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| Yayoi Kusama's: Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity. |
Most of us are looking for truth with a capital T. Scientists, mathematicians, religious scholars and practitioners, philosophers professional and recreational examine the world physically, theoretically, socially and psychically, with at times pathological fervor, on different scales with different tools, adding to the cumulative, imperfect mass of human knowledge.
Our truths[i]
define reality, finding them changes our worlds and reaffirming them keeps them
in orbit. Truths are the touch points in our personal narratives and support
everything we’ve ever been proud of, ever loved or had faith in. Truths help us
tell the story of where we’ve been and where we’ll go next, as individuals and
a species. Medical truths keep us safe and healthy. With conviction, we look to
the heavens and feel heavy with grace, we predict electron orbitals and
describe celestial mechanics. Truth can be powerfully seductive and equally
repulsive.
It’s impractical to deny truth. Even firm relativists, who refute the
existence of all but subjective truth, would be pained to dispute that humans
need water to survive and live in groups, and that when you’ve got two apples
and another two fall on your head, you have four. A religious fundamentalist
may pronounce a lack of faith in certain scientific statutes but it’s likely
both he and the relativist go to the hospital when injured, drive in cars over
bridges, fly in planes 30,000 ft above the ground and use cell phones that
bounce signals off orbiting satellites.1
What objective truth is, whether or not we can know it, and how, is likely
an unanswerable epistemological quandary with a phantasmagoria of distracting
arguments, distracting, in this case, from the much more exciting premise that
we all choose our truth. Selection of truth limits reality. Possibility is
superseded by the constraints of a singular life. Although we have great
potential for change and growth, we bind ourselves, accept silent impediments
and actively self-limit.
David Foster Wallace, in a speech delivered to the 05’ graduating class
at Kenyon College, arguably the most self-reflectively didactic of his
published works, said:
The only thing that's capital-T True is that you
get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide
what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's true. In the
day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is
no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is
what to worship.
It’s a beautiful thing, consistent with his genius, that DFW chose on this
panoramic, emotionally illimitable setting to remind these young people, each a
distinct patchwork of learning and ignorance and old enough to know it, of the
power of choice in prescribing reality and to be aware of the limiting effects
of knowing and unconscious decisions.
Foster Wallace’s commencement speech refers mainly to normative social and
psychological beliefs, but it seems just, facing the gargantuan range of human
behavior: Tibetan contemplatives, Nazis, Gurus and
followers, luddites, furries, child geniuses, technophile
hackers who consume Mountain Dew in 12oz breaths between screen time, bouts of
polyphasic sleep and the practice of Jediism… It seems just, as what can
be known, felt and produced by human beings approaches infinity, that we ask
questions about limits. How do most of us negotiate lives within a narrow
standard deviation of the typical? What limits us?
Our regression to a behavioral mean is a complex interconnected process that
involves the physical world, body, brain, mind and groups of minds.
All of the matter and energy we see and measure is subject to physical laws,
with solid Wikipedia articles, and (if you’ve got problems with the standard model or want to make arguments involving special relativity or divine
providence, please, write) the upshot is that these essential limiting
forces act on all of us and everything we know, and, an inert variable is a
constant, overlookable in a discussion of the borders of human potential.
Our terrestrial environment, the geological, thermal, chemical,
topographical and atmospheric conditions of the planet we live on, presents
barriers, dotted lines around our lives. Physical obstructions allowed for
phenotypic phylogenesis, the development of different languages and myriad
cultural distinctions. But physical limits were more present in the past. It
would seem from sustained cross-cultural observation that human history is
increasingly a narrative of a species reshaping its environment to suit its
needs. Ancient peoples journeyed across vast oceans in wooden canoes,
domesticated animals and carved niches in inhospitable places.
Today, telephones, radios, air travel and the internet have mitigated the
effects of physical boundaries, but perhaps not as comprehensively as we’d
imagine. A research study conducted by Samuel Arbesman for The Atlantic Cities in collaboration
with MIT and AT&T suggests (via analysis of multiple points of connectedness:
communication, movement, regional lexical and cultural features) that to a
noticeable degree our geography continues to restrain us. Arbesman writes:
“Despite all the technology at our disposal, in many ways we are still products
of place.”
Being a product of place means that where we live, despite superhighways and
supersonic jets, puts fairly solid walls around the cultural package that
includes our given language, ethics, pastimes, the food we eat, the sights,
sounds and smells that remain in our memories and constitute reality.
Language is one of the most significant cultural bequests. Although we think
of language, particularly written language, as a uniquely human development,
evolutionary biologist Mark Changizi, pulling from evidence presented in his
books The Visual Revolution and
Harnessed argues that:
Writing was culturally selected to look in
fundamental respects like nature, just the look our evolutionarily illiterate
visual system is highly competent at processing. Writing doesn't have a brain
instinct so much as a nature instinct.
Changizi believes the same is true of music, that both are sourced from the
natural world, that by harnessing
instinctual responses to sights and sounds found in nature, human culture has,
in essence, preempted evolution. We’ve developed tools that exploit our
biology, expanding our cognitive abilities, allowing us to reshape our
surroundings and forget the source of the written symbols and evocative
melodies we fill our days with.
It’s not surprising that we’d forget. The truth is hidden in the past. We
remember and study this phenomenon perhaps only because we write – a behavior
performed as it is because we inhabit the bodies we do.
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