. We can only absorb facts that are in accord with our essential view of self, our self at the centre of things, ringmaster in the circus of life. Some of this is culturally determined and and some of it is psychology. In object relations theory the other exists in relation to the self. Winnicott said that you cannot see the infant on its own, but in relation to the mother. With globalization we cannot see our bank account on its own, but in relation to spiraling systems of international debt and credit. We don’t understand but in the last few months we have got to acknowledge what we already sort of knew that. There is a momentary realization that we are not the independent actors we think but particles in a cosmic brainstorm. Of course we hope that normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, when we can be comfortable again with an egocentric view of human agency – when things get better and we think we have done it ourselves.
The starving refugees of Darfur may have a better hold of reality than the readers of the Guardian and the Mail. That is the tragedy.
The idea of the self as a filter through which we sieve reality makes sense to me – that is, it appeals to my own sense of self as a convenient holding together of our experiences as a coherent whole, so that we can have a go at understanding what is going on. I realize that other people may not find this interesting at all. By seeing the self as a system, with a boundary to distinguish what is inside and out, what is subjective and objective, what is idiosyncratically creative (and potentially mad) and what is socially constructed (and potentially dead), we are making coherent our partial reality.
But we are at the same time recreating and reinforcing a dichotomy (inside/outside/ subjective/objective) as if the observer is outside the frame. But we also know that is not the case. How we think, feel, perceive the world and act in relation to everything around is, with all the distortions and special effects that we insist on in our self-obsessed project, that is also reality. This is our philosophical gene at work.
The common image of is of us as deluded fools unable to face an ultimate reality or truth. But our foolish delusions are part of that reality. The dichotomy I find more useful than I-it or me-not me or self-object (which are all exclusive ways of defining reality) is that between exclusive and inclusive states of mind. (There are two kinds of people in the world – those that think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.) In an inclusive scenario there is no separate existence to justify the politics of difference. It is absurd then to say that I am better than you, or that anyone has rights or moral advantage over another. At this time of economic downturn it could be good to do away with bonuses and performance-related pay as a first step to facing the facts.