Worldviews

Notice also that the crumbs of the past couple months (those leading up to and following from the crumb on “Parent Groups”), to say nothing of the crumbs of years past, rest on many values, critiques, and purposes not at all captured by my pedagogical concerns around technology addiction, consumption, and over- and under-control (see last crumb). These three concerns were chosen not because they are particularly central or important, but because they are accessible to the action of a relatively small group of parents.

 

But the ideas that I used as a path to the parent groups—the principle of experimentation; its purpose of restoring agency and self-determination over our social forms and ways of life; the double critique of radicalism and incremental reformism—all clearly entail other values and purposes, which operate at an entirely different level from the three pedagogical concerns. They are the conditions of one possible response to the pedagogical concerns; they tell us whether and how to address them; perhaps they even give us permission to contemplate them.

 

I discussed, in the crumb on “development of functions,” how the parent groups, once formed, would be well positioned to pursue other aims: shared labor, integrating age-groups, altering dynamics in extended families, etc. All these are further purposes, entailing other values and critiques. My discussions of conflict and how to navigate it and the challenges and powers of different phases of life imply yet others.

But all of these purposes and values and critiques fit together. They are not a random assortment. 

 

We sometimes imagine people’s beliefs as a series of checkboxes, like the search-parameters on a shopping website: one person chooses this set, another chooses that set, a third a third set; and they may agree or disagree on any given one. But we know this is not true. A person’s beliefs (and values and aims and critiques of her society) are part of her worldview, which will tend to have some sort of coherence to it. If she is a person with the time and calm and wherewithal to keep her eyes open and think for herself, they will spring from her perceptions of and reflections on the world; so they will be a coherent response to the world she finds herself in. If she is too busy, anxious, unhappy, distracted, deadened to think for herself, they will probably reflect the values and beliefs of whatever cultural-political milieu she finds herself in; in this case her views many not have real internal coherence, but they will certainly be a recognizable configuration. Of course, any real person will be some mixture of these two extremes.

 

What I want people to gather around is not a handful of individual aims, values, etc., but a worldview. But a worldview that is more perceived than received, the worldview of a calm and living mind not of one dizzy with rage and fear or dead with despair.

 

Here I admit to a controversial position: I think that the standard beliefs of any well-known position on the political spectrum are basically distorted and confused. Not only do these sets of beliefs not have internal coherence; the individual beliefs that make them up are all distorted by their weaponization in an inherently destructive culture war. I am not about to try to argue this on the level of particulars. I will only observe that any conversation that accepts and engages with the categories that define “political discourse” in America today is doomed: nothing interesting will be said, no one’s thinking will advance, no thought will occur to anyone that is not simply the doppelganger of an opposing thought from the other side. On an emotional level, such conversations, whether they are conducted between opposing views or consist entirely of affirmations among people who already agree, can produce nothing but more rage, righteous indignation, frustration, anxiety, despair—that is, more of the very same emotions that gave rise to this bad mode of discourse in the first place.

 

By a worldview, then, I mean not one of these but precisely what one can see (what I’ll admit I believe anyone can see) when they set aside their preoccupations and look with calm eyes at the world as it is. The first mark of such a worldview will be that it squarely fails to fit into any obvious political camp.

 

Notice that almost all the claims from the crumbs of the past two months—concerns about technology addiction and media consumption; the thoughts about control, supervision, and indulgence that I discussed in the last crumb; the longing for a community in which some of the old ways of sharing labor again become possible; the focus on our immediate lives rather than distant events; the sense of an urgent need to regain agency over our lives; a conviction that we need a big change but not a wiping away of everything so much as a new kind of step forward, which is also a kind of return—none of these is particularly left or right. Or rather most of them are both left and right: they would appeal, for example, both to a hippie and to a traditional conservative. I left out over-consumption, because that one depends on the language we choose. If we use words like “capitalist” and “consumerist” we are signaling left and will tend to alienate people from the right. But if we say instead that we should live more simply and more frugally, resist advertising, especially advertising aimed at children, stop dressing up our babies and toddlers like they were dolls—then this sounds no more left than right. Again, it sounds strangely both.

 

 

Is that strange? Maybe not. If I am right about these things, if they are the truth of our condition, then it should be no surprise that they are perceived by both right and left. Everyone can perceive the truth. It is when we begin to think and speak that we err and diverge into warring camps. (Emerson writes, “Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed.”) 

 

So I too err and diverge. These crumbs lead me away from the truth. In the loaf was the truth, but it will not come into the crumbs, or only tiny flakes of it. I do not claim that what I have written in these crumbs is the final, perfect, transcendental truth. Of course: no sane person claims that. I claim only that it is true in the ordinary way: not, on the one hand, that it is the last thing that ever should be said on its subject; nor on the other that it is a statement of arbitrary “personal taste”; but that it is an imperfect, human, fumbling attempt, subject to revision, but useful and good, a hint in the right direction, a response to a perception that I have not yet entirely forgotten and that others may recognize if they understand my language and read me in search recognition not disagreement. (“I would ask you to read [my book] with my eyes,” writes Gandhi.)

 

What varies is not the truth of our perceptions but the degree to which our words and thoughts are responses to those perceptions, the degree to which they are or are not swamped and distorted by rigid preconceptions, petty consistencies, paranoias, obsessions, vendettas, self-justifications, pride, guilt, self-deprecation. Sometimes we even think and speak before we perceive, think and speak so as not to perceive, so as to be shielded from perception—because it's exhausting; because it's outside of our control and never fits our ideas; because, habituated to living in closets, we're afraid to go outside. Sometimes we all do this.