So You Think You Know?

by Skipper (writer), Victoria BC Canada, January 04, 2012

Credit: Striatic via Creative Commons
It's easy to think we understand

Understanding is harder than most people think.

In a year that just was, we saw an almost endless parade of change; it’s as if revolution and upheaval is the birthright of new centuries. We look out in the world as viewed from our own little corner, and pass judgement. Arguments ensue en mass regarding the meaning and worth of all the changes we see sweeping across the earth.

Problem is of course that it isn’t really change at all, just a year when the litany of forces that constantly animate all human discourse find new and temporary equilibriums. Sometimes it seems like the breaking of a tectonic fault line, a seismic slip that rearranges things until pressure builds again, to the oozing of dough from between one’s fingers when you give a fistful a squeeze. I imagine the latter is what it feels like to Syria’s al-Assad about now

Human energies have always needed expression and will continue to do so, and over the long haul of history we see the same impulses emerge, with first one then the other take precedence, and these impulses are driven by deeply instinctual human needs of security, freedom, and control. There are endless ways these needs can express themselves and so primal are they that we tend to believe the correctness of our own version with our entire beings.

The closer a view reflects our own, the more likely we are to support it, but necessarily our image of the other is distorted, fragmentary, and deeply biased. None of these should give us any confidence in our understanding of global events, and yet we judge, praising this revolution and that, endorsing change or decrying it.

It is human nature to observe and pass judgement; that’s how our ancestors decided that wild strawberries were good, while stinging nettle were not. For such simple and immediate analysis we are quite adept, and I would suggest fairly accurate. But as soon as it gets much more complex than this, and involves moral questioning, accuracy flies out the window. Objectivity rarely applies to human endeavours. Anthropologists long ago arrived at this awareness; most of the rest of us have not.

We in the West cannot judge the passing of the “Dear Leader” without Cold War Western eyes, any more than we can the rise of Iranian power. We must necessarily judge the unseating of Mubarak from our own small and idiosyncratic needs.

All this is human and inevitable, but what is lacking is humility and doubt. Various forums and presses are filled with analysis and opinion regarding the meaning and significance of the world’s upheavals, and the whole thing reeks of arrogance. There are an infinite number of ways one can approach and interpret events much simpler than the so-called Arab Spring, and we would be far better off to withhold our incessant chatter. Defining things makes us feel more secure but I doubt it really bring us closer to the truth.

According to Ecclesiastes, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” We don’t know, cannot understand, and far better that those of us who can go sit in a meadow and marvel at the beauty of a day.