“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”
William Blake.
This is going to be rather a ramble, hopefully one that is more coherent than not, but nevertheless a ramble. My reaction to the world we’re living in today, with the firehose of news, mostly bad, and the endless torrent of opinions pouring out on social media. So many people, myself included, with various degrees of success, shouting out into the virtual universe, here I am, please pay attention to me.
I began this ramble with a favorite line by William Blake that often pops into mind. I think of it often when reading whatever news story or opinion piece that comes to my attention, as a reminder that very little of what people write is reflective of reality. Of all the things that we think we know, virtually none of it is really knowable. So little of it is something we experience directly so that we can say, I saw that myself, or I tested that out and, sure, it really works, the evidence is there. Most everything we think is going on in the world is reported second hand (or third, or fourth, etc.) and you can’t assume it to be true. At best, you have to weigh the reliability of sources, and conclude that some things are, perhaps, more likely to be true than others.
The first gate is, of course, our own senses and their limitations. As suggested by the Blake quote, what we sense bears little relationship to reality. Everything we perceive is transmuted along the way. We don’t see, hear, smell, taste or feel anything directly at all, so we can’t know what they really are. Only the trail they leave as they get from outside to inside, assuming we are paying attention enough to notice them. On top of that, there’s all of our own preconceptions, which shape what we perceive into some picture or conclusion, that may or may not reflect some sort of reality. We are biased observers, at best, and anyone who doesn’t question themselves is an unreliable reporter.
The second gate is what we can observe first-hand (very little) versus what we have to take on faith from others (most everything). This applies to everything we think we know. I can know, for instance, with a fair degree of confidence that despite protestations to the contrary, my wife was snoring in bed last night because I woke up and heard it. What I don’t and can’t know for certain is nearly anything I read in the news. In our world today, like many others, I avidly read and try to stay on top of new about the wars in Ukraine and Iran. However, as I do so, I try to keep in mind, that when it comes to reports about war, the news is even more unreliable than about most other subjects (and having on occasion been involved in situations on various jobs that were reported on in the news, I know from first-hand experience, that little of what is reported is accurate). Misinformation has always been a tactic of warring parties, so I have little reason to believe anything said by “talking heads” on the news about what is really going on in Iran, Ukraine, Russia, or anywhere else where the players are motivated to lie. Knowing this, I try my best to parse through the news I happen to read, figure out whether or not sources have any reliability, and frame out some story or other – one that I know may or may not be real.
It is no different with all other things that, taken all together, make up my picture of the world. For instance, I have always had a strong interest in the sciences and am a sucker for all things scientific in nature, to the extent I can even understand them. Do I believe in quarks? Well, I don’t really understand what they are but it seems likely to me that they are something real given the general consensus of physicists in the field who have dedicated their lives to their field of endeavor and written studies that go through the gauntlet of fellow scientists (aka, scientific method) and come out the other end. But, even then, that doesn’t mean they are really right. After all, many scientific theories hung around, believed in by most for centuries, until someone wiser pointed out their fallacies. But analogous to how I digest the news, I always question the sources. Where is the information coming from and is there good reason to believe that source is more reliable than others.
But, then again, consensus is hardly an indicator of reality. Most people, for instance, have reached a consensus that somewhere or other in the universe there exists something they call God (or plural Gods) – a being (or beings) worthy of spending a great deal of time worshipping or thinking about or modifying their behavior to please (or displease). Well, that is one consensus opinion that never, from the earliest age I can remember, made the slightest bit of sense to me. I distinctly recall, sitting in temple with my family as a small child, wondering if all of the adults around me actually believed in the apparent nonsense that was coming from the rabbi standing in the pulpit. In the years since, largely motivated by the obsession so many people have with religion and the impact of that obsession on the lives of so many, I have read millions of words, arguing this way or that, on the subject – and always come to the same conclusion I intuited when I was six – namely, that the beliefs of every single religion, throughout the history of humanity, is all exceedingly unlikely to be a true reflection of reality. That said, coming around again to Blake’s beautiful sentence, I may well be missing out on the delightful interior reality of every little bird that flies by me. That part of it does seem more likely. Reality is far more than our senses can perceive. But turning to a God (or Gods) as an explanation of all that we cannot understand or perceive just seems to me to be weak thinking.
Well, that ramble took a different direction than where I started out – but so it goes. One thing leads to another. Back to the news. As “talking heads” on the news or on social media, who make a living by jolting up the adrenaline levels of their viewers or readers, come to my attention, I try my best to take a step back, take a deep breath, and not let myself get worked into a lather. They are motivated, by either greed or money, or greed for attention, to be provocative, but that doesn’t mean they have a clue. The opposite is more likely. Most lack the clarity of thought or self-reflection to deal with the complexity of reality and question their own opinions or perceptions of whatever subject they are going on about. I often find myself reading something and feeling, yes, this is right on target, only to find, on further consideration, that there’s less to whatever they were saying than was apparent upon first read. Or the opposite. My initial reaction is a negative one, but then, upon further reflection, I realize they might have more of a point than I gave them credit for at first glance. To make matters worse, as AI-generated slop increasingly dominates what algorithms feed to me on social media, what is really true recedes further and further out of grasp, like looking through the world through the wrong end of a telescope.
Although aware (often painfully so) that my personal joys and desires are accidental with no inherent meaning other than that they are mine, I plow on, occasionally expressing myself (as I am doing here) in words, but most often, spending my hours deciding on which next note is the right note to jot down on a staff. It may amount to little but whatever pleasure it gives to me (or to others) is enough. Reminiscent of another famous sentence, this one by Voltaire, that “we must cultivate our own garden.”
By nature, I tend more towards excitability than philosophy. It takes hard work for me to rein myself in and avoid allowing others who attempt to share their intense anxiety about life get to me. For sure, there are endless horrors going on in the world, no different (actually perhaps a bit less than in prior eras) than throughout human history. What to do with all of that information pouring in is the big dilemma. What, out of all that torrent of information and opinions, is actually real? Of that which is real, what can I actually do something about? And, if there is something to be done, what is that something?
As I reflect on all of this, to my own surprise, I have found that my world view has shifted as I’ve grown older. The firm opinions that I held for most of my adult life have changed. For one thing, I was long convinced, evidenced by my consistent votes for Democrats as opposed to Republicans, over 55 years of voting, that generally speaking, Democrats were wearing the white hats and Republicans were the bad guys in my filmic version of the world (oops, this ramble just migrated into politics). In my attempts to not immediately accept what “talking heads” from the left, who mostly held my sympathy, were saying and trying to come to my own independent conclusions, it has become increasingly apparent that, to turn to yet another quote, this one from Shakespeare, “a plague on both your houses” is applicable to today’s (and probably yesteryear’s) politics. Both on the right and the left, both sides are equally unreliable reporters of reality. In the world of politics, in an Orwellian fashion, black is white and white is black, and neither side holds a monopoly on that sort of thinking. In that world, and what version of this world has ever been different, tending one’s own garden does seem to be very sound advice. Live simply as one can, try to hold fast to what you value most, avoid spreading fear and anxiety, try to pierce through the thicket of misperceptions and outright lies to the extent possible, let others find their own path.
