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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.

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