Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Five

Bob Fiske

Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Five

CLICK HERE to go to Part Four

Erasing the debt.  Our relationship to the earth has been one of taking and not of giving.  We—all of humanity—have accrued a huge debt.  We have not made a sincere, planet-wide effort to begin making payments to repay the loan.  The big question that will get in our way is this: Who’s going to start?  Which person?  Which neighborhood?  Which city?  Which state?  Which country?

This is not an idle question; it’s a central one.  Just witness the difficulty we are having with climate change related to global warming.  The collective efforts to reign in human production of greenhouse gases (so-called atmospheric carbon and carbon equivalents) continue to stall.  The talks are marked by in-fighting and failure to come to consensus.

What most people fail to recognize is that global warming is just one of several “overshoot problems” looming on, or just over the horizon.  If we’re having this much trouble with the global warming problem—for which replacement technologies already exist—then how are we going to deal with other pollution excesses and resource shortages, not to mention destabilization of the greater biosphere beyond the pale of human concern?

The new human nature.  My answer is a shift in values.  Change ourselves.  If we can flip our taking behavior over to giving behavior, then the question of “Who will start?” may evaporate.

For many, this new direction may be an almost insurmountable challenge.  In the book of Genesis, God instructs Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, and to take dominion over the earth.  In some religious traditions, these statements are regarded as God’s first commandments to humanity.  I view these statements as somewhat more than mere commandments.  They are concise, brilliant expressions of human nature.

Looking at the broad scope of human history, is it not obvious that our natural inclinations have lead us down the path of “mastery over the earth”?  Our successes in this regard are a logical outgrowth of our basic nature.  Or is it?  What is missing from this description of human nature?

What if we were to recognize that human mastery of the earth—the cause, one might say, of our unquestioned taking from the earth—is only one half of our nature.  In that case, it might not seem quite so impossible to change our nature. 

Changing our nature might appear to be a process of forcefully suppressing our “base desires”.  That is an unpalatable notion.  But the problem can be turned around.  Perhaps there are parts of our nature that are already being suppressed, making it seem as though we are nothing more than taking creatures.

I maintain that fully human beings are more than taking creatures.  Animals are taking creatures.  They respond to motivational forces and show no capability to restrain those motivations.  Only human beings can consciously exercise restraint.  It’s true that many times we don’t want to do that—unless we are provided with a compelling reason.  Nonetheless, it is a capacity we have that is unique in the kingdom of living beings.

What else can fully human beings do?  We can think about and judge our own actions.  We can look back upon something we have done and conclude that that action is not desirable or socially acceptable.  Again, we often do not wish to do this because of emotional barriers such as shame or guilt making us want to hide our actions from others or ourselves.  But if we have sufficient reason, we can override these barriers.

I have given just two ways that mark fully human beings as more than taking creatures: self-restraint and integrity.  Furthermore, if we consciously take ownership of these traits (and other fully human traits), it will become easier to reign in the part of us that exists only to take.  Our full human nature can “naturally” lead us away from fruitful multiplication and dominion over the earth.  Our full human nature can lead us to own that part of our humanity that is rooted in integrity and responsibility for our actions.

And so, I have a proposal to begin our reprogramming of ourselves into giving beings.  This is coming in the next section of this essay.

Another Path to Self-Worth: Nobility.  I have argued so far that our economic system has embedded within most of us a “deep value” that guides many of our choices.  This value is reciprocity, which can be understood as the drive to engage in fair exchanges.  We are so well conditioned in this way of thinking that many of us determine our sense of self-esteem or self-worth based on how effective we are at conducting fair exchanges.  For most adults this occurs firstly through the activity of earning a living.

To illustrate this I will ask you to imagine a person that has developed a severe illness that will require an extended period of recuperation.  Consequently, the person will have to stop working.  If the person is fortunate, he or she may have some kind of worker’s compensation that keeps some income flowing into the bank account.  Nevertheless, this person feels uncomfortable about not working and impatiently waits for the doctor to release him or her to return to work.  Have you ever met a person like this?  Maybe it was even yourself.

When people are denied the opportunity to work they often feel inadequate and may even sink into a state of depression.  I would suggest that this makes perfect sense if generating income for the purpose of engaging in reciprocal exchanges (buying stuff) is the primary means that people have been taught for arriving at a sense of self-worth.  Consequently, people will become highly invested in maintaining a system where self-worth is organized around reciprocity, or fair exchanges.

However, this is a distorted picture of human psychology, as well as of the entire system governing the well-being of the world.

Martin Seligman, who wrote a book entitled Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment talks about a fellow psychologist who built a career on a phrase he learned from his mother when he was a boy.  If the mother found her son moping around, she would say, “If you’re in a bad mood, go find somebody to help.”  This idea brilliantly reminds us that self-worth is not only about exchanges.

Yet our economic system seems to have forgotten this.  It is no wonder, then, that the field of economics has lead us down a path toward ever-increasing imbalance.  It is no wonder that citizens of developed countries, and the United States in particular, are having trouble reclaiming a sense of self-worth.

Summary of Part Five.  In our relationship to the earth, it is time to start repaying the debt.  Who will take the lead?  Suppressing our desire to take might appear to be an insurmountable challenge.  Maybe the answer is to un-suppress other aspects of our nature.  The fully human being is endowed with capabilities such as self-restraint and judgment of actions as good or bad.  There may be other suppressed capabilities of the fully human being.  Expanding these capabilities will help temper our taking nature.  Additionally, our economic system is tied in with the methods we use to achieve a sense of self-worth.  If self-worth is primarily achieved through earning an income and buying goods and services, then this, too, will impair our ability modify our taking nature.

CLICK HERE to go to Part Six.

Art Cries

(NOTE: This is a raw journal entry.  Some stones are unpolished.)

I brought chard to The Growing Experience (my CSA) and met J-Dream-Worker who says he will read my blog.  His schooling was in theater, and he’s starting to return toward his artistic self.  So, he’s hungry for all kinds of input.

I’ve started owning my thinking and my writing as my art, and I’m starting to own myself as an artist.  When you’re an artist you create because you have to.  There’s not much choice involved.  The pressure builds and stuff pours out.

Bangkok-Girl said something about my being an outside artist, kind of like the guy who built Watts Towers.  He worked in isolation and didn’t have the reward of public acclaim while he did his work.  She said this in response to my complaint that I’m getting tired of being insane: the feeling that I’m the only one who understands or cares about what I create.

I’ve been feeling very disconsolate lately.  Like, why bother?  I mean, I even asked her if she read myDawkins vs. Collins essay, and she admitted she read only a third of it, and then it seemed like a bunch of Matrix talk, so she skipped to the end.

Fuck it. I’m surrounded by idiots.  And they’re all so busy embracing the technology that is dumbing them down.  Assholes.

All this Facebook dreck where people post a picture and think they’ve made a meaningful statement.  They don’t know what it means to craft a personal thought.

A picture is not worth a thousand words.  A picture is the loss of a thousand words because someone plucked it off the shelf instead of growing it in the soil of her/his mind.  Where’s the effort?  The creativity?  The risk?  And, social networking tools perpetuate all this bullshit—pouring somebody else’s work into your info-stream.

So, I’m a lonely outside artist.  I guess I still have a responsibility to bring my art to the world.  That’s what it means to be in the world and do your work.  Once you come to know and accept your responsibility, then you’ve passed the point of no return.  There is no choice any more, no opportunity to agonize over should I or shouldn’t I.

You just know your work and do it.  Damn it.  God, are you laughing again?  I thought so.

 = = = = = = = =

I had a thought a couple of days ago.  It’s a little hard to recapture.  “You don’t yet know who you are.”  As if to say that I am tip-toeing around my purpose and my power and my use and my instrumentality.

And it makes me sad.  I feel so far away from the home I knew and the home I’m to make for myself.  Sad about all this work on my path, and seeing that I’ve barely begun.  I ask you, God, how many times must I walk this way before I get it right?  How many times must I live this life before I understand?  How many times around the track for my pitiful self to run into the conscious awareness of what I’m actually doing here?

These are the questions every grain of sand asks.

Dawkins Versus Collins: On the Things Which Spark Debate*

After being sick for three weeks, my mind is starting to click again.  (Poor you.)  Can I ask a question?  What is a “thing”?  As in my saying, “Buddhism is just a thing.”  What does it mean to call something a thing?

A thing is something that can be separated and removed from the other elements around it.  Thus, a stone lying on the road is a thing.

But this opens other avenues for drawing conclusions.  Something that is a totality, representing the superset of “wholeness”, cannot be a thing.  So, the universe cannot be a thing if, by the universe, we mean the sum total of everything.  Some people might say the same thing about God, seeing that God subsumes everything that is less than God.

I would say that the phenomenon known as conscious experience also qualifies as a totality.  We cannot directly “know” (or have direct awareness of) anything that falls outside the scope of conscious experience.  Elements within consciousness can be removed from the mix.  But consciousness itself cannot be removed (while we are conscious).  Therefore, conscious experience is not a thing.

Here is another distinction.  Some things can be described as “physical” things.  Other things have no physicality, but are, nevertheless, things.  Nonphysical things could be described as “mental” things.  They exist only in the mental environment of a conscious mind.

Example: I create a mathematical set that consists of the days of the week.  Each member of the set is a thing since I could remove it from the set and consider it alone.  And the set is a thing.  Why?  Because it is not the totality called “the set of all sets”.  (It can be removed from the set of all sets and can be examined on its own.)  Yet, we can recognize that all these are mental things and are clearly apart from physical things.

There is a special category of mental things: words.  A word is a constituent of the superset known as “vocabulary”.  What makes words interesting is that they have “correspondences” to other things.  Word correspondence can be representational: words stand for things.  Word correspondence can also be associative: word things can have similarities or relationships to other word things.  This permits classification, grouping and reminding.  In other words, word things have primary meanings as well as shades of meanings beyond the primary.

Word things can create confusion.  When I use a word I am using a thing, but do I mean the word thing or the meanings associated to it?

One area of word thing confusion might arise if the word thing refers to a rule.  “Rule X” is a thing that references a law or regulation that requires car drivers to turn on headlamps when continuously operating a vehicle’s windshield wipers.  If I invoke “Rule X” in conversation, am I making reference to the practical application of this rule on the part of a car driver?  Perhaps, I am in the legal or enforcement profession.  In that case “Rule X” refers to the word-for-word law that is recorded as the official wording of Rule X.  Or, maybe my use of “Rule X” in my speech would be a reference to the intent or the “why” behind the rule’s creation in the first place.

Many an argument has taken place precisely because the discussants were using the same word thing, yet conjuring in their minds distinctly different referential meanings.  The fact is that such debates happen and are given social importance.  To illustrate, we might step into a courtroom in which two law firms (and the parties they “represent”) are battling out a conflict to the point that one side’s meaning prevails over the other side’s meaning.

Here’s another example.  Suppose I use the word thing “God”.  Doing so, I might be referencing the word itself.  This is not a trivial usage.  Fundamentalist Judaism places strict limits on how and when words for God may be used.

Or, perhaps “God” refers to a specific religion’s understanding of a God-concept, and, indirectly, is a reference to that religion apart from other religions.  For instance someone who says “God” might be invoking the specific meaning “Christ”, which, of course, directly connects to a specific group of religions known as Christianity.

Alternatively, the word thing “God” could be indicative of a specific type of experience.  For instance, a person who says “God” might have in mind the entity to whom humans give praise and what it feels like to give praise.

Clearly, the experiential quality of praising is distinct and different from a specific God-concept, and both are different from a name for God.  Yet, unending arguments will burn because each participant is contributing a different sort of kindling to the fire of disagreement.  The debate happens because the participants can’t free themselves from the trap set by a word thing with different referents.

What this suggests is that we may need a new kind of language that can describe the use of things in multiple and different ways, thus freeing us from the confusion of “single thing, multiple correspondences”.  This new language (and the thought which accompanies it) would help us see past the confusions that arise when things enter the mind and take on form in conscious experience.

From such a language a new concept of things and meaning could arise, as well as a respectful understanding of the weaknesses that come with holding things such as words in consciousness.  From this new language:

A super-consciousness.

That renders consciousness as a thing.

A super-consciousness.

That transcends.

Words.

And.

Things.

*As I wrote this, I had in the back of my mind some of the great debates in recent years between believers and atheists.  One notable, and brilliant scientist, Richard Dawkins, has positioned himself to become a lightning rod for some of these debates.  For example, see the debate between Dawkins and NIH administrator Francis Collins that was arranged and published by Time magazine in 2006, “God vs. Science”.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1555132,00.html