A case for pragmatism: Buddhism, individualism and evolution as ‘threshold concepts’.
Firstly, I apologize to anyone reading this. It is more like a stream of consciousness / free writing than a structured argument. It is just so hard to unpack what underlies our deepest assumptions about the world so I had to ‘let it flow out’ in a sense.
I think it’s so hard to know what our real threshold concepts are — the ones which have the most effect on us will (almost by definition) be deeply ingrained, hard-wired into our consciousness that they are almost impossible to see. Hindsight Bias will mask them from us, our brains are efficient. We cannot operate with two opposing theories so we do a sweep of all the old ones and merge them into our current paradigm.
This idea of course stems from one of my threshold concepts: The Brain, which is a 60k year old piece of hardware, trying to run 21st century ideas has natural (and useful, but blinding) processes for masking reality for our survival.
My main source for this was ‘You Are Not So Smart’ by David Mcraney. These ideas have been confounded by my use of ‘The Evolutionary Lense’; the idea is that our bodies, brains, even our societies developed for the vast history of our evolutionary past, even Agriculture onwards (~10k ya) is recent compared to the estimated 60kya that we first became ‘conscious’ (by which I mean the first narratives and symbols appeared).
Keeping the Evolution of our species in mind helps me be wary of simple solutions to novel and complex problems that are often at odds with our early development. A few ideas which spring to mind: The modern diet and the obvious health problems, the sexual revolution (c.1960) restructuring the idea of the family unit, infinite choice and complexity, unfathomable productivity and political power.
My practice of Buddhism and my study of how it relates to Neuroscience helped me to combine these above two concepts which the theory of the modular mind: There is no ‘self’. Our mind (brain) is a collection of survival modules (mate attraction, mate retention, food, shelter, social status) which compete for our attention. Our consciousness is more like a ‘Public Relations Office’, which justifies our choices (which module wins) to the outside world, to make us seem sane. My practice of Buddhism also led me to my pragmatism / non-judgmental view (which is probably more like an ego-trip or emotional shelter actually) which I discuss briefly later.
Another strong threshold for me was a focus on the individual (rather than the group, or historical ‘facts’ about power). Through concepts such as Personality Theory, Cognitive differences, mental health, cultural values, hierarchical complexity (stage theory of the mind), I began to see political disputes as often a misunderstanding of differences in personality or clashing of cultural values.
I used to see typical Left/Right politics as mostly about compassion, I believed (as do many of my friends and family) that people on the right are just greedy, heartless capitalists. However I have recently learned that it is more about the dimensions of Order and Openness within personality. A variation in these scales was beneficial to the group in our evolutionary history (‘let’s go and meet that nice tribe across the river’, ‘no they might kill us’, ‘let’s try this mushroom it might have medicinal properties’, ‘let’s not the food we have is enough and it’s too risky’). So I now see the Left/Right debate of more of a necessary, eternal, ongoing debate about how best to deal with (sometimes) natural inequalities (within people and also mathematically inherent in Economic (and many other) systems [‘Prices Law’, ‘Pareto Principle’]).
On the whole these threshold moments and concepts have left me feeling a lot more calm, a lot less angry, less certain (but admittedly a little more smug, after all, now I know better than everyone, not just those on one side of the political spectrum). There are no (at least very few) evil people, except for me, I am the worst of them, it is myself I need to change, my actions, my beliefs, my reactions to the world. Bloody violent revolution isn’t my secret wish anymore. ‘The System’ isn’t a thing, it is a complex, unfathomable monster, an unstoppable organic offspring of a delightful little naked ape who discovered the exponentials of technology.
Pragmatism
Beware of grand-narratives, especially if there is one solution, with a few villains (and one of them isn’t you).
