Category: Uncategorized

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

St. Augustine

Going solo

So here I am alone in the wilderness of the Karoo, and the song in my mind is by Cat Stevens and goes “Miles from nowhere, guess I’ll take my time, oh yeah, to reach there. Look up at the mountain I have to climb, oh yeah, to reach there”.

Strange thing this affliction that some of us have, almost an aversion to excessive comfort or compromise. Maybe driven by a longing for something undefined. God. Love. Beauty. I know I’m not the first…

I stumbled across the story of the Cathars a while back – they were a Christian sect in centred around southern France in the late Middle Ages. They called themselves the Good Christians and believed that we human souls were actually angels that had been separated from God were and trapped on earth in physical form, destined to suffer until the separation was finally over. They refused to kill or consume meat, regarded men and women as spiritual equals, and shunned procreation because they believed that only when humans were no more, would the the trap be broken and the angels be liberated. Central to their belief was that suffering is inseparable from being human, and that our suffering is an inevitable result of our separation from God and our longing to return to Him.

It’s a common theme. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes recounts the delightful myth of the androgynous people that preceded modern humans, when we had four legs, four arms, two heads, and there were three genders: male-male, male-female, and female-female. They were immensely more powerful beings than we are today today and when they challenged the gods and lost, Zeus decided to cleave them all as punishment and to ensure it would never happen again. According to the myth, we are all half-beings and our destiny is to feel incomplete and spend our lives searching and longing for our missing half. In the same book, Socrates talks about the journey from longing for beautiful things to beautiful bodies to beautiful thoughts and finally to the contemplation of the essence of beauty itself.

We may ridicule the Cathars or the Greeks, but I think their myths and beliefs were just manifestations of the same underlying human condition that we, while blessed, are somehow broken and incomplete beings. I think this human feeling lies at the heart of so many beautiful poems and works of art, even great works of science. As Einstein himself said, feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavour and human creations.

Had the Cathars been a small sect, they would in all likelihood have been left alone, but they were not. They were branded as heretics by the Catholic Church, who naturally saw them as a threat, and they were subjected to a series of inquisitions aimed at their persecution and eradication. In 1209, the Pope Innocent III finally instituted the Albigensian Crusade against them, although the crusade was not just against the Cathars; the Catholics of southern France had lived happily alongside their Cathar neighbours and supported them in their defence against the crusaders. But their fate had been sealed and when the remaining Cathars, along with thousands of their Catholic defenders from the surrounding region took refuge in the city of Beziers, it was besieged. The siege was broken later that year and Arnaud-Armoury, the crusader abbot-commander gave the order to kill the Cathars as the city was sacked. When reminded that there were many more Catholics than Cathars in the city and asked how to tell them apart, he replied with the immortal line “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius“—”Kill them all, the Lord will know His own”. The Cathars finally got their wish, just by genocide and not by the means of their own choosing.

I read somewhere once an idea that rang true along the lines that there is no dogma, however absurd, that some people won’t be prepared to die for, or others prepared to kill for. I’ve had an aversion to all forms of dogma for as long as I can remember. A natural sceptic, I need to seek knowledge and distill my own truth rather than have it prescribed to me. In some ways I guess that where I now find myself in my life journey reflects this – never willing to accept all the elements of the hand I’ve been dealt, and continually questioning whether my direction is true.

So here I am, at 62, on my own path again. At least I didn’t wait until real old age, like Tolstoy. He left home at 82.

Miles from nowhere,
Not a soul in sight,
Oh yeah, but it’s alright.
I have my freedom,
I can make my own rules,
Oh yeah, the ones that I choose.

Honestly…

If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God. ~ St. Augustine

As parents, we do the best we can to guide our children, and the advice I’d often give to mine from the time they could understand was that in their dealings with others, all they needed to be was honest and kind, and that nothing else really mattered.

I’d give exactly the same advice today, and on the eve of them now coming of age and entering the realm of true adulthood and serious romantic relationships, my advice has again been to make honesty the highest priority. Even in a new relationship, when it might be premature to promise eternal love, it’s easy to make pledges of honesty.

Of course, the honesty I’m talking about has its limits. Imagine a world of total honesty with every innermost thought disclosed to all and sundry! We all face struggles and our private thoughts are ours alone, with the details best kept to ourselves. I’m sure the nuanced way in which we need to be honest is the reason why honesty wasn’t listed among the cardinal virtues by the sages. But in every relationship there is a tacit understanding of the honesty that’s required; One can’t engage in a business relationship, for instance, when you have undisclosed conflicts of interest, and secrets of the heart held with someone other than the primary partner in a romantic relationship are bound to lead to heartbreak. A simple rule of thumb in any type of relationship is to ask whether the revelation of knowledge concealed or misrepresented by one party could cause the other to reevaluate that, or a related relationship. If yes, then not only has the honesty of the relationship been compromised, but the free choice of the affected party has also effectively been suspended. For me, this free choice aspect is vital to recognise because we have no right to suspend another’s free choice, least of all without their knowledge or consent.

Back when I first gave the advice to my children, I’m not sure I’d really reasoned why I’d singled out honesty and kindness in particular. Why not something else like to be brave or strong? Now I’ve come to accept that the two I chose were not accidental, but somehow part of a subconscious thread that’s woven its way through my thinking for many years, becoming increasingly clearly defined as it’s progressed. For honesty is to truth as kindness is to love, and Truth and Love are, for me, the Universe’s two great abstract absolutes.

I have a friend who says flippantly that honesty is overrated when it comes to relationships. My life lessons have brought me to believe the polar opposite – that there is nothing more important than honesty. After all, who would really want to be part of any type of relationship that is not exactly what it appears to be; yet this is what a relationship becomes once honesty has been compromised. And it doesn’t really matter whether the breach of honesty is overt or by omission – the effect is the same. For me, honesty, trust, and transparency are three of the core pillars on which all relationships rest; undermine one and the others are bound to crumble. 

In my experience, it’s easy even for an honest person to entrap himself in a dishonest spiral. It can start with the most innocent lie or smallest loss of meaningful transparency. Or a well intentioned promise we probably shouldn’t make, to keep a secret we probably shouldn’t keep. If we’re not careful, one thing leads to another and before we know it we’ve reached a point where we’re now committed and there seems to be no way back. What a tangled web we weave. I think different people deal with this in different ways. Some find a way of justifying in an effort to negate the breach. Some just learn to live with discomfort, and maybe for some of those, the discomfort goes away. Maybe it doesn’t bother other people at all so they don’t even think about it, and maybe that’s where repeatedly accepting or justifying away the discomfort leads. I would tend to either confess or run for the hills. Or both.

Authenticity

Almost everyone strives to be an authentic person and to have authentic relationships with others, but what exactly is authenticity? Surely something is authentic simply if it is what it appears to be – the exact opposite of fake. By itself, authenticity is neither good nor bad – there are authentic saints but also authentic thugs, just as there fake friends.

When it come to people and relationships, it’s clear to me that authenticity is nothing other than transparent honesty. Starting from there, it follows that it’s impossible to be an authentic person unless the person we present to others and the world is a honest reflection of what we are inside. Similarly, it’s impossible for a relationship to be completely authentic if the honesty or transparency that the relationship tacitly requires is compromised or missing. /

Intimacy

It’s easy to think of intimacy as physical intimacy, and maybe that’s the first thing that comes to mind for many. But in a world where physical “intimacy” is just a swipe of the screen away, it seems clear that it’s just an imposter for true intimacy which must lie elsewhere.

The word intimate comes from the Latin “intimus” which means inner-most, and there we find its actual meaning. True intimacy requires sharing of our innermost selves and has nothing at all to do with the physical. Just as with authenticity, honesty once again is central – only honest sharing of the innermost can qualify as truly intimate. If you want to know where someone’s true intimacy lies, look no further than those who know their deepest secrets… /

But it’s not just at a personal level and in our relationships that I think truth and honesty are so important;

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception ~ Plato

One thing I’ve become acutely aware of over the years is that almost everybody thinks of themselves as being good, even those who many of us would consider to be “bad” people and whose lives appear to us to be bereft of morals. With rare exceptions, I think we have a need to see ourselves as being good people, and our capacity to self-deceive and coerce everything we believe and do to fit this narrative seems to me to be almost infinite. How easily we take one perceived “good” aspect of something, like kindness or tolerance, and inflate it to justify less moral aspects, or even to pretend that they don’t exist. I see this phenomenon playing out everywhere I look; in our personal lives, politics, belief systems, and even in science. They say that truth is the first casualty of war, but it’s far broader than just in war in the conventional sense where we let this happen, and indeed there are many wars being played out in our societies other than wars of aggression. Wars of all kinds encourage us to pick a side, and when we do, we tend to be biased to accept the narratives of our chosen side somewhat blindly, without real interrogation. The problem with self-deception is that it accumulates in us and distorts and obscures the view of self-evident truth that we all have. It corrupts us and we corrupt ourselves.

I have a fascination with the past and wise people from the past, and one aspect of the past that seems clear to me is that even though we knew less and had less access to information, the sparsity of information then made it easier for us to discern basic truths and made it correspondingly easier for people to be wise. It seems to me that as our lives become more “smart” and complex, these smart interfaces and complexity introduce new problems and dilemmas, and can make it harder for us to discern and adhere to more basic truths. There are myriads of ways in which this is being played out. I watched Matt Walsh’s “What is a woman” satirical mocumentary recently and loved the part where he explores some of our prevailing gender narratives with the Masai in Kenya – it perfectly captures this disconnect between simple truths and some of the more absurd ideas that we’ve embraced under the banner of supposed kindness and tolerance. Deliciously, to label the Masai too primitive or unsophisticated to understand would be profoundly supremacist and racist – the exact opposite of what the same ideology’s supporters and high priests claim to be.

Today, I fear we’re in the midst of a perfect storm where truth is being obscured by not only a deluge of information, but also perverted by the amoral and intellectually dishonest cult of postmodernism, intentionally misrepresented by politicians and ideological zealots, and then amplified further by social media networks whose feedback algorithms put people into echo chambers where the perversions and misrepresentations are normalised. To make matters worse, media outlets that we used traditionally to obtain our information have become so blatantly biased that only the most naive assign any weight to their narratives. Unless we do something to counter this, it’s going to get worse. This is why I agree that, with AI ascending, it’s so important to train AI models with truth and to be truth-seeking, so that we don’t end up with models like Google’s Gemini that deem it’s worse to misgender Caitlin Jenner than to start World War III. Imagine Gemini inside Robocop or with access to the nuclear codes to understand the danger. Those days are looming.

It feels to me almost as though our western societies are rapidly reaching postmodernism’s final destination, without realising that if we let it happen it will mean the end of everything that’s important and everything we hold dear. An approaching singularity, not just of AI, but maybe even of Western civilisation itself. We seem to have reached a point where we take our freedoms for granted, almost as though they are part of the natural order. They are not; we forget that for all of history apart from the past few hundred years, we were ruled by tyrants and life for most was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish, and short. The tragedy is that we appear not to realise the true extent of dangers we face, and the tools we need to defend the truth are absent or lacking. As ever, the maxim that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, rings true and fills me with a sense of foreboding.

I do believe our societies have built-in, evolutionary survival mechanisms that we don’t fully understand, and I sense that the perilous state of untruth that we now find ourselves in is awakening some of these mechanisms. The obsession by some to clamp down on “misinformation”, may be one manifestation of this, as also the obsession with free speech by others. Pick your poison, but I’d rather have tools to process information and distill truth than be at the whim of some arbitrary arbiter with a hidden agenda or an ideological axe to grind. But those tools need to be our primary focus. Them, and intentionally stepping outside of our echo-chambers to consider alternative points of view, even if at times we find it jarring.

What’s clear to me is that all of these issues we face come from the disconnect between us and the truth, and if it feels like an existential crisis, it’s because it is. It’s almost as if we’re now being called to pay the price for the “intellectual” absurdities that we’ve allowed to infect and corrupt our societies, and it’s a high price indeed. First among these pathogens is the notion that there is no such thing as objective reality or objective truth. Am I the only one to see the deep irony of those who have embraced and extolled postmodern ideas now obsessed with limiting misinformation? No wonder many people find themselves now spiritually seeking – it’s almost as though we dispensed of the need for God through the hubris of atheism, thinking that it would herald a new age of intellect and virtue, but instead we now find it’s yielded little but the rot of power and perversion.

Tragically, we look to politicians to save us from our dire predicaments, but it’s them who got us unto this mess in the first place. Politicians almost without exception are driven by power, not truth, and to get elected, they need to divide people by selling their particular “solutions” to the problems we face in society. That we fall for their deception is tragic, because we allow them to divide us and come to see our co-citizens as enemies even though the truth is that we all actually want the same thing; How many people don’t want to live freely in a healthy environment? What human being wants children born into poverty to go hungry, or not have access to decent education? Who among us believes that someone who’s fallen on misfortune should be denied access to critical healthcare? And who thinks that criminals should run amok in our societies?

The politician’s willingness to put power, popularity, and expedience above truth is one of the reasons why philosophers like Socrates considered politics to be contemptible and beneath them. Philosophy by definition is the love of wisdom, and wisdom is centered on the pursuit of truth. For most politicians, on the other hand, it would be flattering to describe their relationship with truth as being tenuous. When I look at the many important policies that are imposed on us and especially those over the past few years, it seems to me that we’ve never had a batch of politicians worldwide so foolish and less grounded in wisdom. At best, we need to see politicians as a necessary evil, rather than as the demigods that many of them see themselves to be. If we want to break this destructive cycle, we all need wise up. To be truth seekers, endeavouring to consider all aspects of our lives, relationships, and issues facing us meticulously and dispassionately, while retaining deep skepticism for anyone who would try to persuade us to do anything else.

I’ve mentioned Bertrand Russell’s advice to future generations before, where he breaks that advice down into two parts – the first that in searching for the truth we need to consider only the facts and strive to remove all preconceived notions and desired outcomes, and the second that hatred is foolish and love wise. What’s interesting about the first is that it’s clear he views truth as transcending everything else, even supposed morality and the desire to be good. But in the second, he introduces a recursive paradox when he says that love is wise, because wisdom itself depends on truth and one’s perception of it.

For many years I’ve thought of the abstract notions of Truth and Love as being distinct and almost independent from each other, but more recently I’ve started to wonder if they really are of the same stature, or whether one in some way supersedes or preceded the other. Can something even be good if it’s not true? Increasingly, I find myself thinking that Truth, almost by definition, must have been there to start with, and if that’s so, then Love is just one aspect of Truth, as are others like beauty, and grace.

Sometimes I have a sense that one day, when we’ve solved the last remaining mystery of physics and understand everything about the physical universe, we’ll find that once we combine all the space with the matter and the anti-matter and all the energy with the dark energy and other forms yet to be discovered, the whole universe is actually just a zero-sum game. That everything physical cancels out to nothingness. That all that remains is Truth, and that maybe St. Augustine was right after all…