small epiphany (personal)
June 4, 2007 by thinking girl
the other day, I received an email from a long-lost friend. Actually, this friend and I had broken up so to speak, and have been out of touch for two years, nearly. It was a difficult time, and in lots of ways, it continues to be difficult not to have her in my life. I’ve struggled a lot with why I felt I couldn’t be there for her, and what kind of person that made me, what kind of friend. I have also struggled with whether or not I judged my friend, too harshly… or misjudged her… and what kind of person that made me, what kind of friend. Was it my place to judge her actions by my code, my ethics? Was that really what I did? I know that I have continued to love her and wish her the very best in life, from afar. I know that I am not angry with her. And I have gathered myself up, and with the help of my best-sister-friend, have moved into a new place.
So, lately my friend and I have been in contact. I am about to move to her city, and to go to school to do a degree that she herself has done. She knew it was around the time I should be getting offers, and she emailed me to wish me luck, which opened the door to a new kind of conversation. The past month or so we’ve not been in contact, but the other day I heard from her. She seemed to be in a bit of a dark place, rock bottom if you like. She felt alienated and alone, and singly responsible for both.
And in reading what she had written, I began to understand something. I think that we lead the lives we believe we deserve. I don’t like to put it “the lives we WANT” - because I don’t think anyone WANTS to feel alone and small and afraid. BUT, I do think we live the lives that we believe we should lead, that we deserve, that we are worthy of - and this is how we attract things and people and events into our lives. We can never have the life we want without believing that we truly deserve it. These two things - our desires, and our belief that we deserve that which we desire - must be in alignment for a happy and successful life.
I believe that we are the architects of our own lives, in many ways. And I think that when we don’t believe that we deserve to have the things we want, even when we have worked really hard for those things, even when we already have what we want - we will end up sabotaging our efforts to have that which we desire, consciously or unconsciously.
I remember a couple years ago I took a course about the philosophy of religion. Something the prof said on the very first day of class really stuck in my craw, and I still think he’s dead wrong. He said, “We cannot change what we believe. We can only come to realize what we believe, and live accordingly.” (Actually, I don’t think he put it so eloquently as I just did! 
) I heartily disagreed with him, then and now. I think we absolutely CAN change our beliefs. And in fact, I think for some people, they MUST change their beliefs in order to live the life they want to lead.
And so, I guess the questions become NOT, “What do you want?” BUT RATHER, “What do you believe you deserve? Why? Why do you believe you deserve the life that you are already living? How can you come to a place where your belief in what you deserve and your desires are aligned?”
What do YOU think?
This post has a tremendous amount of merit. The cogwheels are turning in my brain, no doubt about it.
I think you’ve just hit the nail on the head of why so many people lead lives of “quiet desperation.” We get what we *think* we deserve.
Damn brilliant.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate with you a little bit
First I should say that I am keenly interested in how people come to be who they are, how they get to their present station in life, etc.
Before I came around to this paradigm shift in my world-view (i.e., metaphysical naturalism), I had a certain affinity for some of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, as well as atheist Existentialist philosophy a la Sartre. Rand once said “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” And of course Sartre, et al, said that since God is dead, all things are possible and the responsibility for our lives and for our beliefs is completely our own.
But my naturalistic world-view, based on what our most current science tells us about the world and about ourselves, shows me that there is no supernatural ’soul’ or ’self’ outside the causal chain, and thus no free will. Even William James once wondered:
“If a free act be a sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself onto me, how can ‘I’, the previous ‘I’, be responsible?”
And as the philosopher Galen Strawson put it:
“(1) You do what you do—in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you are. (2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain mental respects. (3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are. (4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.”
Strawson’s argument for (3) is based basically on this:
“For suppose you do want to acquire a want you haven’t got. The question is, where did the first want—the want for a want—come from? It seems it was just there, just a given, not something you chose or engineered. It was just there, like most of your preferences in food, music, footwear, sex, interior lighting and so on.”
It seems pretty air-tight to me, given the fact that I don’t countenance any supernatural mechanisms that are outside the chain of cause and effect. I usually tend to discount accounts of personal experience, but I meditate frequently, and I’ve experienced this ‘given-ness’ aspect of my thoughts in general. When you try to still your mind, when you try NOT to think, you can’t help but think. Thoughts simply arise, seemingly out of nowhere. I liken it to the Magic 8Ball where a message slowly appears out of the dark depths!
And I would say that our ‘beliefs’ arise from the way we reason about propositions. Anyone who holds a belief has reasons for that belief. But we can always ask how one arrives at those reasons; i.e., what are the reasons for the reasons? And so on. I think if we act like a toddler and keep asking the ‘why’ question, we eventually get to a point where we don’t have any further answer. We say something like, “Because I just do, that’s why!” And that brings us back again to Spinoza who said that, while we are fully conscious of our wishes and desires (and we could add beliefs here), we are ignorant of the (ultimate) reasons that lead us to wish and desire (and believe).
So in a round-about way, I guess I would say that we only proximately choose what we believe, but not ultimately. But I would say that we can certainly change our beliefs, but the chain of causes that led to this change of belief is fully determined, ultimately, by a confluence of our genetic predispositions as well as the way our brain has been shaped by our life experiences. Each of us has a unique filter through which we experience the world, and sometimes that filter can change. Sometimes it can’t. We all know people where we just scratch our heads and say, “Why can’t you just change?!?!”
One more thing. When you said that we attract certain things and people and events in our lives, I thought, “Has she been reading The Secret?? But you also said that we have a way of sabotaging ourselves despite our best intentions, and even sabotage what we desire most. That sounds very Jungian to me. His idea was that unless one has integrated one’s total personality in a balanced way, i.e, by acknowledging one’s good qualities as well as accepting one’s bad qualities, then one’s ’shadow’ (i.e., one’s ‘dark side’ personified, if you will) does indeed sabotage one’s best efforts.
While I now think most of Jung’s metaphysical musings are somewhat dubious, there may be some truth in it. I’ve had many experiences throughout my life where I’ve managed to screw up something really good - and I certainly didn’t mean to! Also, when I practice more of a mindfulness meditation, I am aware of competing streams of will, you might say, that many times seem to be all equally strong. I always wondered how it gets decided which will wins out. What is the final arbiter in that case? I don’t know…
Anyway, sorry for rambling. I love philosophy!!!
Best,
Juno
I think we absolutely CAN change our beliefs. And in fact, I think for some people, they MUST change their beliefs in order to live the life they want to lead.
For more information in this area, I would recommend the work of the psychologist Her (peer reviewed, highly acclaimed) work suggests (1) that your set of beliefs has a powerful effect on your output and goal achievement and (2) that your set of beliefs is highly malleable. So one can change from a less useful set of beliefs to one that helps you both feel better and do better at reaching your goals.
Crap, that didn’t work.
Here’s the link I was intending:
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/dweck.html
This really makes me ponder a lot. I admit.
I think I beleive I deserve the life I live…but still…I don’t know…i am lost in my thoughts…
I also know the person you’re referring to in this post, obviously, and I gotta say there is no better poster girl for proving this point.
As a personal aside, this would also explain why you had to sever ties with her. Not because you, or your best-sister-friend, have judged her for that single reprehensible act, but because her life has been a chain of bizarre (in my opinion) actions. Why did she never follow your advice? If what you say is true, it’s because she doesn’t believe she deserves a friend like you.
I agree that we tend to get the life we think we deserve. This explains why assholes with a strong sense of entitlement always rise to the top. But I’m not sure we can always change our own beliefs. I think it would be handy if we could, for the sake of relationships, jobs, etc. But in practice, it’s difficult and sometimes impossible.
Some people can’t see outside their own belief system to actually affect it. For instance, I was raised with a religious mom and an atheist dad, so I could easily think about beliefs in god. But for many others, considering believing or not believing just isn’t an option. It’s just not possible to alter the belief, even if the belief is harming them.
And beyond religion, I think there are many beliefs that are so deeply ingrained they won’t shift in this lifetime. Some people have an intellectual belief that they deserve good stuff, but a deeper belief that they deserve nothing - but they can’t see that. Their rationalizations are hiding their true selves from themselves.
And sometimes you do just got to cut your losses and move on rather than try to change someone’s beliefs about themselves that they possibly can’t see or can’t alter. Maybe it’s a matter that for some reason, the belief system is too important to let go of; it’s somehow perceived as necessary for immediate survival or in order to be a good person.
(I’m not really proving my point here, just throwing it out there. I can’t think of a solid example right now. Maybe later. )
HI .
Nice post. Easy for me to relate to at the moment with mum’s suicide being so close to my ‘belief system’(that is very much like yours) that was ironically taught to me by the very person who behaved in the polar opposite to that set of lessons (la mamma). You might say that this topic has been HOT on my list of thoughts, not just upon her death, but for a long time leading up to it in the observing of her ‘darkness’.
Clearly there is lots to be said, though my initial thought comes from the reading that I’ve been doing on the subject that is absolutely non-philosophy and/or non-psychology and that’s biochemical or the ecology of our make-up: our blood and how it effects our brains and consequential behaviour.
So ‘change’, I’ve learned, can happen on a simple biochemical level, before we even attempt to question and investigate and add to and subtract from our beliefs. Simply, you can talk and think all you like but if ‘change’ is not ‘in your blood’, then it won’t be in your behaviour.
On another, more personal level. I remember about ten minutes after we found our (we: me and brother) mum had died, we were sitting on her couch in the lounge room with the police fella there (an angel). We were sitting in silence. I said to my brother, “Shit Simon, our lives have just changed course entirely.” And he replied “Yep, and the change WILL be a good one ~ no one will be able to understand that we see our lives now as being so uttely %100 transformable in the best way, and all we don’t know is how good it’s going to be, because if it’s not, this could kill us.” He looked at me and we smiled at eachother knowing that we were about to begin the ride of our lives, and it would be tough, but worthwhile and, most significantly, that we had to give up any belief that we could control the details, instead keep focus on our capacity to have what we deserve. My point being, that for better of for worse, one of my beliefs is that trauma/shock/heart break CAN and MUST change you - and I’m reluctant to use this term for want of not being moralistic - for the better.
All depends on motive to me, more that belief. Belief can change, but motive must always stay the same: thriving, not just surviving.
Anyhoo.
Happy Learning!!
Thansk all.
Scarred - lives of quiet desperation, yes indeed. Also, I was watching some show last night and the plot included a woman who was being beaten by her husband. And this is exactly what I thought about - she didn’t think she deserved a better life. And then I began to think about pimps and other con artists, who seem to have an ability to recognize those who are most vulnerable, feed into that, and then exploit it.
Juno - the thing for me is that even if we cannot control who we are doesn’t excuse us from taking responsibility for both who we are and what we do from that point on. I’ll direct you to an old post of mine that, while the subject of the post itself seems kind of bizarre, throughout the comments a wonderful argument is made by one Mister Pregunto along just these lines.
I write a lot about oppression here, and social construction, which are part of what makes us who we are, and is pretty much totally out of our personal control. However, I still believe that we have free will, and so have a responsiblity to do waht we can to eliminate the forces of oppression in our lives and in the lives of others. I don’t think one has to have a belief in a soul or a higher power in order to believe in free will - I don’t believe in a higher power (not so sure about souls) and I still believe we have free will - nor does NOT believing in a higher power automatically mean determinism - one can just as easily argue that a higher power has pre-determined everything about everything and no choice ever truly exists because our paths are always laid before our feet before we begin our journey.
Also, incidentally, I don’t believe science to be objective in the least, nor does it show us a complete and final TRUTH about anything.
I’ve always believed that we draw things into our lives, that there are no coincidences, etc. The Secret is a nice little pop-cultural bite-sized morsel of that - while I don’t know whether it’s 100% true, and its rather materialistic message seems a little much, the general principle makes sense to me. And yes, I am kind of an old-school fan of Jung.
Tyler D - thanks for the link, very interesting article.
Matthew - yes, I agree with you, a pattern that totally seems to support my idea here. And, on the flip side of your point about her not believing she deserved a friend like me, also I think it says something about what I believe I deserve, too.
Sage - thanks so much for your comment, great to see you. I read your recent posts the other day, but haven’t been over to comment yet. MY feed burner is totally backed up right now. Belledame and BFP and Nezua and Amanda and Ren just post so GD often, I can’t keep up! Anyhoo…
I sympathize with your point about it changing one’s beliefs being really really hard. I think that’s absolutely true - it is really hard for some people. I think about people who’ve suffered abuse their whole lives, from the time they were small children. That’s some deeply ingrained shit. I think also about social construction of identity - it’s not exactly easy to shake the labels we are given by this society. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Oh yes, the rationalizations. I chuckled when I read that, and thought “wait, does Sage know my friend, too?”
And yes, I agree with this: “And sometimes you do just got to cut your losses and move on rather than try to change someone’s beliefs about themselves that they possibly can’t see or can’t alter.”
I don’t think we actually can change someone’s beliefs about themselves. And trying to is futile. That kind of work is for that person and his or her professional therapist. It’s too personal, that kind of work. And so, the sane person moves on.
I struggled with that, because I felt like I was abandoning my friend in a time when she most needed support. But, I came to understand that all the support I had already given her over the years had not made a difference. So what help could I give her then that I hadn’t already given her and that she refused? And really, the same advice I’ve always given is still applicable today. Ultimately, the work can only be done by the one in the skin.
Oh Daniela! thank you for sharing - brilliant, this: “for better of for worse, one of my beliefs is that trauma/shock/heart break CAN and MUST change you - and I’m reluctant to use this term for want of not being moralistic - for the better.
All depends on motive to me, more that belief. Belief can change, but motive must always stay the same: thriving, not just surviving.”
Interesting about the biochemistry. very interesting.
“Scarred - lives of quiet desperation, yes indeed. Also, I was watching some show last night and the plot included a woman who was being beaten by her husband. And this is exactly what I thought about - she didn’t think she deserved a better life. And then I began to think about pimps and other con artists, who seem to have an ability to recognize those who are most vulnerable, feed into that, and then exploit it. ”
Yes, that’s just it. And it’s a vicious cycle: the people who first acquire the belief that they “don’t deserve any better” usually get it because someone initially gave them *lots and lots* of reason to think that–frequently through child abuse and neglect, and watching abuse and neglect. Kids exposed to frequent domestic violence, for example. Most women caught in a domestic violence situation get there because as kids they were exposed to watching someone–usually their father–beat the *crap* out of their mother. It’s modeled for them, and it’s most often *generational.* The kids grow up with the feeling/reality modeled for them that “they don’t deserve any better.” They *internalize* this. Then, they go out and replicate it. If they *do* manage not to get physically abused or abusive, they go on to get *verbally* abused or abusive, because they’re still caught in the mindset “I don’t deserve any better.” The pimps, the con men, and other fraudsters and mind game artists *sense* this, because they’ve got a *radar* for it. Then they pounce/lure the person, who becomes a victim all over again. Ad nauseum, ad infinitum. The ONLY known way to break the cycle for the victim is for the victim to get into therapy, either group or individual or both, and to locate the programming and conditioning of “I don’t deserve any better”–and get rid of it. And this usually takes awhile; often, to do it completely, it takes years, for the reason that Sage mentions:
“And beyond religion, I think there are many beliefs that are so deeply ingrained they won’t shift in this lifetime. Some people have an intellectual belief that they deserve good stuff, but a deeper belief that they deserve nothing - but they can’t see that. Their rationalizations are hiding their true selves from themselves.
And sometimes you do just got to cut your losses and move on rather than try to change someone’s beliefs about themselves that they possibly can’t see or can’t alter. Maybe it’s a matter that for some reason, the belief system is too important to let go of; it’s somehow perceived as necessary for immediate survival or in order to be a good person.”
Let’s take a last look at that statement: “Maybe it’s a matter that for some reason, the belief system is too important to let go of; *it’s somehow perceived as necessary for immediate survival* [emphasis mine] or in order to be a good person.”
Sage is incredibly right here. Allow me to quote from Dr. Patrick Carnes on his website, SexHelp.com:
“These people are all struggling with traumatic bonds. Those standing outside see the obvious. All these relationships are about some insane loyalty or attachment. They share exploitation, fear, and danger. They also have elements of kindness, nobility and righteousness. These are all people who stay involved or wish to stay involved with people who betray them. Emotional pain, severe consequences and even the prospect of death do not stop their caring or commitment. Clinicians call this “traumatic bonding.” This means that the victims have a certain dysfunctional attachment that occurs in the presence of danger, shame, or exploitation. There often is seduction, deception or betrayal. There is always some form of danger or risk.
Some relationships are traumatic. Take, for example, the conflictual ties in movies like The War of the Roses or Fatal Attraction. What Lucy does to Charlie Brown (in the comic strip, Peanuts) every year when she holds the football for him to kick is a betrayal we have grown to expect. Abuse cycles such as those found in domestic violence are built around trauma bonds. So are the misplaced loyalties found in exploitive cults, incest families, or hostage and kidnapping situations. Codependents who live with alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, or sex addicts, and who will not leave no matter what their partners do, may have suffered enough to have a traumatic bond.”
Traumatic bonds are induced frequently by original abuse; the victim picks up the idea, “I’m worthless,” and this idea means that *any* worth comes from the attentions of the abuser–hence the victim sticking closer than glue to the abuser. It’s SICK, but it’s true. I know; I *was* there. Still have some remnants in my system, but I’m working them way out. It’s slow going, and in the process I tend to alienate people. A shame, but there it is.
I’ll post the link from his website:
http://www.sexhelp.com/case.cfm
I particularly urge people to read this link and read about Cheryl, the woman with a MASTER’S degree who had been in *four* marriages, each with domestic violence from each husband. The last husband sexually tortured her. IN SPITE OF ALL THIS, and as horrified as she was at who her husband was, she STILL COULDN’T break off ties to him. It has been my experience that most people in our society judge the Cheryls of this world very harshly. *I* don’t, because I had a much, much milder version of what she had–traumatic bonding. I’m getting over it now, thank God, because something turned over in my head because of the therapy and I had my own epiphany, “I deserve better than this.”
But I urge people to realize that traumatic bonding can happen to *anyone* given the right circumstances, timing, and state of vulnerability. Another term for it is “Stockholm Syndrome.” It’s happened to some the toughest POWs; hell, in my opinion it happened to Simon Wiesenthal! When he was alive Simon Wiesenthal was interned in Janowska ( a concentration camp) by the Nazis. AFTER WWII, Simon Wiesenthal became the premier Nazi hunter in the world, in his lifetime bringing over 1100 Nazis to justice. Wiesenthal in his public life exhibited at least *four* of the symptoms that Dr. Carnes quotes on his website for traumatic bonding (reference is the link I provided):
“When you want to be understood by those who clearly do not care.”
“When you choose to stay in conflict with others when it would cost you nothing to walk away.”
“When you persist in trying to convince people that there is a problem and they are not willing to listen.”
“When you continue contact with an abuser who acknowledges no responsibility.”
When I read his one of his biographies, “Nazi Hunter,” by Alan Levy, Wiesenthal (to me) shows clearly these four characteristics. It took people in Europe and the world a long time to understand Wiesenthal in his drive to bring monsters to justice; in the initial years, he was told so often to just forget what happened. He was frequently in conflict with conservative Eurpean politicians, some of whom had former Nazi ties; he could have just walked away from the conflicts, and it wouldn’t have cost him anything. He spent the rest of his post-war life trying to convince people that there was a need to bring former Nazis involved with the Final Solution to justice, and still *to this day* there’s a subset of the population that views Wiesenthal as a troublemaker who couldn’t let go of the past. And Wiesenthal continued contacts with former Nazis; he hunted them incessantly in order to bring them to justice, yes, but he often got his greatest tips from former Nazis who carried grudges against other Nazis–who would *contact Wiesenthal* just to drop a dime on their partners in crime. So in his own way, Wiesenthal most likely had a good case of traumatic bonding going. The Western world needs a lot more Simon Wiesenthals, though, than the “don’t make waves” crowd. He brought *over 1100* former Nazis to justice; that’s 1100 less monsters to prey on people in this world. He couldn’t have done this if he had taken the socially-acceptable path of “least resistance.”
When I grow up, I want to be a Simon Wiesenthal.
hi again.
IN RESPONSE TO SCARRED and TRAUMA BONDING:
Interesting, and vital info for me to read this post giving vocabulary to a ‘thing’ that has lived in my familial zone for a long long time, though I stood outside it; the trauma bond. Thanks for the definition.
This post, as an adjunct to the above comment that I made yesterday, sees one full picture, with the insertion of S’s above post.
Fascinatingly, my mother had 3 female family members who since her death have had no contact with me or my brother and have perpetuated horrid lies about me and my brother amongst mum’s community. They have provided no support for us and breathed contempt over our parent’s memory. But they ‘know not what they do’.
I have chosen to leave them be and let them make whatever drama they need, because it’s such a pile of crap that I can’t even stand near it.
These 3 females, and my mother, I came to see some time ago, have a trauma bond. And I could feel it, and I saw it and it was soooo strong that my brother and I couldnt believe that it even over-rode our bond with our mother, in that mum’s loyalty always stayed with her co-abused.
Without boring you with details, in a nut-shell: my father, my brother and I hit the brick wall of the trauma bond over and over and over again, even to the point of banging on the walls while she killed herself.
Fucking incredible to learn these things. Shit I feel like a child, just learning how to eat. Humanity, hey … what a wild aray of shit and wonder you are.
Toodle-pip.
Thinking Girl -
I didn’t mean to imply that we don’t or shouldn’t take responsibility for our choices; or rather, that others shouldn’t hold us responsible for our choices. Even though I believe that individuals aren’t self-caused or self-made, I believe that individuals need to be held responsible for their actions in order to shape the kind of behavior we all (mostly) in a civil society agree we want. You could call it a ‘do-as-you-would-be-done-by’ ethic, to keep things simple.
To respond generally to Mister Pregunto’s comments in your other post, I would say that there is no doubt that humans deliberate and make choices. We all choose based on our unique mental filter, which is fully a product of our genetic dispositions combined with the way our brain has been shaped (via synaptic connections and patters, neurochemical levels, etc.) by our experiences throughout life. And I don’t doubt that we ‘feel’ we have total control over our will, or over the ‘impediments over oneself’. (As an aside, I just published a blog entry about dogs and their ability to ‘deliberate’ and ‘choose’.)
And I agree that, for most of us, our choices do ’suffer limits’. I can’t choose to fly by the power of my arms alone, even if I really want to. That’s a silly example, I know. But I also can’t choose to go to see shows on Broadway every weekend because I’m a lowly dog guide trainer and I don’t get paid a fortune. I also can’t choose to be a mathematician - I have no aptitude for calculus or differential equations, etc. I must note, however, that there are those who believe that they can mold a person to be whatever they wish. To that, I would say read Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate. He successfully puts the lie to the myth of the tabula rasa.
I also agree that one must identify what is wrong before one can change it. But this says nothing about traditional free will. A person can be fully determined to think in such a way that they are able to identify what is wrong, as well as having the ability to change it.
But the alternative to determinism is indeterminism. But indeterminism doesn’t provide us with the free will we think we have and want. It only provides randomness. I’d be interested in hearing why you believe in free will….
On a final note, you are right to say that a ‘higher power’ could pre-determine our lives. That’s a very Calvinistic, predestination theology. But my naturalism also tells me there’s no god - god is superfluous; and therefore no divine pre-destination or determinism.
Oh, one more final note
While specific scientists may not be ‘objective’, the scientific method is a mechanism that more or less insures an objective view of reality - though maybe not a ‘ding as sich’ view as Kant noted. And I would add that scientific knowledge is almost constantly evolving as we gain new knowledge and insight, or more precise ways to measure what it is we are observing/testing.
OK, I’ve had a little too much wine and now I’m just rambling. Though I look forward to continuing our philosophical conversations
Best,
Juno
Scarred - I second the thanks for that info on trauma bonding. fascinating.
D - glad that made sense for you. sounds like an apt description of what you had going on there with the aunties. yikes. Again, I’m sorry. It’s enough to lose your mom, but to have all this BS crop up as a result is utterly foolish.
Juno - I don’t find free will to be incopmatible with determinism. I think what you and many many philosophers before you have done is set up a false dichotomy between free will and determinism. Like I said, compatibilism. Check out this link for more.
Also, I find determinism to be far too nihilistic, even for me, the Nietzsche lover of all time.
I guess I should say that I prefer to remain agnostic on the subject of a higher power, although I often identify for ease of conversation as an atheist. I think knowledge of a higher power is an epistemological limitation. We cannot know for certain whether or not one exists, so the most logical position is that of agnosticism. So, that’s where I’ll officially hang my hat, but I’m a heavy leaner toward atheism.
I do not for one second believe that there is anything even remotely close to objectivity going on in science. I laugh at the idea! In fact, I’m writing my thesis right now about that very topic - standpoint theory. All knowledge is socially situated, because all knowers are socially situated, and simply claiming that a scientific investigator has achieved complete neutrality through a shedding of his or her standpoint in order to achieve a disembodied view from nowhere is not true, and it’s not possible. All scientists are situated, and all knowledge is generated from specific social locations. Also, social structures and institutions created by the dominant social class are imbued with the values and interests of that class, and thus are hardly neutral either. Science is one such institution. And in order to see just where science’s interests and values lie, simply take a look at the stats: a shockingly low number of women and people of colour work in professional science and math careers. Science is a white male hegemonic socially constructed institution. Check out this post I wrote a while back on this topic.
sorry if that was a bit intense, I’ve been reading, writing, and thinking about this non-stop for the past several days - and weeks really. Anyway, I’ll likely publish some of my work on my thesis here when it’s completed.
I can see where there is room for subjectivity in science - we are all human beings, but there are plenty of objective facts uncovered in science and used in science.
Newton’s equations (and then Eistein’s modification of them) actually WORK. You can build things based on them that work. This computer I’m typing on right now functions because of scientific principles discovered and put to use by various engineers. No matter what your ’standpoint’ e=(gamma)mc(^2). So saying there’s nothing even close to objectivity in science is a patently false statement. What makes science so useful is that it DOES work, no matter who you are. One of the most important part of any science work is replication. You can be subjective all you want, but if others can’t replicate your results, it is thrown out the window. Science may not be perfect, certainly the people who perform it aren’t perfect, but one’s standpoint simply can’t alter the fundamentals of the universe (Schroedinger’s Cat notwithstanding…
Now, in “softer” sciences (which some would say aren’t even real science because you really can’t replicate results or necessarily even tell what is going on) like social sciences and pscyhology, etc, I can see where what you say is important and standpoints matter, but not in physics, chemistry, etc. Water is going to boil at 100 degrees celsuis at sea level temperature and pressure no matter what your race, creed, religion, or favorite baseball team.
everything is context-specific. including more varied standpoints will provide a clearer picture, and more objectivity, always. denying that a scientific investigator has a standpoint, asserting that they have achieved an objective stance before during and after the scientific investigation they have undertaken, quite simply limits human knowledge. the knowledge that is gained from overlapping analyses beginning in multiple locations is more complete.
“Water is going to boil at 100 degrees celsuis at sea level temperature and pressure no matter what your race, creed, religion, or favorite baseball team.”
Well, the steam sure boiled between *my* ears when the Twins can’t even get past the Division Title this decade.
(Sorry, DBB, I felt an irresistible urge to tease you. Don’t mind me.:))
A great article and discussion!
I think it’s definitely true that if you aren’t confident that you deserve more, it’s unlikely that you get a better life. Self-esteem is crucial. But vice versa is not always true, sense of entitlement doesn’t guarantee you a successful life.
If you are/have been unconditionally loved by someone (most likely to be parents) it would be the best for maintaining healthy self-esteem… otherwise I believe we can change our belief system, though revaluation of values can sometimes be hard because some values are unconscious and visceral. It’s so true that “some people have an intellectual belief that they deserve good stuff, but a deeper belief that they deserve nothing”.
Sometimes some people may not even have an intellectual belief that they deserve better. Many people base their self-worth on who they are; if you value something much (e.g. religious values, intelligence…
and if you don’t/can’t live up to the standards you value (e.g. tempted by alcohol/bad grades at uni) you can “intellectually” lose self-esteem. In this case you might not even want revaluation of values just to make you happy at the expense of your intellectual/moral principle.
As for the objectivity of science, at least it aspires to be value-free and a rigid scientific method is meant to achieve it. However, I think there can be bias in what sort of researches is conducted and what not because of the male/white dominance (capitalist influence is important I think, it means scientific researches that will make more money for companies will be prioritised).
Natural phenomena that are “proven” in the rigid scientific researches are objective. However, the statement “Water is going to boil at 100 degrees Celsius” is more precisely “a substance with chemical formula H2O is going to boil at the temperature which we call 100 degrees Celsius under a pressure of what we call “standard” atmosphere”. This mere natural fact is scientifically objective. However, the fact that we use the temperature scale that originates from the water’s melting temperature as 0 degree and boiling temperature as 100 degrees is affected by the societal values that regard water more important than other substances. The fact that Celsius assumed atmospheric pressure of 1013.25 hectopascals (“ standard atmosphere”) when he calculated the melting and boiling point of water is directly caused by the circumstance that he lived in Sweden not in Peru. If Incan scientists developed the temperature scale in Cusco they would’ve used far lower atmospheric pressure as standard and “100 degrees” (as the water’s boiling point) would have meant lower temperature. I’m not really saying here that science is entrenching the oppression of the minorities, but the interpretation of natural phenomena can be influenced by social construction as I cited above.
Just one more thought, when Luce Irigaray calls e=mc^2 a “sexed equation”, she’s basing the argument on the assumption that privileging something fast is masculine. Why is it masculine? Isn’t she rather enforcing a socially constructed gender role that regards something fast/the speed of light ‘masculine’?
DDB: “there are plenty of objective facts uncovered in science and used in science.” True, but let’s not forget what some call the “lamp-post theory” (if you lose your keys outside on a moonless light, the first place to look should be under the lamp-post, because in the unlikely event that they are there, at least you will be able to spot them): science is limited by where scientists look for results, which is based on years of subjectivity.
As for “soft” sciences, there are a lot of these (e.g. lingustics) where results can be replicated.
As for changing, or choosing for that matter, our beliefs, it usually comes, as the title of the post says, through a sort of epiphany, of revelation. Rarely through reason or logic. So when it comes to changing other people’s, I tend to agree that you can’t. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t try to help the person, albeit in a limited way, towards an epiphany, by making the tools for such a realization available. There’s more chance of doing that by showing trust, than by confrontation.
But, as I said, that is limited. And we sometimes need to cut our losses and bail out of a relationship, and maybe come back later (as I have also recently done). But that can be particularly difficult because we tend to be in a similar situation towards that person: our reaction is often to have faith that the person will “come to their senses,” will see the truth in our arguments. It takes a big kick in the ass to get rid of this faith.
I really like the idea of traumatic bonds. And Daniela, I agree, “trauma/shock/heart break CAN and MUST change you, for the better.” It WILL change you, that’s for sure, so why shouldn’t it be, in the end, for the better. I’ve been living through this for more than two years, and I can truely say that the worst experience in my life has made me, in some ways, a better man (even if, in a way, part of me will always be reelling from the blow).
Very interesting discussion.
“heart break CAN and MUST change you”
This, I think is so true. At my grandmother’s funeral my Aunt spoke and said something I’ll always remember. (For quick background: my grandmother lost her son when he was a baby. When we were going through her things after she died, we found in her purse his picture and birth certificate - he had been dead for 40 years or something, and she had been carrying this around. She was a kind, caring person, always volunteering with this or that organization, but also suffering from bouts of depression. It was only when she became ill that she started fighting to live after years of wanting to die.) So anyways, the line was: “when a heart breaks, it opens”. The pain of a vulnerable and open heart can either cause a reaction largely due to fear, resulting in bitterness, or alternatively, a broken heart can become a “force for love in this world”.
My personal experience with trauma (including, interestingly, traumatic bonding which I can tell you is very real) - well, the healing from it - is exactly what sparked my political consciousness. I came to understand from a deep and personal place what it means to be controlled, powerless, marginalized.
But it is also easy to go the other way, and feel like to protect oneself a good offence is, as they say, the best defence. The personal truly is political, isn’t it? I recently posted on something similar here.
This is something I’m still working through, because I feel we have less control over our beliefs than we often think, but at the same time, exercising what control we DO have is empowering.
Foucault’s relation of knowledge to power is important to bring into this conversation, I think. We can make our personal salad of beliefs from what’s available on the salad bar, but we can’t really go outside the ingredients that are available - we don’t even know what our own cultural limitations are, until something else comes along.
I have much more disjointed commentary to make, but running out of time. Great discussion though.
Yes, this is a great discussion! I second Red Jenny, both in that sentiment, and in a personal experience of something like this - traumatic bonding - sparking for me a greater political consciousness.
TG - I suspect I am rather less of a Jung fan than you, and that I am very suspicious of The Secret-type sentiments. Partly because it seems so convenient to the dominant culture of the first world (especially the materialism promoted by so many new-age theories like the Law of Attraction etc - maybe it would be more accurate to say that the materialism is a sort of derivative degeneration away from the spiritual aspect, but I’m not so sure) and partly because I get somewhat confused by the quasi scientific claims…
like, in the Secret (or maybe in the Bleep film, I get mixed up with those two) this whole thing about WHY we attract certain things to us - I think they say ‘positive attracts positive’ but I just cannot understand the science claims here. What scientific law is it supposed to be based on (in nature)? Am I just being really dense? (Physics = not my strong point). If anyone knows, please tell me! I always thought opposites attract, not like for like!
Liberallatte:
“when Luce Irigaray calls e=mc^2 a “sexed equation”, she’s basing the argument on the assumption that privileging something fast is masculine. Why is it masculine? Isn’t she rather enforcing a socially constructed gender role that regards something fast/the speed of light ‘masculine’?”
From my understanding of Irigaray (admittedly, a bit hazy and in translation) her work is primarily critiquing language, which she calls ‘phallologocentric’. So I would wager that her criticism is not that priviledging something fast is wrong due to the inherent ‘masculinity’ of fastness, but that she sees the problem to be precisely the presumption itself - i.e. she’s critiquing both the fact that our language and culture associates masculinity with certain binaries in the first place, and the fact that those things associated with masculinity are placed ‘higher’ in the hierarchy of cultural binaries.
Yes, a great discussion!
Thinking Girl - I wanted to clear up my view on free will/determinism. I, too, believe that determinism and free will are compatible, provided we use a proper definition of ‘free will’. I believe that, so far, science has shown us that determinism is true; I know Hume said that just because determinism may have always been true in the past, doesn’t mean it will be true in the future. Or something like that. Anyway, I don’t believe humans have ‘contra-causal’ free will. The brain is a physical organ, and is thus subject to physical, deterministic laws - quantum indeterminacy wouldn’t give us any freedom, it would only give us randomness. But my best layperson’s guess is that all of the indeterminate (or random) quantum events get sort of leveled-out or canceled out on the macro-level of our awareness.
So my definition of free will, like Schopenhauer’s, is that a person can certainly do what she wills to do, but she cannot determine what she wills. In other words, we are free to perform any voluntary action within our physical capabilities (e.g., we can’t fly, even if we really want to), but we are entirely the product of deterministic forces. But with that type of free will, we are still able to hold each other responsible for our actions, because our actions flow only from us. So we are proximately responsible - though not ‘ultimately’ responsible.
I love Nietzsche, too, so I think it’s funny that you dislike determinism. I can understand an initial aversion to it; but what’s the alternative? Randomness? If that’s the case, I’d have a greater fear that my fellow citizens would be acting unpredictably and randomly. The reason we can hold people responsible for their actions is because we assume they have reasons for their actions - we implicitly assume the truth of determinism.
As far as your agnosticism goes, I of course agree that nothing can ultimately be proved. We are not omniscient. But I think we can be justified in assigning probabilities to certain things. Is it probable that if I drop the glass I’m holding now that it would fall upwards instead of downwards? We can’t prove that gravity exists, or that it will always act in the same way. I know I can’t prove that a god doesn’t exist, but I think it’s highly improbable that one does. And even if there was actual evidence of such a being, I would still have to ask what created it. Where did that being come from? And if someone says that it always existed and it has no beginning or end, I could just as easily say that the physical universe has always existed with no beginning or end. Maybe ‘big bangs’ happen all the time in a sort of ’super-universe’.
So I have no problem calling myself an atheist. I simply have no belief in any gods. As a metaphysical naturalist, I further don’t believe that there is anything supernatural. I believe that nature is all there is. However, since I consider myself to be a true skeptic, I remain open to possibilities. If there is convincing evidence of a supernatural realm, then I would be forced to alter my belief. To date, there has been no convincing evidence.
And I also agree that each scientist brings to the table a certain mental framework or world-view through which they interpret their results. There’s no question about that. But I think the mechanism of the scientific method provides a safeguard, or at least a system of checks and balances. For example, if a Hindu scientist performs an experiment and arrives at certain chauvinistic conclusions, a Muslim scientist can try and duplicate the Hindu scientist’s experiments. Of course, even if the Muslim scientist does in fact duplicate the results of the Hindu scientist, there’s still a problem of interpretation. But if they both publish in peer-reviewed journals, there will be a more or less satisfactory (and presumably objective) interpretation of the results by many other scientists of many other stripes around the world.
Regarding you accurate claim that there are more male scientists than female scientists, I’m not sure what is the reason for that. Didn’t the President of Harvard or Yale or someplace get into some hot water over that issue? I’ll try and find the link…
That’s all for now. I have to go walk may dog
Best,
Juno
Brain, I have to say I hate The Secret. I find it terribly disturbing, and of course, inaccurate. I think it is simply another way for privileged people to feel like they deserve what they have (the corollary of which is that marginalized people also attract/are responsible for their own oppression). For instance, did a rape victim attract rape into her life by somehow thinking rape-attracting thoughts?
However, I think that being anti-Secret doesn’t necessarily lead me to dismiss TG’s statement “we lead the lives we believe we deserve” as long as we ignore the implicit “always” in that statement (i.e. we don’t always lead the lives we believe we deserve - terrible lives happen to people who have strong self-esteem, and good lives happen to people who are very insecure).
I do not think we attract certain people or events into our lives simply by our thoughts, but that our chance of stumbling upon certain things may increase based on where we situate ourselves. So, for example, the likelihood of being rich increases when one has social contact with rich people - a person growing up in a wealthy family would have more contact with, hang out in the same place as, and feel more comfortable among millionaires than a person who grew up in a trailer park, on average. So the wealthy person, expecting a certain kind of life, is likely to get it. But then again, if that person grew up poor and insecure but made it rich (say, was ‘discovered’ as a supermodel) perhaps they start to feel they deserve success only after several years of it. Did they attract their success by their belief in what they deserve, or did their success give them that belief?
Another example, victims of domestic violence tend to have low self-esteem - this is a correlation. Did a victim have such poor self-image before her experience, or was it a result of the abuse and put-downs? Does she lead the life she believes she deserves (did she choose this life?), or did she come to believe her life was what she deserves because of her situation - because of being constantly beaten down?
Brain; “her criticism is not that priviledging something fast is wrong due to the inherent ‘masculinity’ of fastness, but that she sees the problem to be precisely the presumption itself”; thank you for your succinct and coherent explanation. So does it mean she wouldn’t have opposed e=mc^2 if our language and culture didn’t associate fastness with masculinity? I just can’t support difference feminism which I think entrenches the social construction of gender, and when I read about the Irigaray’s theory somewhere it sounded to me as such.
Juno; “a person can certainly do what she wills to do, but she cannot determine what she wills” Sorry but I fail to understand how this can be a definition of free will. If “what she wills to do” is not what was determined by her but what was pre-determined beyond her control and transplanted into her mind by someone/something else, does she really have a free will over her actions (which are determined by her will which is not determined by her)? I don’t have enough knowledge to argue if science has proven determinism or not, but determinism is not only nihilistic but horrifying, spine-chilling for me…
liberallatte -
Let me see if I can explain myself better. The traditional view of free will says that we are not always subject to causality; our decisions are not subject to causality; we are able to cause things to happen without ourselves being caused in turn. But since we’re all talking about Nietzche, I’ll quote him on the subject:
“The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.”
Of course, Nietzsche wasn’t known for his tact
I, too, thought that determinism was horrifying at one point. But I don’t anymore. I still feel like I have free will; but that feeling is gradually going away - various meditation exercises seem to help with that.
Here are two articles that may help quell your fear of determinism and/or fatalism:
Juno
Hmmm…my links didn’t seem to work. Try this:
here
and here
Red Jenny - yeah, I’m similarly confused on the notions of believing one deserves/deserving. I didn’t read TG as endorsing the Secret - rather as saying that The Secret is illustrative of something that is more widely true (although maybe The Secret -type explanations as to WHY this is true is inaccurate).
I need to think this through more before I can form more coherent thoughts on it!
Liberallatte - “So does it mean she wouldn’t have opposed e=mc^2 if our language and culture didn’t associate fastness with masculinity?”
I think what Irigaray is objecting to is not the scientific ‘truth’ of e=m^c in the way a scientist might think of it, but the framing of knowledge itself within western cultural discourse. It’s not that she would have been OK with fastness if fastness were somehow thought of as feminine but rather that, for Irigaray, ALL knowledge (in the sense of that which is invested with authority by the culture) is attached to masculinity, and femininity serves as a functional ‘other’. For Irigaray, the ‘feminine’ is an empty category in western canonical thought. So I think Irigaray can’t really be called a difference feminist or a cultural feminist - she isn’t promoting ‘feminine’ qualities over ‘masculine’ ones, or even saying that there is such a thing as femininity (in the sense that she doesn’t say science, for example, would need to include that for a whole view or anything as far as I can see).
Hmm. Here’s a clearer example of someone else’s summation of Irigiray’s position vis a vis the language:
“Since Irigaray agrees with Lacan that one must enter language (culture) in order to be a subject, she believes that language itself must change if women are to have their own subjectivity that is recognized at a cultural level. She believes that language typically excludes women from an active subject position. Further, inclusion of women in the current form of subjectivity is not the solution. Irigaray’s goal is for there to be more than one subject position in language.”
and a link to the online exegesis:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/irigaray.htm#SH5a
Actually, that website makes reference to what, I think, you’re talking about: the tendency to interpret Irigiray as essentialist or as enforcing socially constructed gender roles. If you look under the section called ‘Strategic essentialism’ it mentions that the debate around that particularly in the US. I never really read her that way, but I guess it depends on how far you think she is successful in her argument for mimesis as a feminist/subversive strategy.
OK, hope that helps.
Shit! I just saw that I spelt Irigaray wrong twice in that last post - ironic, in the light of her arguments about language.
Thinking Girl -
By the way, I gave you a plug on my latest blog post.
Though you might not agree with what I said there
Best,
Juno
Juno; thanks for the explanation. I don’t believe in such an extreme form of ‘free will’ that we are free from any external influences. So probably it means I’m a compatiblist…
Brain; thanks for the point, probably her true intention was to use essentialism ’strategically’ to further her anti-essentialist goals, but I think it can be highly misleading to many non-philosophers in the public…
On the one hand i sympathise but on the other hand i think there is a danger of letting people like that off the hook.
The Prophet Muhammad said that oppression was caused by two people 1.) the oppressor and 2.) the oppressed people who allowed the oppressor to do the oppression.
They are two sides to the same coin IMO. My mother in law allowed her daughters to be sexually and physically abused and tortued with some ordeals lasting as long as 3 days for a period of 20 years. Now i know how tough it is for a woman to leave a situation like that, i know that she is scared of what may happen if she tries to leave and whatnot. I know also that there is not, nor was not adequate means to help women get away from the domestic violence environement. BUt still despite that - there was options for her. There were womens refuges (not enough etc), there was people from her own family that wouldve helped. But ultimately she chose to stay with a man that was abusing his daughters on a daily basis for a period of 20 years.
So whilst he has ‘blood on his hands so to speak’ so does she, she was complicit in what happened in that household.
“On the one hand i sympathise but on the other hand i think there is a danger of letting people like that off the hook.
The Prophet Muhammad said that oppression was caused by two people 1.) the oppressor and 2.) the oppressed people who allowed the oppressor to do the oppression.”
This is a very true statement, and I agree!
“My mother in law allowed her daughters to be sexually and physically abused and tortued with some ordeals lasting as long as 3 days for a period of 20 years.”
Oh, man, that is just *SICK!*
“Now i know how tough it is for a woman to leave a situation like that, i know that she is scared of what may happen if she tries to leave and whatnot. I know also that there is not, nor was not adequate means to help women get away from the domestic violence environement. BUt still despite that - there was options for her.”
That’s very, very true. When it gets to the point of collusion, one has lost innocence and becomes the perpetrator. No argument here.
Andrew Vachss once talked about this in one of his novels, “Blue Belle.” He talked about how you always have choices. Granted, they can sometimes be very, very hard ones–especially if you’re a child in an abusive household. Yet, you always *have* them.
If I were the mother-in-law, I should hope that I had the *ovaries* to **kill** the torturer of my daughters. I might do life in prison…or face the death penalty, here in the States (depends on which state this takes place), but I would hope that I would have the ovaries to *put my children first* and do what needs to be done, **for their sake.**
You won’t hear me defending her; unquestionably she was complicit.
Simon Wiesenthal, the man I mentioned in my last post, had enormous criticism for Bruno Kreisky, the Austrian chancellor who was Jewish but liked to publically turn his back on his heritage and appoint “former” Nazis to his administration posts. Kreisky got victimized by the Holocaust by losing tons of relatives, but his response was to embrace denying his Jewishness and refusal to admit that the Nazis went after Jews *precisely* *because* they were Jewish. Wiesenthal *rightly* saw Kreisky as a collaborator and very complicit in Austrian coverups and failures to bring former Nazis to justice. So, you won’t get any argument here from me…there comes a point when *you have* to take responsibility…
definately. Families like that are so frustraiting to marry into it has to be said. The amount of times id argue till i was blue in the face to get them to go to the police and put this person behind bars where he belong but to no avail. Invariably they would all make excuses for him. It was utterly sickening, I spent many years of anger fantasising every single time id see my wifes life totally limited because of the scarrs she had to this persons actions, of killing him with my own bare hands. But then id’ve gone to jail and no doubt her family wouldve been making excuses for him and condemming me…..
Amen. Tell you what, stixzz…let me come on over to *your* blog and we’ll see if we can talk about this a little more. This should free the thread up more for *intellectual* realm. See ya in a bit.
I watched the Secret yesterday; I absolutely abhorred it. Sure, positive thoughts by itself make people happy, gratitude is important, and positive attitudes tend to make people around her/him positive as well. But to present these points you don’t need a film filled with cheap materialism and total disregard to the reality (if I take their claim seriously, how can everyone who follow the “law” get everything they want, when resources in the world are finite?). They are skillful salespeople though, I suppose, their claim to universality, eternity, finality and secrecy of their “Law” is the best way to get people buy their DVD.
At best it is a nonsense mystical fantasy that averts people’s attention away from real problems (social, economic injustices that cause inequality), and at worst it can be justifications of all oppressions no matter how horrific. As Red Jenny pointed out, it is a statement of total rape victim blaming. I wonder if anyone takes their claims seriously, I even suspect in my wildest conspiracy dream that it might even be an anti-New Age plot to discredit the New Age by presenting the most absurd of their arguments….
I wouldnt say that Liberalitte. It is utter shite. But then again most new age stuff is materialistic based too. Notice that its always middle class people that are into the new age stuff.
The secret is a sack of cack i do think postive thinking has an impact but theres only so far it can take you. Id imagine if someone has an earthquake happen to them its more to do with other factors than their thinking.