With Whom Do I Agree?

I was asked today by a coworker whether I am a die-hard democrat.  I laughingly answered, "no!" and proceeded to clarify that I'm not a die-hard anything, and that I disagree wholeheartedly with almost all political actions that are taken (or not taken).  The resulting question, after a short pause, was "well, what do you find so objectionable about Objectivism, then?"



Oh, boy.  I was somewhat blindsided by this, because as I see it, I'm diametrically opposed to Ms. Rand's philosophy on life, its celebration of selfishness, and its equating of personal pursuits with the common good.

The Outsider Perspective

Observation is a powerful tool, and we use it from the moment we're born until the moment we die as a way to gather information. Our culture has formalized observational technique into multiple disciplines such as anthropology, behavioral biology, quantum physics (paradoxically), sociology, and so forth. The list is long because of how important observation is to our ability to gather information, and our senses seem designed to operate in a way that allows us to be absent as an agent but present as an observer.

Some will state that it is impossible to be an observer in our society, that we are all influenced by the situations we see and the way in which we process them. This is absolutely true, but only to a point. For the most part, the faculty most incapable of remaining impartial is our emotive capability, and the influence of our emotions seems directly tied to our investment in the situation at hand. To put it another way, the further removed from a situation you are, the better you will be at observing it impartially.

This premise is difficult to argue with; it is relatively clear that emotions and logical processes inhabit separate locations in our minds and while they certainly create feedback, noise, and difficulty for each other at times, it is theoretically possible to distill one without the other. Philosophy finds this as the ONLY method by which to approach problems of life, the universe, and everything.  The scientific method is based on this idea, on the assumption that there are facts and laws and mechanisms that can be known and understood based on observation and variable elimination.

And yet, almost to a person, we believe that the most essential way of knowing a person or a group of people is to be that person or a part of that group of people.  The distinction is incredibly important, because there are intrinsically subjective elements to being a unique organism or being part of a unique culture that cannot be understood from a separate context.  We have words to describe the inaccessibility of this knowledge, the most notable is Empathy.

To be empathetic is to have, for a split second, an understanding of what it means to be a part of the situation being observed.  This point of reference is used from that point onward in order to alter the situation, but at no point has the observer become the observed.  This is akin to our forays into astrophysics, which are based entirely on snapshots--generally stationary--of systems we cannot touch, feel, or measure directly.  We know that in all reality, this is the closest we'll come to a true understanding of the cosmos or of each other.

Interestingly, there are cases in which we do trust others to have more knowledge about ourselves than we do.  Psychotherapy is a perfect example of this, in which a total stranger is asked to help illuminate things about ourselves that we would otherwise be relatively blind to or in denial about.  The methodology surrounding psychology/psychiatry is such that rather than building a catalog of all the possible personalities, a good therapist will look for markers that indicate more common TYPES of personalities or ways of coping with life.

All of this is just a lead-up, though.  I want to talk specifically about efforts to "improve" the world (quotes for subjectivity).  Activist groups are a special breed, passionate to an intensity head and shoulders above the rest of their respective cultures and generally interested chiefly in solving problems that affect them at their specific social locations.  Western progressive activism tends to center itself around the concept of intersectionality, under which characteristics of a person decide their unique social location and end up creating subtly different communities underneath the larger progressive umbrella.

Race, class, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, body type, educational level, and geography all play into this matrix of forces that influences us every day.  People at certain locations have more privileges than others due to history, context, and the Isms that describe the multiple types of discrimination faced by regular people every single day.  And thus, activists tend to rally in order to overcome these Isms.

(Full disclosure:  I'm white, male, well-educated, generally straight, without any disabilities)

The general feeling within these activist groups is one of emotional support, empowerment, re-education, and direct action.  There is not a huge amount of room for scientific discovery, which is in part due to the rejection of science as a valid way of describing human society (see this post).  However, there also seems to be a general sentiment that empathy is not enough.  To effectively  fight an Ism, you have to be affected by it.

And that's fine!  I'm not whining that I can't participate in empowerment campaigns for groups I don't belong to.  Being a progressive, forward-thinking individual, though, I do see room for improvement.

Activism could benefit greatly from a big dose of Outsider Perspective.  Not the hostile, "what are you whining about?" type, because this is given all too willingly and all too often.  I'm not even talking about the sort of white guilt that results in somewhat well-intentioned but ultimately doomed efforts to "save the children" of poorer, less-western, less-white cultures.  What I'm referring to is the perspective held by those of us who empathize with the cause but cannot participate due to the hypocrisy that would result.

And this is where I tend to get into trouble.  How do you approach a group of legitimately marginalized people and tell them, here, my privileged life has yielded a more helpful way of doing things!  I used to do this as a kid, before I understood the error I was making, by questioning the submissiveness and lack of academic integrity embraced by many young girls my age simply because they were girls.  It just wasn't my place to tell them that something was off, but it didn't change the fact that I knew.

Rather than end with a resolution, I end this post with a dilemma:  how do the well-intentioned, entirely devoted outsiders of a cause make a positive impact?  There has to be a way, just as there was a way to overcome the problem of powered flight, just as there was a way to fuel the civil rights movement in the 1960s, just as there now is a way to communicate nearly instantly using invisible ones and zeroes over thousands of miles.

The Bootstrap Problem

A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes.

-Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

We all face hurdles in life that we must cross, some bigger than others. These challenges come in all shapes and sizes, and more often than not affect more than one person at a time. We can call these social problems, or give a lengthy description of what these problems MEAN to us, but at the end of the day, if a person is affected, they must learn to deal with the issue or find a way to cope with it.

When a person has lots of these challenges to face, we consider them "disadvantaged." It sucks to be disadvantaged, pure and simple. Those of us (myself included) who are not in that situation feel much sympathy and empathy for people whose life is spent dealing with problems such as hunger, financial struggles, racism, sexism, family tragedies, abuse, illness, and so forth. More often than not, the sensitivity felt by onlookers like myself is accompanied by a desire to help in any way possible. This desire is quickly dashed by the realization that for a person to change, they have to WANT to change, and they have to do most of the work themselves. And thus, we run into an obstacle so large many have called it insurmountable.

We are not constructed as beings that respond well to drastic change, and we are even less suited to instituting that change ourselves. I'm not talking about "change" as we consider it in politics, or the number of things a person owns, or the nature of the relationships they accumulate, but rather change in a more profound sense, as in the transcendence of socioeconomic status, or finding a way to escape abuse, or learning to recognize the intrinsic value of self and community. These things can happen, but do so rarely because of how closed our perspective is to the possibility of change.

This is what I call the "bootstrap" problem, from the antiquated phrase, to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," which is really a great way of describing how seemingly impossible it is to move yourself with no point of reference by which to accelerate against. Try it: you cannot physically overcome the force of gravity without an additional force in the opposite direction. It's the same for personal/social problems. We are immersed in our own worlds, and it is almost impossible to change those worlds without a force pushing you in that direction.

For those disadvantaged individuals whose situation is sub-optimal (I realize this is a mild way of describing a very terrible phenomenon in our culture), there are constant forces of social, economic, and emotional oppression applied upon their lives at such constant intervals as to require perpetual attention. In order for a person to find a way out of this mess (to whatever extent that is possible), an opposing force is needed. Sometimes this is direct aid, sometimes it is social empowerment or education, but most of the time, even when presented with these options, people who experience the weight of their situation acutely and dynamically are unable to overcome it.

When we see the lack of results these efforts generally produce, we commonly react by saying the model must be tweaked, or a new perspective has to be embraced by whatever outreach program appears to be failing. Rarely do we stop and think about the personal elements of change that must be accepted before a person will let themselves change in a broader sense.

Look at the quote at the beginning of the post. This idea of being at the forefront of your own self-awareness is somewhat foreign to us as westerners. In fact, it's a decidedly Zen idea (and ideal) to be in a state of being under which all other states of being come as no surprise and are easily prioritized and interpreted. This is usually done within the meditative state common to eastern religions, but can easily be re-created in the daily routines of which we are so fond. The routine becomes the process through which you access your thoughts without distraction, and allows a mind to rise above itself in such a way that thoughts and emotions float across rather than become lodged the mind, facilitating a deeper analysis and understanding of one's inner-self.

That might seem like a very distilled, anemic version of appropriated bellybutton-worship, but what we're concerned with here is not the philosophy itself, but the process of being self-aware and open to whatever the universe holds. I am convinced that this is the secret to self-maintenance and social change. By being self-aware and open to the outside world simultaneously (note the duality), a person opens the self to the possibility of change in a way unavailable without such an understanding. Change can come from within, without outside prompting, simply because patterns of behavior are unable to silence new thoughts when a mind is observing and experiencing rather than attempting to reach some invisible "end." You are, in a sense, lifting yourself up by your bootstraps.

Anyway, that's the theory, at least.