The fact is that truth needs context to have any use. It is nodes of meaning, rooted in the networks giving meaning. That does make it relational.
We know there are universal truths, but what they really are, are essentials. 1+1=2, where it’s apples or oranges.
When we get to higher order and more complex realities, there are multiple points of view, looking at situations differently and simply assigning an official interpretation might solve some problems, but it creates others.
Civilization has been largely built on this model, of leaving it to some higher order to set the rules, but we are reaching the effective social limits of this practice, so it is becoming ever more necessary to examine the logical, cultural and evolutionary factors leading us to the edges of the petri dish.
As mobile, goal oriented creatures, with a narrative based culture, we have a linear, goal oriented approach to a reality that is more fundamentally cyclical, reciprocal and feedback driven. The more we seek that signal in the noise and not understand the noise is context of the signal, the more anything distilled out loses meaning.
Yet we continue to conflate the the absolute with the ideal. While both are reductionist, one is of our preferences, while the other is of the essences.
For example, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell.
More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Good and bad are another essence we assume to be an ideal. We treat them as though they are a cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, when they are actually the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
The resulting problem is that all the higher order social and cultural constructs and impulses; honor, trust, responsibility, respect, love, empathy, etc, not to mention the negatives, like envy, anger, jealousy, insincerity, etc. evolve out of this elemental code of attraction/repulsion, analogous to what computers can do with 1/0.
So that when conflicts arise, rather than viewing them through this lens of social and civil growth and structure, possibly as opportunities to further expand our insights and civil discourse, they quickly become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, good, versus bad.
The real tension and conflict of life is between the multitudes of desires and the need to judge among them. The heart and the head.
The anarchy of desire, vesus the tyranny of judgement.
We can’t have our cake and eat it too. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. Short term desires and longer term goals don’t always agree.
Yet without the desire driving it, life has no purpose. It is the appetite that gives the meal meaning. Desire that gives the objects of desire purpose.
Society is a reflection of this tension, as organic desires push out against the cultural and civil forms giving them structure and grounding.
Youth and age, liberal and conservative. Each side seeing themselves on the road to nirvana and those going the other way as misbegotten fools.
It really is more a yin and yang, than a God Almighty.
Now we have this atomized, monetized, quantified society, where everything has to fit in its box and only flow through the channels of commerce. Its ultimate truth has been revealed as the dollar bill.
Be careful what you wish for…..
