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02/04/2006:
"Changing Our Minds"
by RootsieAs I was driving to work the other morning, I saw this bumper sticker on the car in front of me:
The problems we face will not be solved by the minds that created them.
There are a lot of ways to think about this, and as I have been contemplating with some bitterness the coming global war which we apparently can do nothing to prevent, I thought about how this supposedly great Western supposed civilization has the cojones to fancy itself the global leader in the search to solve humanity’s persistent problems, while it itself has either generated or exacerbated all of them. I thought about the moral bankruptcy I’m so fond of pointing out, inspired by Ayinde’s very simple (on the face of it anyway) contention that only from among the worst historical victims will come the conscious people to lead us out of this mess.
The white West is very fond of announcing what this year’s, decade’s, century’s and millenium’s problem is and how they will solve it for everybody. One of the big issues du jour is the sorry state of Africa, to be addressed through Western aid initiatives and ‘rooting out corruption’ and so forth, which is such astonishing hypocrisy to anybody who reads the news with a little historical context. First you rob Africa blind and continue to, and then she is supposed to be falling over backward thanking you for your charity. Charity makes the generous benefactor feel really good, which privileged people figure is their god-given right to be feeling all the time. The proper gesture, which is reparations, on the other hand suggests “Hey we broke it. We stole it. It’s just that we not only apologize for our folly but seek to repair some fraction of the damage.” That doesn’t feel nearly as good.
Moral bankruptcy means that even if you want to do something ‘good’ you can’t. You can NOT. That is tough for the arrogant to swallow. Including me. The same arrogant mindset that has visited such planetary misery can’t rush forth to save the planet now.
By and large, nobody’s mind has changed a whole lot in the West over the last 1,000 years: remember, the ideas of the ‘Enlightenment’ didn’t deviate much from the view of a static universe held by most of the Greeks. The last century of physics, though, holds out some hope. Ironically, the revelations rising from the exploration of the quantum world are nothing new. They just lend mathematical fire power to the oldest indigenous human ideas, ideas that were forgotten or disregarded or distorted.
The bumper sticker suggests something along these lines, something on the quantum level: we can, after all, literally change our minds, every human can, even white folks. But that requires a lot of click/delete, a lot of entering of new data into the human biocomputer. It can be done, but thinking you’re doing it and actually doing it are very different things. One of my teachers speaks of ‘ruthless self-examination,’ and that is what really changing our minds involves. To get the neurons to fire along new pathways, we have to shut down the old ones, and this means we have to be able to minutely observe our assumptions and our actions, and discard the faulty ones, which it turns out are most.
It also turns out that this whole privilege thing we’re riding so high on is what will get us in the end if we don’t think our way beyond it. Our relative comfort and material plenty. Our relative safety. Privilege sets up a negative feedback loop that tells us we are the masters and mistresses of the universe, and all we have to do is think it and it will be done. Well in a way this is so, but look at the crap we’ve been thinking. All the good stuff we think we’re doing backfires because the crappiness of our thinking begets mayhem and pestilence and abomination, which we conveniently blame on ‘them,’ whoever ‘they’ may be this week. ‘They’ tend not to be white, not Western (or Northern). ‘They’ need our urgent help or require our naked aggression. Once we have ‘them’ in hand it’s gonna be all right. We are the ones who make things right. This junk plays out in the nastiest of ways in the individual psyche.
It’s interesting, the interplay of collective and individual thought. Maybe there is really no such thing as individual thought, only collective thought distilled. I am no scientist of consciousness, but on the other hand any scientist of consciousness who does not take the historical situation which colors their ideas into account is going to be off the mark. One feature of the crappiness of Western thought is the compartmentalization of it: you’ve got string theorists zinging around in a megaverse of infinite dimensions, while the presidents and CEO’s of the places they live are busy trashing up this tiny corner of it.
In a little New York town across the lake from me, a city councilor
tried to pass a resolution calling for the impeachment of Bush based on the lies of WMD that precipitated the war in Iraq. His critics told him that Plattsburgh New York is not the place to debate these things, and that he should be concentrating on how to make local tax dollars stretch to pay for the things the town needs.
Only a string theorist could figure out how to do that, frankly, and the idea that what’s going on ‘over there’ has nothing to do with ‘us’ is preposterous. Anyone trying to make things better on a local level without deeply and publicly critiquing Western assumptions of superiority, and the actions which naturally follow from them, is a co-conspirator, ensuring the perpetuation of the problems he thinks he’s trying to solve.
When I googled the quote on the bumper sticker, I found that Albert Einstein said it. No surprise there. Einstein didn’t like quantum physics, though. “God doesn’t play dice,” he said, referring to the wild randomness that seems to exist in the subatomic world. But the quantum view of the universe now emerging is, I suspect, something he would like very much. You can now go into a number of labs in the world and actually see a single particle in two places at once. String theorists have an explanation for why the gravity we experience is so much weaker than the other universal forces: it turns out that graviton particles probably leap from dimension to dimension. Lucky for us, because otherwise the universe would be a single black hole: zero mass, infinite density. Our very existence here and now, in this place, is an incomprehensible miracle. At any one of numerous junctures in the last 15 billion or so years, a slightly different chemical reaction would have sent matter flying apart or crashing together or mixing around in ways that would have made us impossible. We are the product of the narrowest window of possibilities: I wonder why that isn’t mystery enough for us, God enough for us.
One way to change our minds is to contemplate the universe, the stunning enormity of which we are an infinitesimal part, a smear of biosphere on a rock orbiting a third-rate star in a forgotten corner of the cosmos…somehow our earliest ancestors knew that whatever goes on down here is just the palest reflection of what’s happening up there. They discerned that there are basic laws with which humans must align themselves. Humility, empathy, unity—these are the values born of a universal perspective. We would be merciful to ourselves and to each other if we grasped our amazing fragility and the miracle of our existence. We would look at the human productions of time that dazzle us so much as just a tiny spark in the vast furnace of creation that tumbles and swirls around us. It is not all about us, and we are not all that, but the subatomic particles that make us what we are exhibit properties that point to capabilities we are just beginning to be able to imagine.
Lurking under this war and that war and the attacks on the planet’s natural processes is the neural rut we’ve dug these past few thousand years. It is typified by the Christian idea of the ‘fallenness’ of human nature and of the earth, and backed up by any number of ‘scientific studies.’ People are bad and violent and only the most strenuous interventions by the better ones among us in the form of military aggression and the establishment of elitist authoritarian regimes can keep humans’ natural impulses at bay. A bunch of people are waiting for Jesus to come pull their asses out of the fire, while the power-mongers exploit that passivity to pretty much do anything they want.
What a radically different view emerges from the oldest/newest ideas: we can have any reality we are willing to cultivate, and these changes can be effected from inside out. Before we can change our minds, we have to understand that it is possible, and then we have to be willing to make the effort. Our privilege works against us, telling us we shouldn’t have to work too hard to do anything. But changing our minds feels like death, and it’s what’s meant by the idea that “you must be born again,” not to Jesus, but to some closer semblance of our true quantum universal selves.
As it stands, and as I have said so many times before, the West has nothing to say to the rest of the world. As long as the same minds are rutted in the same grooves, there is no possible way for them to improve anything anywhere.
For starters, history has to be engaged. All of it, from mega to micro. Even the ‘best’ Western science was born off the back of centuries of denial, suppression, and exploitation, and it is ok to know it and say it and still affiliate ourselves with the best of what humanity can produce, allowing our actions to reflect that understanding.
We can change our minds, but will we? I don’t know, but I do know that the universe will continue in its infinite generosity bringing new things forth out of nothing, whatever little old we decide.
