Skip to main content

The Sturdy Structures of the Mind

From Anton van den Berg
Nobody wants to admit it, because it scares the hell out of us, but there is no objective right or wrong.  You don't have to be an academic genius to see that.  All you have to do is to look around at the world around.  What is assumed to be divine truth here is foolishness somewhere else.  What is the only acceptable marriage in Indiana is not so obvious in Afghanistan or Sri Lanka.  What we eat is unclean to other people.

Not only that, but a little honesty will demonstrate that what we hold to be good and true and beautiful today is not what we have always thought.  We change, over time.  If we did not change, it would mean we had never learned anything.  That may, here and there, be the case.  There is a grand religious hymn that has the line, "Time makes ancient good uncouth."

Robert Bellah has a book titled, "Habits of the Heart".  The argument there is that if there is no objective guarantor of right and wrong, then we have only the habits of our heart to guide us.  That is to say, if there is no truly objective authority, we shall have to be responsible, ourselves, or there will be no responsibility, at all.

All you have to do is to look around at the world around, and you will see that is the case.  If there is an objective authority, somewhere, we have never agreed what it is.  There is no shortage of people who claim to own the truth, or to have discovered it, or to have heard it from God himself, or the gods themselves.  We cannot even agree on that.

Occasionally, I am chagrined to discover that, although I had planned to drive to the grocery, or wherever it  was I had in mind, my habits turned me off in some other, familiar direction.  When we are not thinking, the habits of the heart remember, and guide us.

Sometimes I deliberately take alternative routes to familiar places, not because I really think I will find a better way to get there, but because I do not want old habits to restrict me.  And sometimes, I discover something new; something better.

Observe, some time, how men cut and comb their hair.  They still have the style--is that too strong a word?--they had in high school.  They might have to reach farther over to find something to part, but they part it, as they did, when there was hair everywhere.  They often get to the point where they are combing ear hair over the top, or trying to make those stray tufts, up front, swing around and do what they used to do.

Oh, stop it!, we want to say.  Those days are gone!  Everyone else can see that you are bald!  We really do change, even if we comb the same way.


We all have our ways of doing things like that.  Habits are sturdy structures of the mind.  We do a lot of things for no reason other than that we have always done them that way.  That is why most Republicans vote Republican  Their parents did.  They grew up that way.  That is why most Democrats are Democrats, too, and why most Catholics remain Catholic; most Episcopalians are Episcopalian.  The habits presevere.

If there were an objective truth, if there were objective goods and evils, then to be moral would, indeed, be a product of discovery.  We should try to find the truth, and it would make us free, maybe.  Then right and wrong would, in fact, come down from a mountain on tablets of stone.  All we would have to do is to find the Promised Land, the Promised Truth, eat the right foods, marry the right people, and have just the right number of children.

Habits are durable, but they do not pretend to be forever.  They can be learned, as we learn to like music, and food, and friends.  They can be examined, rationally, and rejected, or affirmed, or amended.  If that were not so, someone else would have determined who we would be, and what we would be, and what we would do with our lives.  But we have our habits, and we are responsible for them.

We live somewhere between necessity and whim.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more